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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Lee Jin-wook, Jung Chae-yeon
Latest Nielsen rating: 8.3 per cent
The year 2025 delivers yet another legal K-drama in Beyond the Bar, a by-the-numbers tale of a capable young woman learning to coexist with a smug lawyer at her new law firm that tugs hard on the heartstrings with a collection of sentimental cases.
Following Lee Jong-suk in Law and the City and Jung Kyung-ho in Oh My Ghost Clients – to note only the summer’s most recent examples – Lee Jin-wook of Sweet Home and Squid Game fame plays Yoon Seok-hoon, an ace lawyer at the Yullim Law Firm.


With a brilliant legal mind, and dashing to boot, Seok-hoon does not play ball when it comes to navigating office politics. Unlike some people at the firm, he is not connected to legal royalty, but despite this, he makes no effort to ingratiate himself with colleagues.
Kang Hyo-min, played by Jung Chae-yeon (Family by Choice) – formerly a member of the girl band I.O.I. – is running late for her panel job interview.
After she barges in moments after the appointed time, Seok-hoon admonishes her, exclaiming that punctuality is key for lawyers and telling her to get out.
She sticks around, and since the panel recognises her as the winner of the National Law School Mock Trials, they invite her back in for a later panel.

Hyo-min trounces her fellow interviewees when quizzed on the legal ramifications of fairly basic thought experiments such as the trolley problem, in which a person is given a choice to redirect a train so that it will kill fewer people.
Regardless of the ethical quandary, pulling the lever is an act of murder, and it beggars belief that any law school graduate would fail to note that.
Once the hiring is complete, the new recruits must choose their preferred departments. Seok-hoon’s fellow department heads are all trying to seduce new workers with special perks and promises of a healthy work-life balance.
Seok-hoon’s litigation team offers nothing of the sort. In fact, he assures the gathered recruits that working on his team will mean gruelling hours and no bonuses.

Unsurprisingly, we discover that Seok-hoon is not as prickly as he first appears and that his team’s work is morally righteous, unlike others at Yullim.
But this only reinforces the message that one should live to work, rather than work to live, something that South Korea, which has some of the longest working hours in the world, has long struggled to overcome. When it comes to modern work standards, Beyond the Bar proves to be beyond the pale.
The show announced its thematic intention early on.
Hyo-min is brought before Seok-hoon and explains why she wants to join the litigation team. She talks about how love, in all its forms, can hurt people and how that pain can move people to legal action, as they believe that the law can protect their happiness and their right to it.
“I want to represent people like that. Because it’d be fun,” she says.

What follows is a series of cloying cases that blossom in the heart but wither in the face of jurisprudence. These include a man who vandalises a fertility clinic after it accidentally spoils his sperm sample.
A double emotional gut punch follows when he explains that this sample was the only one he banked before testicular cancer rendered him infertile, and his wife, who dreams of being a mother, is revealed to have been horribly disfigured in a crash.
The fertility clinic is presented as callous, but what do these emotional facts have to do with the law?
The episodic cases are mawkish and manipulative, but at an even more fundamental level, the show is hobbled by poorly drawn leads.

While there is nothing wrong with Lee’s performance, Seok-hoon is a hollow variation of an archetypal K-drama lead that fails to stand out. The show humanises him by showing us that he has a dog – not that it needed to, since he is so clearly but drily signposted as morally good.
Hyo-min, meanwhile, does not work as a character at all. Half the time, she is a normal girl with a heart; the other half, she is a textbook-reciting legal automaton.
She is pitched somewhere between Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s kooky Yoo Young-woo and Good Partner’s morally righteous rookie lawyer Han Yu-ri, and Jung struggles to find purchase in that space.
Beyond the Bar surely has more dramatic cases up its sleeve, but what of the journey of the characters who shepherd us through them? Is there anywhere for them to go, and is there enough of a reason for us to care?
Beyond the Bar is streaming on Netflix.


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Mawkish and manipulative cases and poorly drawn lead characters are so far hobbling Beyond the Bar, a new legal K-drama on Netflix


Mawkish and manipulative cases and poorly drawn lead characters are so far hobbling Beyond the Bar, a new legal K-drama on Netflix.


Netflix K-drama Beyond the Bar: Lee Jin-wook, Jung Chae-yeon lead cloying legal drama

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Mawkish and manipulative cases and poorly drawn lead characters are so far hobbling Beyond the Bar, a new legal K-drama on Netflix

Mawkish and manipulative cases and poorly drawn lead characters are so far hobbling Beyond the Bar, a new legal K-drama on Netflix