'The Scandal' New Trailer: Release Date, Time, and the Wager
Netflix dropped a full trailer for "The Scandal" this morning, and it finally shows the actual bet at the center of the show. Not just moody shots of Son Ye-jin and Ji Chang-wook staring at each other in hanbok, which is mostly what the August teaser gave us. The K-drama premieres September 18, and when I checked around noon KST, this trailer was still the newest thing out there on it.
The premise stayed vague through that first teaser: a "dangerous wager" between two Joseon-era nobles, no real detail attached. The new trailer spells it out. Lady Cho (Son Ye-jin) asks Cho Won (Ji Chang-wook), Joseon's most notorious playboy, to seduce So-ok, a young woman about to become Lady Cho's own husband's concubine. Cho Won counters with a different target entirely: he'll go after Hui-yeon (Nana) instead, and that swap is what drives the show. Hui-yeon resists him at first, and the trailer hints that nobody in this triangle ends up feeling what they expected to feel.
That's a real plot beat, not vague teaser mood, and it sits a lot closer to the story's source material than the early marketing let on.
The Wager at the Heart of It
Everything about "The Scandal" reads like straight costume drama on the surface: hanbok, Bukchon rooflines, a director talking about Confucian social order. The wager underneath it is not subtle. It's manipulation dressed up as elegance, which is the actual engine of the story this one is remaking.
If you've seen the 2003 film this is built on, the character names will look familiar. In "Untold Scandal," the playboy was named Jo-won (played by Bae Yong-joon) and Lady Cho (Lee Mi-sook) was his scheming cousin, not his sister-in-law, and the two of them bet that he could seduce a virtuous young woman played by Jeon Do-yeon. The 2026 version keeps both names almost exactly, Cho Won and Lady Cho, but reshuffles who's driving the bet, who the original target is, and how it goes sideways. Small details, but they're the kind of thing a remake usually changes first.
A Joseon Take on a 220-Year-Old French Novel
"The Scandal" reworks that 2003 film, which was itself an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel "Dangerous Liaisons." Western readers may know the same story better from the 1988 film of that name, or the 1999 teen version, "Cruel Intentions." Director Jung Ji-woo moved the plot to Joseon-era Bukchon and gave it a new tagline: "Desire what is forbidden."
Jung explained the choice to Soompi plainly: "I didn't simply want a romance structure. I built the story around protagonists who possess the modern self-awareness of 'Who am I?'"
That's a bigger swing than most K-drama remakes attempt. Most just move a plot to Korea and call it done. Whether that "modern self-awareness" holds up in a story built on manipulating people into an arranged concubine's bed is what I'm not sold on yet. The trailer made all of this look prettier than it reads on paper, honestly.
When (and Where) You Can Watch It
All eight episodes land on Netflix at once on September 18, no weekly wait and no cliffhanger schedule. If you've ever wondered what time do K-dramas come out on Netflix, here's the short version: Netflix Originals go up worldwide at 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time, which works out to 3:00 a.m. Eastern, 8:00 a.m. in the UK, and 4:00 p.m. KST that same day in Korea. Depending on where you're reading this, you're either staying up late for it or setting an early alarm.
English subtitles are standard on a Netflix Original from day one, same as every other title in the catalog, so nobody's waiting on a fansub for this one. It's a Netflix Original outright, not a licensed pickup from a Korean network, which is also why the whole season posts at once instead of trickling out weekly.
My Early Read
I watched the new trailer twice before writing this, mostly to double-check I had the wager right. This is Son Ye-jin's first TV drama since "Thirty-Nine" back in 2022, and by a wide margin the darkest premise she's touched since "Crash Landing on You" ended. That alone is worth the ten-day wait for me. Ji Chang-wook playing an outright manipulator instead of a charming male lead is the more interesting casting call of the two, honestly, coming right off his 2025 series "The Manipulated."
What I can't tell yet is whether the show earns the kind of real tragedy both "Untold Scandal" and "Dangerous Liaisons" land on, or ends up a good-looking period drama that never gets past the surface of its own bad behavior. Ten days out, that's the open question. If you've seen the 2003 film, tell me in the comments whether you think this cast can top it.
7/10 on anticipation, almost all of it riding on the cast.
This is a running news series, not a one-off post — new stories go up twice a day, roughly 7am and 7pm Korea time.
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