Warning: There are huge spoilers in this review, including the ending.
I have been conflicted about The Scandal almost from the beginning. There is a lot about this K-drama that I liked, but also a lot that, as a viewer, I really didn’t buy into.
First, what I liked. The performances are excellent, the production is beautiful, and in an interview with The Chosun Daily, Director Jung Ji-woo said the original novel “not only focuses on female dominance but also subverts gender roles,” something he wanted to explore within the setting of the Joseon era. I liked that the director approached the drama with the intent to explore flipping the script on female power in the Joseon Dynasty. I applaud that.
But by the end of its eight episodes, I found myself admiring individual performances far more than I believed some of the characters' choices.
So to really unpack my thoughts and feelings about it, I am going to separate my review into three separate parts: the acting, the screenplay and the direction.
The Acting
The acting is easily the strongest part of the drama, and in many ways is what carries the story.
Ji Chang-wook is particularly impressive as Cho Won, and I hardly recognized him at times, because his character is so different from many of the roles I associate with him.
Cho Won is charming, clever and charismatic, but he is also manipulative, misogynistic and at times cold and cruel. He treats seduction like a game and seems to view women as challenges to conquer.
And yet, underneath all of that, there is clearly a damaged man.
Years earlier, Cho Won had planned to run away with his cousin Lady Cho. At her request, he waited for her at the river, believing she would meet him so they could leave together, but she not only never shows up, but never bothers to send word that she decided to marry another man. This clearly traumatized him and sent him down a path of self-destruction and indulgence in the company of concubines.
Ten years later, Cho Won may behave like a carefree seducer, but he has never really escaped Lady Cho’s emotional grip, nor gotten over the fact she deserted him. It is this lack of closure, and continued emotional connection, that causes him to drop everything and run to her at the first communication he receives from her in 10 years. Ji Chang-wook does an excellent job of showing the character’s bitterness, desire for closure and vulnerability underneath his cavalier attitude and arrogance.
I didn’t like Cho Won’s character for much of the drama, and that is a compliment to the actor. Ji Chang-wook made his personality really come to life and I rarely saw the actor behind the character. He was completely believable.
Son Ye-jin is equally convincing as Lady Cho, a stoic woman both content and trapped within the restrictions of her societal position, unable to conceive an heir, and angry that her husband has chosen his own concubine without consulting her. She knows her husband is the one who is infertile, so she suddenly summons Cho Won to assist in creating an heir with the concubine. I think this shows her dedication and loyalty to her husband since she is going to great lengths to spare him from the humiliation of not conceiving, yet again, with another woman.
Nana gives Hui-yeon a much quieter presence. She begins the story as a sheltered widow who has deliberately withdrawn from the world, and Nana captures that restraint well. As Hui-yeon begins opening herself to Cho Won, we gradually see more confidence and emotion emerge.
The three leads are strong. My problems with The Scandal are not with them. They are with the story surrounding them.
The Screenplay
Even if I knew nothing about Dangerous Liaisons or its previous adaptations, I am not sure the screenplay would have completely worked for me.
My biggest problem is the eight-episode format.
It feels caught somewhere between a movie and a traditional longer K-drama.
Eight episodes give the story more space than a two-hour film, but in this case, not enough space to fully develop the complicated emotional relationships that would make the ending believable. And because several of the episodes are relatively short (less than an hour), there is even less time than the episode count suggests.
The plot line seems rushed and this becomes noticeable very early.
Lady Cho has not seen Cho Won for years yet suddenly summons the man she once abandoned and asks him to father a child with the concubine to save her husband’s reputation. That’s a fairly elaborate scheme to involve your ex-lover in.
Then the wager happens. After hearing Lady Cho’s request, Cho Won instead suggests seducing the chaste widow Hui-yeon, whom he had briefly encountered on the journey to Lady Cho. She presents a greater challenge than the concubine, and Lady Cho agrees thinking he will never succeed. If he succeeds, she agrees to give him anything he desires, which, we all know, is her.
What the screenplay lacks is enough background and emotional motivation to explain how these characters could arrive at such a bizarre wager during their first meeting in ten years. In the original, the characters had a long-standing and continuously toxic relationship out of which the wager was born. In The Scandal, it is just too sudden to make any sense.
Cho Won acts so over the top confident, it’s hard to see how any woman would fall for his tactics, but Hui-yeon has been completely secluded for 20 years after her husband died. She married so young, she has no recollection of him, so you can see how she would be taken by any man who showed her attention.
After Cho Won successfully seduces her, he seems to change ever so slightly. You just see it in the way he lingers with her or strokes her hair. The experience of being with such a sheltered, kind, and untouched woman seems to have emotionally affected him. Not a lot. But some. It’s like he comes to respect her and wants to help and protect her.
But did he fall deeply in love with her? I wasn’t convinced.
I could see affection. I could see respect. I could see guilt. But what I never completely felt was the kind of overwhelming love that would make his final decision believable.
And that matters because without it, the ending makes no sense.
After everything collapses around him, Cho Won jumps from the ferry into the freezing water rather than accepting exile? Huh? I was stunned at the decision of the writers.
What I wasn’t was devastated at his apparent death by suicide.
That surprised me because in other adaptations of this story the tragic ending arrives, and I am crying and devastated at the death of the main character, that arrives as he finally realizes that what began as manipulation became real love, only to lose the woman before he can undo the damage and die before fixing it.
Here, I never completely reached that emotional place with Cho Won. His death only served to tragically cut the drama short!
His deepest wound throughout the story never seemed to waver from his connection to Lady Cho, and his deepest desire was for her to love him back. Would his realization she would never go with him be enough for him to end his life? While I didn’t get that here, it was clear that a decade after she abandoned him, he was still caught in her orbit.
What the drama left wanting was Cho Won’s transformation from simply a wounded man to someone so emotionally destroyed by what happened with Hui-yeon and Lady Cho that he no longer wanted to live. The only possible reason, maybe, is that he wanted to remove himself from their lives so they could live without the stain of what he’d done, but his character was just too clever and full of life for that.
That is why his decision felt strangely out of character to me. Especially when the King gave him an out after Cho Won lied to him. The fact that the King kicked him out of court was certainly not the worst possible outcome for a man who never appeared especially attached to court life in the first place. So, there is no motivation to kill himself. He could just simply leave and start a new life. That makes his final choice all the more puzzling.
Perhaps it was guilt over what he did to Hui-yeon, but they seemed to have more closure in that relationship than in his relationship with Lady Cho. Perhaps he finally realized Lady Cho would never leave with him, and that was so devastating? Those possibilities are there. But they don’t make sense with the character they created.
The ending does leave a small amount of ambiguity as to whether or not he actually died. No one ever finds a body, only his gat pops out of the water, and letters continue to arrive although no one accepts or reads them. The drama never definitively tells us that he survived, but it leaves just enough uncertainty to make the viewer wonder.
The Direction
This is probably the area where The Scandal surprised me most.
One of the things I love about K-dramas is the way intimacy is often created through anticipation, emotion and connection. A glance, a hand softly brushing another hand, or even a character simply moving slightly closer can carry enormous emotional weight.
The Scandal takes a more sexually explicit approach than many K-dramas, although on reflection, most of those scenes do serve the story. Cho Won's casual encounters with women help establish just how much of a womanizer he is. Sex is easy for him. Seduction is practically a sport, and women are challenges to conquer.
The scene I continue to question is the much more explicit encounter between Cho Won and Hui-yeon. It is beautifully and respectfully filmed, and reports indicate that body doubles were used for some of the nudity. But that almost makes me ask: why was that degree of nudity necessary at all, especially if body doubles were needed to create it?
What mattered to the story wasn't seeing their naked bodies. What they really needed to show was Cho Won’s first true emotional connection during a sexual encounter with a woman, and this could have been done without focusing so heavily on their naked bodies. I wish they had focused more on that than the sex scene. That may have made his final decision more plausible.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against seeing naked bodies or body parts, but it has to contribute the overall building of the character or their emotional state. For example, in The Trunk, with Gong Yoo, there is moderate nudity and some explicit, adult scenes but, despite my surprise at the graphic scenes, they made sense in the context of the scene and they contributed to the character’s state of mind then.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot to admire in The Scandal.
Ji Chang-wook gives a brilliant performance as Cho Won, a complex man still emotionally trapped by Lady Cho years after she abandoned him. He moves from charming one moment to cold and calculating the next, burying the pain of being jilted by the only woman he truly loved beneath a life of seduction and indulgence.
Son Ye-jin brings enormous presence to Lady Cho, and Nana gives Hui-yeon a quiet vulnerability that gradually changes as the story progresses.
Visually, the drama is beautiful.
And there are genuinely interesting ideas here about women, power, sexuality and the restrictions of Joseon society. But emotionally, it never completely came together for me.
In my opinion, the eight-episode format never gave Cho Won enough room to develop an emotional arc that made his final choice believable.
But the biggest difference for me with the prior remakes of Dangerous Liaisons was that in The Scandal, Cho Won never completely falls in love with Hui-yeon; or if he does, the drama never shows that.
I believed that she changed him. I believed that he came to respect her and somewhat regret manipulating her, but nothing so bold and transformational happened that would convince me that his only choices were to take his own life or disappear completely. I feel like the character they created would have disappeared but taken Hui-yeon with him even if only to make sure she was safe.
And because the tragedy of this story depends upon that emotional transformation, I ended The Scandal appreciating what the drama was trying to do far more than I was emotionally affected by what actually happened.
Maybe that is why I am still so conflicted about it.
I didn't dislike The Scandal. I just wanted it to go deeper into the characters and create a believable emotional journey.
You can watch The Scandal on Netflix. If you do, let me know what you think!
Get K-drama recommendations, reviews, industry updates and more weekly!
Sign up now! 👇