Son Ye-jin and Ji Chang-wook's Scandal Fails to Justify Its 23-Year Wait

Netflix dropped all eight episodes of Scandal on the 18th, returning to the story that captivated Korean audiences in 2003 with a full series adaptation 23 years later. The original film, directed by Lee Jae-yong and starring Bae Yong-joon, Jeon Do-yeon, and Lee Mi-sook, was itself a Joseon-era reimagining of the 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The new series, directed by Jung Ji-woo from scripts by Lee Seung-young and Ahn Hye-song, keeps that same setting and source material but expands what was a two-hour film into roughly eight hours of television, and the additional runtime reveals the structural limits of the project more than it deepens anything.

The premise remains close to the original. Lady Jo (Son Ye-jin) is a woman of exceptional intelligence confined by the strict gender expectations of Joseon society. Jo Won (Ji Chang-wook) is the era's most accomplished seducer and her unrequited first love from childhood, separated from her when she married another. When they reconnect years later, Lady Jo proposes a wager: if Jo Won can win the heart of the newly widowed Hee-yeon (Nana), she will grant him whatever he wants. What begins as a game of manipulation gradually pulls all three characters toward consequences none of them planned for.

Where the expansion works

The series uses its longer format to do a few things the film could not. The early episodes build Lady Jo and Jo Won's shared history with more patience, tracing the bond that formed in childhood and the bitterness that followed her marriage. There is also genuine effort to center the women's stories more fully: the series draws a clearer line between Lady Jo and Hee-yeon's relationship, and frames both characters as women navigating desire and constraint in a society that allows them neither openly. Son Ye-jin carries this material with precision. Her Lady Jo is quietly corrosive, composed when running the wager, visibly conflicted in moments when something older and less controlled surfaces. Ji Chang-wook matches her, moving from practiced charm toward a more genuine emotional exposure that the film's compressed timeline never had space for.

Where the extra hours hurt

The problem is everything in between. The series leans heavily on exchanged letters, loaded glances, and incremental emotional shifts, and while that texture works in the early episodes, it becomes repetitive through the middle stretch. The psychological tension that should build across eight parts instead dissipates: scenes that belong to secondary characters feel disconnected from the central wager rather than enriched by it, and the drama's momentum stalls whenever the focus moves away from Lady Jo and Jo Won.

The most consequential structural failure involves Hee-yeon. As the target of the wager, she should be its emotional and moral center, but the series never fully commits to her perspective. Her shift from guarded grief to genuine feeling for Jo Won moves too quickly and without enough groundwork, so when the consequences of the wager land on her, the weight is diminished. Nana, in her first sageuk role, is taking on a character defined against Jeon Do-yeon's performance in the original film, which is an unenviable comparison even without the scripting issues. Her instincts read as stylized and cool in ways that sit slightly at odds with Hee-yeon's vulnerability, and the series never quite bridges that gap. The challenge is worth noting: stepping into a role that iconic, in a genre she has not worked in before, is a genuine risk, and her effort to find something different in the character is legible even when it does not fully land.

Episodes seven and eight shift gears abruptly, compressing conflicts that took the series considerable time to construct into a final act that feels rushed rather than earned. The closing psychological moves between Lady Jo and Jo Won, meant to be the payoff for everything that preceded them, generate confusion more than catharsis.

The broader context

The 2003 film had the advantage of constraint. Its running time forced it to be selective, and what it kept was sharp. The series has the opposite problem: the freedom to expand becomes an obligation to fill, and not all of that space is used well. The visual elements that generated early anticipation, the costumes, the period production design, are present but do not fully deliver the lush mise-en-scène that Scandal's promotional materials suggested.

What the series does have, which the original did not, is a global platform. Releasing simultaneously on Netflix worldwide puts this version of the story in front of an audience for whom the 2003 film is not a reference point at all. For those viewers, the familiar bones of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in a Korean historical setting, with two of the country's most recognized performers at its center, may be compelling enough. Whether Son Ye-jin and Ji Chang-wook's performances alone can carry the series past its pacing problems is the question that ultimately defines whether Scandal succeeds, and the honest answer is that they come closer than the writing deserves.