Jang Seo-hee Returns to KBS as a Calculating Villain in New Daily Drama 'Trap of Desire'

Jang Seo-hee is returning to KBS with a deliberate departure from the roles that made her a reliable name in Korean daily drama. Her new series, Trap of Desire (욕망의 덫), premieres on KBS2 on the 10th at 7:50 p.m., and in it she plays not the wronged protagonist but the architect of someone else's ruin.

The casting matters because of what Jang brings with her. Her two best-known daily drama runs, Mermaid Girl and Temptation of Wife, drew peak ratings of 47.9% and 37.5% respectively, figures that belong to an earlier era of linear television but still carry weight when a network is positioning a new daily slot. KBS is leaning into that history as a selling point.

In Trap of Desire, Jang plays Joo Mi-ran, a woman who started her career as a nanny and worked her way up to head of public relations at the Cheongma Scholarship Foundation. The character is defined less by her ambitions than by the precision with which she pursues them: she treats the people around her as pieces on a board rather than as subjects of any particular anger. Writer Gu Ji-won, who previously scripted the daily dramas Hurray for My Life and Please, Summer, described Jang as having "an irreplaceable ability to bring a script to life" and credited her with the capacity to render the character's colder dimensions with "three-dimensional completeness."

The drama also marks a reunion between Jang and director Lee Dae-kyung, who has built a reputation for controlled, atmospheric work through projects including Youth of May and the Drama Special Shadow Confession.

The story's other central figure is Go Eun-seol (played by Jeon Hye-won), an ordinary woman whose life is upended when she is falsely accused of murder. A teaser released on the 4th opens with Joo Mi-ran coolly denying a past secret to a former friend, then cuts to Eun-seol in prison clothing, begging to be believed, while Mi-ran watches from a distance with no visible emotion. The sequence does a clean job of establishing the dramatic distance between the two: one carrying the weight of an injustice, the other having already moved on.

Complicating Eun-seol's position is Kang Hae-ra (Ju Sae-byuk), heir to the Cheongma Group conglomerate, whose hostility toward Eun-seol runs alongside the larger conspiracy. The preview suggests their conflict will be one of the show's more charged throughlines.

Rather than stay at the margins of her own downfall, Eun-seol eventually works her way back into the orbit of the Cheongma Group, deliberately approaching foundation chairwoman Kim Jeong-seon (Yoon Hae-young) as the first move in what the show frames as a methodical counteroffensive.

For Korean daily dramas, the genre convention has long been a clear moral architecture: a blameless protagonist, a scheming antagonist, and a drawn-out restoration of order. What Trap of Desire is attempting is a version of that structure where the scheming antagonist is also the show's most compelling presence, which is a reasonable bet when that antagonist is Jang Seo-hee.

Trap of Desire follows Red Pearl in KBS2's evening slot and begins its run on the 10th.