Beyond the Affair Trope: Inside Korea's New Drama Reunion

The "Soap Opera" Label Comes First

In Korea, any drama built around infidelity gets tagged almost automatically with a specific word: chijeong-geuk — roughly, a lurid melodrama of tangled passions. It's a label that compresses an entire production into its most sensational premise, and it sets audience expectations before a single episode airs. So when director Lee Chang-hee, in a recent interview about his new series Now, an Affair (working English rendering of the Korean title 지금 불륜), pushed back with the message that "there are dramas like this too," he was responding to that label as much as promoting his show.

The title itself is a head-on choice. Korean broadcasters usually wrap this kind of subject matter in metaphor. Naming the thing outright is both a marketing hook and a liability — and the director's confidence reads as someone who knows exactly which one he's carrying.

What "We Worked Hard on the Characters" Actually Means

The point Lee emphasized was character construction, not premise. The production, he said, invested its time in building out why each person makes the choices they make.

That distinction usually decides whether an infidelity drama lands. Shows that run on shock value tend to spike early and deflate by the midpoint; the plot has nowhere left to escalate. Shows with tight internal logic pull viewers into a different state — you may not endorse a character, but you understand the pressure that produced the decision. Internationally, it's the second kind that gets talked about years later. By leading with character, the director is at least signaling which tradition he's aiming for.

Intent and execution are separate matters, of course. Whether the writing holds up is something only the episode-by-episode rollout can answer. But a director publicly naming his central axis does give viewers a fair yardstick to measure the show against.

A 23-Year Reunion the Director Didn't Plan

The single biggest reason the project drew attention before release is the pairing of Kim Hye-soo and Jo Yeo-jeong. The two actresses last shared a production in the 2002 historical drama Jang Hee-bin — a gap of 23 years.

For English-language readers: Kim Hye-soo is one of Korea's most established leading actresses, with a career spanning decades across film and television, while Jo Yeo-jeong is widely known abroad for her role as the wealthy Mrs. Park in Bong Joon-ho's Parasite.

The revealing detail is that the director says he didn't know about their shared history during casting. According to the interview, he learned of the connection only after reading press coverage. That implies the pairing wasn't engineered as a publicity combination — each role was cast on its own terms, and the reunion emerged by coincidence.

Commercially, that coincidence is a gift. In the Korean drama market, "reunited after 23 years" is a headline in itself, and a substantial share of the pre-release coverage clustered around exactly that angle. It's worth remembering, though, that a casting anecdote says nothing about whether the script works.

The Tension Between the Two Leads

Kim has sustained a rare kind of presence across genres and tones. Jo has built a reputation for playing characters whose composure cracks in controlled, unsettling ways. Putting those two instruments in the same emotionally volatile material generates expectation on its own — which is also a burden the writing has to justify.

Why Infidelity Keeps Coming Back

For writers, infidelity is an efficient premise. It requires no worldbuilding: relational tension, moral conflict, and social judgment all activate immediately. The cost is that the cliché shelf is deeply stocked.

Recent Korean entries in the genre have generally split into two camps — one maximizing the catharsis of revenge and comeuppance, the other observing the slow collapse of a relationship with something closer to clinical distance. Which camp this show belongs to isn't yet clear, but the director's framing points toward the second.

The Takeaway

One interview can't predict a drama's quality. What it does establish is three things: the director is aware of the genre label and wants to work past it; he claims the production concentrated its resources on character rather than incident; and the reunion driving most of the buzz was accidental, not strategic.

Viewers decide the rest. The honest test for this series will be how far it can close the gap between the provocation in its title and the character-driven story its director says he made.

Sources

• TenAsia — Director Lee Chang-hee on Now, an Affair