Updated: September 11, 2026
Search for Netflix’s The Scandal and three titles start following you around: Dangerous Liaisons, Untold Scandal, and now The Scandal.
That makes the first question surprisingly basic. Is the new eight-part series an extended remake of the 2003 Korean film, a new adaptation of the 1782 French novel, or something in between?
The clean answer is: something in between. Netflix places the new drama in the Dangerous Liaisons lineage, while the Korean production is also explicitly described as a remake of Untold Scandal. Director Jung Ji-woo, however, says he went back to the French novel and rewrote the three central characters and their relationships rather than simply stretching the 2003 film across eight episodes.
Netflix’s The Scandal: The Family Tree Is Easier Than It Looks
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s French novel supplies the seduction game, manipulation and emotional danger at the center of the story.
The Korean film moved that game into Joseon society, where reputation, chastity and social position gave the wager a different kind of cost.
The series inherits the Korean characters and setting but, according to Jung, returns to the novel as a starting point and rebuilds the relationships for a longer format.
That last point matters. Calling the series “the 2003 movie, but longer” sounds neat and is probably wrong.
At the September 9 press conference, Son Ye-jin said the longer format lets Lady Cho become more complicated as the story progresses. Jung was even more direct: viewers should expect many differences because the characters and their relationships have been rewritten from the source material again.
Eight Episodes Change Who Gets to Own the Story
A two-hour film and an eight-part series do not differ only in runtime. They differ in where attention can linger.
The 2003 film had to move through its seduction game with ruthless efficiency. A series can spend more time on why Lady Cho restarts her dangerous relationship with Cho Won, what Hui-yeon represents to her, and how the emotional balance among the three shifts once the wager stops behaving like a game.
Korea JoongAng Daily reported that Jung’s new version expands the women’s intertwined stories, while Son described Lady Cho as a character built with unusually fine detail. That is a more useful clue than comparing costumes frame by frame before the series has even premiered.
Not “Which scenes did Netflix copy from the film?” but “Whose desire is the new series willing to follow for much longer?”
Joseon Is Not Just a Costume Change
The original French story depends on a society where desire, reputation and power are tightly entangled. Moving that mechanism to Joseon works because public respectability and private appetite can become dangerous in a different social grammar.
Netflix introduces Lady Cho as a gifted noblewoman whose abilities exceed the narrow role available to her, while Hui-yeon is a young widow caught inside expectations of virtue and restraint. The point is not to reduce the entire Joseon era to a slogan about repression. The drama is using specific social positions to raise the price of being exposed.
That is the more interesting Korean layer: Joseon changes the rules of the game, not merely the wallpaper around it.
The Most Korean Reinvention May Be in the Sound
Jung’s newest explanation adds a detail that was easy to miss in the early marketing. He says the series is structured to begin and end with pansori, Korea’s traditional narrative singing form.
That choice is more than heritage decoration if the finished episodes use it as promised. Pansori is a form built around telling, listening, exaggeration, tension and emotional rhythm. Using it to frame a story inherited from an eighteenth-century French novel is a very different creative choice from simply putting traditional music under a palace scene.
The hanbok is doing narrative work too. Son said Lady Cho’s clothes grow darker as her desire intensifies, while Hui-yeon’s pale clothing is tied to her characterization. In other words, this adaptation is trying to make Korean form carry psychology, not just period authenticity.
The Scandal | Official Teaser | Netflix [ENG SUB]
The teaser is useful here because it shows the wager and the three-person structure without pretending to reveal how far the remake ultimately departs from the film.
What We Should Not Compare Yet
The Scandal premieres September 18, so there is still a line responsible preview coverage should not cross.
We can say the director returned to the French novel. We can say he rewrote relationships, expanded the characters, framed the series with pansori and used costume color as characterization. We cannot yet say the ending is better, the women are definitively “more empowered,” or the series has surpassed the 2003 film.
Those judgments belong to the finished work.
For now, the useful map is simpler: French novel → Korean film → new Korean series that goes back to the novel rather than treating the film as a fixed blueprint.
That is enough to make September 18 more interesting.
A First Day in Seoul — Markets, Hanok and Everyday City Life
After a story about fictional Joseon desire, this first-day Seoul vlog moves through food, Bukchon and everyday streets, letting the period-drama world dissolve back into the modern city around it.
Sources
- Netflix — main trailer and September 18 premiere
- Netflix — adaptation background and character setup
- Yonhap News Agency — September 9 press conference
- Korea JoongAng Daily — Jung Ji-woo on rewriting the relationships and using pansori
- Wikimedia Commons — Son Ye-jin hero photo and license
- Information checked September 11, 2026.
Post a Comment