Ahn Bo-hyun and Jung Eun-chae's New Drama Beats Its Own Predecessor Right Out of the Gate

Chaebol X Detective 2 wasted no time proving the audience came back: its premiere episode drew a 6.1% national viewership rating (Nielsen Korea), clearing the 5.8% that Season 1 opened with in 2024. For a sequel arriving after one of SBS's biggest recent hits, that is a confident start.

The show follows Jin Yi-su (played by Ahn Bo-hyun), a third-generation chaebol heir who moonlights as a detective, using his family's money and connections to take down criminals. Season 1 peaked at 11.0% and ran as one of the network's stronger performers that year. Season 2 now slots in as the follow-up to Kim Bu-jang, which crossed a 23% rating and became something of a cultural phenomenon, so the bar for first impressions was quietly high.

The premiere set up the season's central conflict quickly. Jin Yi-su has just returned from an undercover investigation in Mexico when he becomes the target of a homemade bomb attack. In a moment that captured the show's tone neatly, he accidentally triggers the detonator himself after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous source, which earns him some embarrassment before the real danger sets in.

The new face in the mix is Joo Hye-ra (played by Jung Eun-chae), the head of the National Police Agency's counter-terrorism unit. She turns out to have a history with Jin Yi-su: she was his notoriously hard instructor back at the police academy, already nicknamed "the demon trainer" by cadets. Their reunion as reluctant partners, with Joo Hye-ra's unit and Jin Yi-su's Violent Crimes Team 1 joining forces to investigate the bombings, is where the season looks set to find most of its energy.

The episode's closing sequence lands on a full-throttle cliffhanger: the two leads inside a car with a live time bomb strapped to it, accelerating toward the Han River. It is the kind of ending built to keep a conversation going through the weekend, and early audience responses suggest it did exactly that.

Also wrapping up on the same day, KBS 2TV's daily drama Bulent Pearl (starring Park Jin-hee and Nam Sang-ji) concluded its run with a 7.4% rating. The show followed two women who go undercover inside a powerful conglomerate to expose a hidden truth after losing someone they loved. The finale resolved their 30-year arc of revenge with the villain meeting his end, then jumped ahead a year to show both women finding their footing: one taking the chair of the Adel Group, the other opening a jewellery workshop and settling into a relationship. Its successor, Trap of Desire, featuring Jang Seo-hee in a villainous role, is up next on that timeslot.

Chaebol X Detective 2 airs on SBS every Friday and Saturday at 9:50 p.m. KST.