The Affair Was Just the Beginning: Cast, Episode 1–2 Recaps and Review

Kim Hye-soo plays a woman who follows her husband expecting to catch him with another woman, and finds him hiding a corpse instead. That is the first episode of The Affair Was Just the Beginning, and it tells you how quickly this show intends to burn through its own premise.

The Korean title is blunter than the English one: 지금 불륜이 문제가 아닙니다 translates as the affair is not the problem right now. Two episodes in, that has already stopped being a joke.

What is The Affair Was Just the Beginning about?

Two neighbouring families, one hit-and-run, and a blackmailer who has it all on video.

Park Kyung-hee built her way out of a flooding rooftop flat by turning home renovation into a YouTube channel. Fifteen years on, the channel has a million subscribers, she goes by “Captain Park”, and the family’s whole income depends on an image of domestic perfection. Her husband Im Jae-hong is a supporting actor who has spent those years being introduced as her husband.

They move next door to Ahn Soo-jung, a dermatologist in the middle of an ugly divorce, and Kyung-hee sets about befriending her — Soo-jung knows an investor Kyung-hee needs. Then rumours start that Jae-hong is sleeping with a young actress, and Kyung-hee starts checking his phone.

It runs to eight episodes, is rated 19+ in Korea, and is billed there as black comedy, crime, thriller and picaresque all at once. Episodes run roughly 50 minutes.

The production is worth knowing about. It is directed by Lee Chang-hee, whose previous series were Strangers from Hell and A Killer Paradox, and written by Jung Eun-kyung and Park Soo-rin. The production company is Firstman Studio, co-founded by Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who is credited here as showrunner and executive producer. He did not write or direct it, which is worth holding on to when you see it sold as “from the creator of Squid Game”.

Who is in the cast?

Two leads of equal weight, and their two daughters as the hinge between them.

Park Kyung-hee (Kim Hye-soo) is the influencer at the centre of it — self-made, relentless, and entirely dependent on the family image she sells. Everything she does in the first two episodes is in service of an investment deal she needs.

Ahn Soo-jung (Cho Yeo-jeong) is the neighbour across the road, and the production describes her as a dermatology clinic director who will endure anything to protect the one daughter she has left. She is running that clinic while her ex-husband tries to sabotage it and sue her for custody. She resents Kyung-hee’s apparently perfect family on sight, and episode 2 explains exactly why.

Im Jae-hong (Kim Ji-hoon) is Kyung-hee’s husband, a working supporting actor whose career has been permanently overshadowed by his wife’s. His ego is the show’s clearest motive for everything that follows.

Joo Bo-seong (Kim Jae-chul) is Soo-jung’s ex-husband, a serial adulterer who walked out and is now suing for custody of their daughter, taking the cat and very little shame with him.

Im Ye-ji and Joo Min-seo are the two daughters, pushed together by their mothers and considerably more entangled with each other than either parent realises. The two actors are at opposite ends of a career: this is Jeon Si-hyun’s debut, while Do Yeong-seo has been working since 2014 and is the more familiar face of the pair — she has spent much of the last decade playing the younger version of other actresses, including Han Ji-min in Miss Baek, Ha Ji-won in Chocolate and Kim Go-eun in Ms. Incognito.

Michelle Jung (Yang Hee-kyung, in a special appearance) is the investor Kyung-hee spends the first episode manoeuvring to meet.

Two casting notes that Korean coverage picked up on. Kim Hye-soo and Cho Yeo-jeong have not been in the same drama since the 2002 KBS series Jang Hui-bin, where Cho was the newcomer — Kim’s memory of meeting her, given while promoting this show, is of a strikingly pretty 23-year-old in a traditional updo. Cho Yeo-jeong and Kim Ji-hoon have not shared one for 20 years either.

Where can you watch The Affair Was Just the Beginning?

In the US and Canada it streams on Rakuten Viki with English subtitles. Coupang Play has it in South Korea, where it is included for Coupang Wow members and ordinary subscribers alike, and Viu carries it in parts of Asia including Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Rights are split by territory rather than sold to one global platform, so the answer genuinely depends on where you are — this is not a Netflix release that turns up everywhere on the same day. As of 3 August, English subtitles on the episodes released so far are complete.

When do new episodes come out?

Fridays at 8pm Korean time, and the next two land on 7 August. Episodes 1 and 2 arrived together on the premiere date, which sets the pattern for at least the second drop.

The back half is where the schedule stops being certain. Two episodes every Friday would finish the run on 21 August, and English-language listings are carrying that date. But Korean listings give the release period as running to 4 September, which only works if the pace drops to one episode a week partway through. Both readings fit an eight-episode run that started with a pair, and Coupang Play has not put a finale date anywhere we can reach. Treat 21 August as the earliest it can end rather than as the date.

For US viewers that Friday-evening Korean slot is Friday morning — subtitled episodes follow rather than appearing simultaneously. Episodes 3 to 8 have no announced titles.

Either way it is the opposite of what Netflix did with The East Palace , another eight-episode Korean series, which dropped the lot in one go. Coupang Play is betting on a month of conversation instead of a weekend of it.

What happened in episodes 1 and 2?

Episode 1 ends with a body. Episode 2 ends with two teenagers confessing to putting it there.

⚠️ Spoilers from here.

Episode 1: Cheater A

The episode opens on a man lying in a road, injured and probably dead, then jumps back fifteen years to a couple bailing rainwater out of a leaking rooftop flat with a feverish toddler. That is Kyung-hee and Jae-hong at the bottom, and her response to it — turning the renovation into content — is the origin of everything.

A montage carries them to the present: a million subscribers, an interior design company, and a house in an expensive neighbourhood next door to Soo-jung. Soo-jung dislikes them immediately. Kyung-hee, who needs Soo-jung’s connection to the investor Michelle, sets out to fix that by having Jae-hong funnel his celebrity contacts into Soo-jung’s struggling clinic. It works, and the two families start eating dinner together.

At one of those dinners Soo-jung makes a pointed remark about how close Jae-hong is with a young actress, Ji-su. Jae-hong drops his wine glass. Kyung-hee leaves the table to deal with the stain; Soo-jung stays to bandage the cut on his hand.

The rest of the episode is Kyung-hee’s suspicion hardening. Tabloid rumours about Ji-su and an unnamed “Cheater A” attach themselves to Jae-hong, the Michelle investment collapses, and Kyung-hee finds a condom in his wallet after planting a tracker in it. On the night she has asked him to come home early, she follows the tracker to an abandoned neighbourhood — and finds him disposing of a body. She runs. He chases her.

Then the episode’s last beat undercuts the whole thing: the press reports that Ji-su was never having an affair with Jae-hong at all. Her rumoured partner was another actor, and the two of them were promoting a drama.

Episode 2: The Woman Across the Road

Episode 2 goes back to the beginning and runs the same stretch of time from Soo-jung’s side.

Her marriage to Bo-seong ended after a series of affairs; he asked for the divorce, said he felt suffocated, and left with the cat. She took over the clinic, poured herself into work and into her daughter Min-seo, and was in the middle of a bitter fight about Min-seo choosing art over medicine on the day the new neighbours turned up looking flawless.

Then the rooftop. Soo-jung goes up to smoke and call Bo-seong, who tells her he is filing for custody; Jae-hong is already up there and overhears the whole thing. He cannot leave without a keycard, so he stays, takes her side, and encourages her to destroy Bo-seong in court. A small fire starts in a bin, he tries to put it out, and Soo-jung ends up spraying him with the extinguisher. They laugh.

That is the beginning of it. By the dinner party — the same dinner party — Soo-jung is making moves on Jae-hong under the table, which is why he dropped the glass, and the bandaged hand in the guest room ends in a kiss. The affair Kyung-hee spends episode 1 hunting is happening at her own dinner table, with the woman she is trying to charm. Soo-jung then volunteers to introduce her to Michelle after all.

The back half belongs to the custody case. Bo-seong hires a lawyer who digs up old recordings of Min-seo complaining about her mother and turns them into a child-abuse allegation, which brings in the police. On Jae-hong’s advice Soo-jung hires a private investigator, who gets the lawyer drunk, takes his phone, finds something incriminating on it, and tries to blackmail him into losing the case. The lawyer fights back and runs. The investigator chases him into the road, and a car comes out of nowhere and hits him.

Soo-jung, who does not know any of that yet, is celebrating with Jae-hong at the clinic. They go home separately to find both children in tears. Jae-hong notices the damage to his car, and Ye-ji admits she took it out and hit someone. At the same time, in the house across the road, Min-seo tells her mother she was driving and hit someone too.

Why does episode 2 retell episode 1?

Because the show would rather you knew than wondered.

This is the most interesting decision in the first two hours, and it is a real one. Episode 1 is built as a mystery: is Jae-hong cheating, and with whom? A conventional version holds that answer until the midpoint. Instead, episode 2 opens the trapdoor immediately — before anything else happens, you know it is Soo-jung, and you know Kyung-hee has been chasing the wrong woman while cultivating the right one.

The trade is mystery for dramatic irony. Every scene of Kyung-hee flattering her neighbour now plays differently on the rewatch it invites, and the show buys itself a second engine at the point where the first one runs out. It also means the two episodes are not really instalments one and two of a sequence; they are two views of the same period, which is why the dinner party happens twice.

It is a confident structure and it costs something. Handing over the answer in the second hour of eight means the back six episodes have to run on the murder and the blackmail rather than the marriage, and the coincidence at the end of episode 2 — two girls, two confessions, one victim — is a large bill for the show to have run up this early. Whether that lands depends entirely on how it is explained, and nothing so far explains it.

Is The Affair Was Just the Beginning worth watching?

On the evidence of two episodes: yes, with a caveat about the shape of the thing rather than the execution.

What is working is the design. Kim Hye-soo and Cho Yeo-jeong are cast as equals rather than as star and support, and the script gives each of them a full episode from the inside — a structure that only pays off if both halves are strong enough to carry an hour, and here they are built to. The two daughters are positioned as the mechanism that will collide the families, which is a tidier piece of engineering than the “wronged wife discovers everything” version this could have been.

The pacing is the risk. Eight episodes at roughly 50 minutes each is about six and a half hours of story, and the show has already spent its title premise, revealed its affair, produced a corpse and delivered a blackmailer. That is a lot of powder for the first quarter. Shows that front-load like this tend to fail in the same place — the middle, where the revelations run out and the plumbing has to be installed. On a weekly schedule that middle arrives in a fortnight.

The one thing to discount is the marketing. Hwang Dong-hyuk’s name is on this as showrunner and executive producer through his production company, not as writer or director, and the closest comparison for what is actually on screen is Lee Chang-hee’s previous work rather than Squid Game. Going in expecting the latter is setting yourself up to be annoyed by a show that is doing something else.

Early numbers are good and early numbers are also nearly meaningless: it sits at 4.6 on Coupang Play and 9.4 on Viki from 88 ratings, both as of 3 August, three days after release. A sample that size, drawn from the people motivated enough to seek out a new Coupang Play title in its first weekend, tells you about enthusiasm rather than quality.

Our rating: 4 out of 5 for the setup, held provisionally. The construction is unusually deliberate for a show this pulpy, and the decision to give away the affair rather than milk it suggests the writers have something bigger they would rather spend the time on. The mark it has to earn is the middle.

The bottom line

Two episodes are out, six more are coming on Fridays through late August at least, and the show has already thrown away the premise in its title. If you want it, it is on Rakuten Viki in the US and Canada, Coupang Play in Korea, and Viu across parts of Asia.

Watch episode 1 as a thriller about a marriage and episode 2 as the same story with the lights on. Then come back on 7 August, when the show finally has to start answering for the body.