Flex X Cop 2: Cast, Recaps and Review (SBS 2026)

Flex X Cop 2 (재벌X형사2) returned to SBS on 7 August 2026, two years and four months after the first season ended. It runs 14 episodes — two fewer than season one — every Friday and Saturday at 21:50 KST, finishing on 19 September.

The setup is the same and the balance of power is not. Jin I-soo, the Hansu Group heir who fell into police work, has now actually been through the academy. The team leader waiting for him at Violent Crimes Unit 1 is the instructor who put him through it.

Who is in the Flex X Cop 2 cast?

Most of Violent Crimes Unit 1 comes back. The one big change is at the top: Park Ji-hyun’s Lee Kang-hyun, I-soo’s opposite number for all 16 episodes of season one, is written out as having left for training in Los Angeles, and Jung Eun-chae arrives as a very different kind of counterpart.

Joo Hyun-young, Jeong Chae-yeon, Min Kyung-ah, the broadcaster Bae Seong-jae and the YouTuber Kwaktube are also credited for special appearances.

What is Flex X Cop 2 about?

It is the same premise with the hierarchy inverted: a chaebol heir who solves cases by throwing money at them, now reporting to someone who spent an entire academy term trying to break that habit.

The series is a remake of the Russian Channel One drama Silver Spoon (2015), from a format by Sreda. Kim Jae-hong directs and Kim Ba-da writes — the same pair as season one, reunited after roughly two years, with Kim Ba-da also credited on Netflix’s My Name. It is produced by Studio S with Big Ocean ENM and BA Entertainment, was filmed between 14 February and 22 July 2026, and is rated 15 and over in Korea.

One production detail worth knowing if you visit: the Gangha police station of the title is the Daejeon Dongbu Police Station, the same building the first season used.

What happened in episode 1?

Episode 1 aired on 7 August and is a bomb-threat story from the first minute to the last, with the reunion between I-soo and Hye-ra played almost entirely for comedy until it very suddenly is not.

⚠️ Spoilers for episodes 1 and 2 from here.

It opens abroad. I-soo, Park Jun-young and Choi Kyung-jin fly to Mexico on the Hansu Group jet after a ring of scammers who fled there, disguise themselves as a mariachi band, and I-soo simply rents out the bar the targets are drinking in. The arrest turns into a fight, one of the scammers pulls a gun, and the waiting police pile in.

Back at Gangha, a reality-show crew is shadowing I-soo. Unit 1 has no team leader — the previous one is away in Los Angeles — and nobody wants the job, because nobody wants to work with him. Through an app where the public sends him requests for help, a message arrives inviting him to play a game. The location it gives is inside one of Hansu’s own department stores, and what is waiting there is a homemade bomb, which I-soo arms by touching it.

The bomb squad clears the store and defuses it. Its leader is Ju Hye-ra, who takes one look at I-soo, pretends the device is still live, and lets him panic. She was his academy instructor; the episode flashes back to what that was like. The film crew, which was told to leave and only moved further away, sends the footage to the newsroom.

The broadcast gives station chief Kwon Tae-gyun the opening he wants to push I-soo out. Chan-gun refuses, on the grounds that I-soo is a competent detective. Hye-ra takes the bombing case and reaches the conclusion nobody else has: someone is trying to kill him specifically. He ignores her, goes to a product launch anyway, and has her thrown out on a dress-code technicality — she changes in the car and comes back. A second message lands at the end of the event, and a small device goes off.

The rest of the hour is the list. Hye-ra bans the cameras and makes I-soo write down everyone who might want him dead. Jun-young and Kyung-jin pull the event CCTV and find Noh Jin-su, a waiter whose father worked at Hansu Chemical until eight months earlier. Hye-ra’s team goes after Park Gyeong-tae, a bomber just out of prison. I-soo visits his half-brother in prison, because he is the only name he can think of.

All three leads die. Noh Jin-su turns out to be a stalker who simply wants I-soo’s money, and his father was not pushed out of anything — he moved to the country to farm. Gyeong-tae has stopped building bombs. And the brother makes the observation the season will presumably run on: the person doing this is unlikely to be motivated by revenge, because I-soo has never done anything worth avenging. Try desire instead.

Hye-ra decides to move him to a safe house, insists they take her car, and someone watches them leave from a parked vehicle. On the road there is a box on the back seat with a light blinking on it. I-soo opens it, which starts a four-minute countdown on a device with a hundred-metre blast radius, on a motorway. He drives for the nearest lake with Jun-young and Kyung-jin behind him, and the episode ends at three seconds with the water in sight and the two of them getting ready to jump.

What happens in episode 2?

Episode 2 aired on 8 August. There is no published account of it yet, so what follows is SBS’s own billing rather than a recap.

The broadcaster’s synopsis says the unidentified bomber keeps coming for I-soo, that the culprit begins a final game, and that I-soo goes alone into a trap to save someone. We will replace this with a proper recap once the episode has been written about, and the same applies to every episode below as it airs.

When does each episode air?

Two of the 14 episodes have aired. The rest run every Friday and Saturday at 21:50 KST through to 19 September, with no scheduled breaks announced.

Episodes run about 70 minutes. Unlike season one, SBS has not given the season two episodes individual titles.

How are the ratings so far?

The premiere took 6.1% nationally and 6.0% in the Seoul metropolitan area on Nielsen Korea’s measure. Only episode 1 has been published; episode 2’s figure was not out at the time of writing.

Two comparisons matter and they point in opposite directions. Against season one’s own premiere, this is up 0.4 points. Against season one’s finale, it is down 3.2 points — and the slot it inherited had just been running above 20%, so in raw audience terms SBS handed this show a very large room and most of the people left. It opened second in its timeslot, 2.2 points behind a rival that had started a week earlier.

The reason not to draw conclusions from that yet is the shape of season one. It premiered at 5.7% and then sat in the 6s for five straight episodes while a competing Friday–Saturday drama took the audience. When that rival finished, episode 7 jumped to 9.9% and episode 8 to 11.0% — SBS’s first double-digit Friday–Saturday number in about seven months — and it never went back below 8.3%. The average across all 16 episodes was 8.3%.

So the honest reading of 6.1% is that it is roughly where this show started last time, in a slot where it has previously taken six episodes to find its audience.

What happened in season 1?

Season one ran 16 episodes from 26 January to 23 March 2024, and its structure was case-of-the-week with a family mystery running underneath.

I-soo is arrested by Lee Kang-hyun in the premiere, ends up assigned to her team, and the pair work through a model killed on a yacht, a painter murdered in his gallery, a suspicious death of an elderly man, a body in an empty office and an actress killed on a film set. Underneath all of it is the death of I-soo’s mother, which he recovers through hypnosis in episode 9, and a cult called Oryunhoe that the back half of the season turns on. The finale has him deciding to fight rather than walk away.

The through-line the sequel inherits is that arc’s resolution: I-soo is no longer the accidental detective, which is exactly why the writers had to find a new source of friction.

Is Flex X Cop 2 worth watching?

Probably, and the structural reason is the same as the reason to be cautious: the show has swapped one relationship for another, and everything depends on whether the new one carries as much weight.

What the change actually does. Season one paired I-soo with someone of equal rank, which made the comedy a negotiation — she could refuse him and he could ignore her, and neither had authority over the other. Season two makes his boss the person who already knows exactly how he cheats, and who has professional grounds to stop him. That is a sharper engine. It also risks being a narrower one, because a chain of command has one obvious joke in it and season one’s version had several.

Volunteering for the job is the detail that makes it work on paper. Hye-ra is not assigned to him as a punishment; she is a counter-terrorism specialist who asked for a unit nobody else would take. That reads as someone who wants something, which is more interesting than someone being inflicted on him.

What the premiere is doing. Episode 1 is not a case-of-the-week opener at all. It is a single serialised threat that runs the whole hour and ends on a countdown, which is a different show from the one season one opened with. Whether that is a change of format or just a launch tactic will not be clear until around episode 3, when the show has to decide whether it goes back to weekly cases.

The things working against it. Fourteen episodes rather than sixteen means the family material that carried season one’s spine has less room. The slot it took over had just been running above 20%, so the comparison every Korean outlet will make for the next six weeks is with a number this show has never reached. And internationally it is on Disney+ and Hulu rather than Netflix — the only SBS drama in this half of 2026 that is — which caps how much word-of-mouth it can pick up outside Korea.

Our rating so far: 3.5 out of 5, on one episode. It is a competent, expensive-looking return that has replaced its best relationship with an untested one and put a serialised thriller where the pilot used to be. Ask again at episode 4.

Where can you watch Flex X Cop 2?

On SBS in Korea, and on Disney+ internationally — with Hulu carrying it in the United States. It is included with a subscription in both cases; there is no separate purchase.

Availability checked on 8 August 2026. It is the only SBS drama in the second half of 2026 going to Disney+ rather than Netflix, which is worth knowing if you assumed a Korean network drama would turn up on Netflix by default. Season one is on the same services if you want to start there.

If you are after something else currently airing, Our Sticky Love dropped all 12 episodes on Netflix the same weekend this premiered, and The Affair Was Just the Beginning is another Korean series being covered episode by episode.