Two Projects Gone in Two Months: Hayoung's Scandal Keeps Spreading

SBS has pulled Win Is Possible, the courtroom comedy starring Hayoung and Lee Je-hoon, from its February 2027 slot, and the network won't say when it will air. The cause is the pro-Japan collaboration controversy around Hayoung's great-grandfather, An Sang-ho.

An SBS representative confirmed on the 19th that the schedule was adjusted. The statement was careful: with "so many staff and cast members" involved, the network is "weighing options from multiple angles," and nothing is fixed on timing. So this is a delay, not a cancellation, but nobody is promising a date either.

What the show was supposed to be

Win Is Possible was pitched as the next entry in SBS's run of satisfying, underdog-wins genre dramas. It follows a office manager, a former lawyer, who leads a ragtag law firm against a giant one. Lee Je-hoon and Hayoung were cast in the leads. Filming was already nearly finished, and the remaining shoots have since been completed.

It has been dropped from the first-half 2027 lineup. Its place goes to Full Count, a baseball drama starring Kim Rae-won and Park Hoon about people who stake everything on winning a pro team manager's job.

How the allegations unfolded

The trouble began in August, when claims about An Sang-ho spread online. He is known as the first Korean to earn a Japanese medical license. Reports said he appeared on the member list of the pro-Japan group Daejeong Chinmokhoe, and that the Maeil Sinbo, the Japanese Government-General's mouthpiece, presented him as an icon of "Japan-Korea assimilation."

Hayoung responded with a handwritten letter. She said she had brought up her great-grandfather's story "like a boast, in ignorance," and apologized "as a descendant." She also left the Netflix series Trauma Center seasons 2 and 3 and stopped working. The Win Is Possible production team has said it takes the recent matter involving its cast member "very seriously."

That leaves a finished or near-finished drama on the shelf. Whether SBS finds a new slot, and what Hayoung's absence from public work means for it, is still open.