A 1782 French scandal, reborn behind the walls of old Seoul with a female-driven twist the original never dared, and a leading lady returning to period drama after more than two decades.
Some love stories are dangerous because they defy the odds. This one is dangerous by design. Premiering globally on Netflix today (September 18, 5 p.m. KST), The Scandal transplants one of literature’s most notoriously cruel games of seduction Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses over the tiled walls of Joseon-era Korea. The production has laid out three reasons to watch: a reinvented narrative, a formidable acting ensemble, and a singular visual style. All three are worth taking seriously and each carries more history than the announcement lets on.
1. A story with pedigree and a bold new twist
The Scandal is not the first time Korea has smuggled Laclos’s poison into a hanbok. The 2003 film Untold Scandal, a period-set adaptation of the very same novel, became a landmark of Korean cinema for its lush eroticism and its proof that this 18th-century French web of manipulation fits the rigid Confucian world of Joseon disturbingly well. That’s the lineage The Scandal is stepping into and it’s a high bar.
Where the eight-episode series (rated 19+) makes its own mark is in what it adds. Directed by Jung Ji-woo from a script by Lee Seung-young and Ahn Hye-song, the drama deliberately deepens the relationships between its women dynamics the original novel largely ignored. The expanded thread between Lady Cho (Son Ye-jin) and Hui-yeon (Nana) reframes a story historically told through male conquest into something more textured: a narrative where the women aren’t just pieces on the board, but players with their own interior lives. In a genre and a source text long dominated by male desire, that’s a meaningful recalibration.
2. An ensemble built on contradiction
The casting is where the anticipation spikes. Son Ye-jin returns to the sageuk (historical drama) genre for the first time in roughly 24 years and to television at all for the first time since 2022’s Thirty-Nine. For an actress of her stature, this is an event. The “Nation’s First Love” of The Classic and A Moment to Remember, and the global romantic lead of Crash Landing on You, she now trades warmth for something far more alluring and treacherous as the calculating, bewitching Lady Cho.
Opposite her, Ji Chang-wook plays Jo Won, the famed libertine consumed by desire for what he cannot have a role demanding he oscillate between predatory obsession and disarming charm. And in perhaps the most interesting gamble, Nana the former After School member turned respected actress makes her first-ever sageuk appearance as Hui-yeon, the unsuspecting woman ensnared in Lady Cho and Jo Won’s wager, whose transformation she renders with delicate restraint.
Director Jung Ji-woo framed the ensemble’s appeal precisely: “All three characters carry a wide gap between the self they reveal and the self they hide. The push-and-pull tension between the three is the real spectacle.” That’s the engine of Dangerous Liaisons in a single sentence masks slipping, one calculated move at a time.
3. Production that turns period detail into modern art
The third draw is craft. The Scandal layers contemporary sensibility over meticulous period detail, and its most inventive flourish is how it handles the story’s lifeblood: the letters. Rather than simply showing the characters’ correspondence, the series delivers it through voice-over in the three leads’ own voices turning private manipulation into intimate confession, and pulling the viewer directly inside their scheming heads.
Beyond that, the direction weaves in two distinctly Korean art forms. Pansori traditional narrative singing is used to compress and comment on the drama’s unfolding situations, while minhwa (Korean folk painting) is animated so its figures move, elevating the visual grammar of the sageuk into something that feels both ancient and startlingly fresh. For global viewers, this is the kind of cultural specificity that streaming has taught international audiences to crave: not a generic period piece, but one steeped in a particular artistic heritage.
Why it matters
Put the three together and The Scandal looks less like a routine adaptation and more like a thesis statement. It takes a story the world already knows, roots it in a distinctly Korean past, hands it to one of the country’s most beloved actresses in a long-awaited return, and dresses it in art forms most international viewers have never encountered. The forbidden-romance genre is crowded, but the combination here prestige source material, a female-forward rewrite, and a director unafraid of formal experiment gives it a real shot at standing out.
The wager at the heart of the plot is whether desire can be controlled. The wager around it is whether Netflix has another global sensation on its hands. Both games begin today and if the push-and-pull is half as electric as its architects promise, this may be the drama everyone’s whispering about by the weekend.