The Affair Was Just the Beginning: Cast, Episode 1–4 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. Four episodes in, that has already stopped being a joke twice.

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 her business and much of the family’s public brand rest 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 Coupang Play files it under drama, crime and comedy. Korean write-ups reach for picaresque as well, and on the evidence of the first two hours that is the more useful word. 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 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?

Outside Korea, Rakuten Viki carries it with English subtitles in selected international territories. Coupang Play has it in South Korea, where it is free both to Coupang WOW members and to ordinary Coupang accounts, the latter watching with ads. Viu covers 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, and Viki’s own catalogue varies by country — this is not a Netflix release that turns up everywhere on the same day. Viki showed English subtitles as complete for the released episodes when we checked on 3 August.

When do new episodes come out?

Fridays at 8pm Korean time, finishing on 4 September. The run is front-loaded: two episodes on the premiere date, two more on 7 August, then one a week for the last four.

That change of pace is the part worth knowing. Eight episodes in pairs would have wrapped on 21 August, which is the date some listings still carry, and it is an easy assumption to make from a premiere that dropped two. Coupang Play’s own schedule runs a fortnight past it, because the second half slows to one episode a week.

For US viewers that Friday-evening Korean slot is Friday morning — subtitled episodes follow rather than appearing simultaneously. Coupang Play has published titles as far as episode 4; the last four are still listed without one. Running times so far are 52, 48, 50 and 48 minutes.

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, in two separate houses, each confessing to hitting someone with a car.

⚠️ 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 two confessions at the end of episode 2 are a large bill for the show to have run up this early. Both girls say they were driving and both say they hit someone, in separate rooms, on the same night; they cannot both be describing what happened, and nothing so far explains which of them is wrong.

What happened in episodes 3 and 4?

Episode 3 answers who was driving and buries the body. Episode 4 hands over the ransom, tracks it, and reveals that the video everyone is paying for is not the one they think — and that the man in the road was still alive when the girls left him.

Episode 3: A Quiet, Secluded Place

The episode opens on the answer to episode 2’s cliffhanger, and it is not a coincidence that both girls confessed. Ye-ji was covering for Min-seo, who was driving.

A flashback fills in the rest. The two became friends the moment their families met, and kept it from their mothers. At the dinner party they stole a bottle of wine and hid in Min-seo’s room, where Min-seo talked about her parents’ divorce, her art, and how she liked to sit in a car with the music loud. Ye-ji promised to take her out driving — her father was teaching her. Min-seo made the first move that night, and they started seeing each other in secret.

On the night of the accident Ye-ji was trying to cheer Min-seo up after a fight with Soo-jung about the police visit. They used the navigation in Jae-hong’s car to find somewhere quiet and empty, which is where the episode gets its title, and which is why they ended up on the road outside the private investigator’s office.

In the present, Jae-hong is already at the scene when Kyung-hee arrives, and the argument between them is the episode. She wants to turn Ye-ji in and hire the best lawyer they can afford. He refuses. Then two pieces of news land within a minute of each other: Michelle’s people want a meeting after all, and a writer wants Jae-hong for a lead role — while the press finally attaches Ji-su’s affair to a different actor. Everything they had been about to lose is coming back, and they decide their daughter is not going to be a headline.

So they clean up. They assume no camera caught it, switch off the dead man’s phone when it rings, paint over the skid marks, wash the blood off the road, drive separately to their holiday house and bury him in a storage room under wet cement.

What they do not know is that Soo-jung was there. She arrives while they are loading the body into the boot, films it, drives away, and picks up the two girls walking back to the scene. At home she talks Ye-ji into handing over the dashcam SD card, asks Min-seo why Ye-ji took the fall for her, gets nothing, and lets it go.

Kyung-hee ends the night wishing she had walked in on an affair instead. In the morning a message arrives: someone says they filmed everything.

Episode 4: 99 Million Won

The demand is 500 million won in nine hours, with a countdown attached. Almost the whole episode is the couple raising it.

The bank lets Kyung-hee take out 300 million — the daily limit, with anything more requiring an appointment. Jae-hong sells the gold in their safe for 90 million and squeezes 11 million out of friends. That leaves 99 million short, which is where the episode title comes from and where it turns cruel: Jae-hong goes to Soo-jung and begs her for it, lying that it is to do with the holiday house. She had assumed he was finally coming to tell her about the accident. She writes the cheque anyway, and he tells her he loves her.

Around that, the walls keep moving. Kyung-hee admits she had already spent their savings propping up the company after the investment fell through. Jae-hong reports his own car stolen, and the police believe him because they recognise him off the television. Michelle asks for another due diligence report before she will commit. Bo-seong introduces himself to Kyung-hee as a fan looking for someone to fit out his new clinic, and she hands him a business card without thinking. And Min-seo goes back to the scene, where the dead man’s twin — also a private investigator — has turned up looking for his brother, having found only a pair of camera sunglasses in the basement.

Kyung-hee hides a tracker in the money. The handover goes through with seconds left on the clock, and the tracker leads them to a woman called Boo-jin, who works at Soo-jung’s clinic and who has been off sick. She lets Kyung-hee in without a fight and agrees to delete the file.

Then Kyung-hee watches it. It is not the body. It is a sex tape of her husband and the neighbour she has spent the series cultivating. She says nothing on the drive home, where Soo-jung is standing in the road waiting for them — and Kyung-hee points the car at her.

The last scene rewinds one more time. The investigator survived being hit. He came round while the lawyer he had been blackmailing was kicking him to get his phone back, they fought, and the lawyer put a piece of broken glass through his head and drove off — nineteen minutes after the girls did. Whatever the two families have buried, they did not kill him.

Is The Affair Was Just the Beginning worth watching?

On the evidence of four episodes: yes, and the specific worry the first two raised has not come true yet.

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 was the risk, and episodes 3 and 4 are the first evidence on it. The worry after the premiere was that a show which had already spent its title premise, revealed its affair, produced a corpse and delivered a blackmailer inside two hours would run out of powder. Instead the second pair spends most of its time on one very ordinary problem — where do two people with a good address actually find half a billion won before lunch — and gets an hour of tension out of a daily withdrawal limit. Then it uses its two twists to reset the board rather than to advance it: the blackmail video is the affair, not the body, and the man they buried was killed by somebody else nineteen minutes later.

That is a smarter use of a front-loaded structure than it first looked. Both reveals take something off the table and put something worse on it. The couple are now being blackmailed over a crime they did not commit, while nobody is looking for the one they did, and Kyung-hee has spent four episodes protecting a marriage the audience has watched end. Whether that holds through the four remaining hours is still the open question — the show has now cashed almost every cheque it wrote in the premiere.

The one thing to discount is the marketing. Hwang Dong-hyuk’s name is on this as showrunner and 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 went to number one on Coupang Play with a 4.6 rating on the platform after the first pair, and it sat at 9.4 on Viki from 88 ratings on 3 August. By 8 August, with four episodes out, MyDramaList had it at 7.5 from 189 users. Those three numbers are not in conflict so much as measuring different rooms: the platform and Viki scores come from people who sought the show out in its opening weekend, and the wider the sample gets the more ordinary the number looks. Treat all of them as enthusiasm rather than quality.

Our rating: 4 out of 5 at the halfway mark, still held provisionally. The construction is unusually deliberate for a show this pulpy, and four episodes in the writers have twice chosen to hand over information early rather than hold it. The mark it still has to earn is the landing: episodes 5 to 8 have to make something of a murder the protagonists did not commit, and of a marriage only one person in it still believes in.

The bottom line

Four episodes are out, four more are scheduled through 4 September at one a week, and the show has already thrown away the premise in its title twice over. If you want it, it is on Rakuten Viki in selected international territories, Coupang Play in Korea, and Viu across parts of Asia.

Watch episode 1 as a thriller about a marriage, episode 2 as the same story with the lights on, and the second pair as the bill arriving. Episode 5 lands on 14 August, and the question it inherits is no longer who was driving — it is what happens when two families discover they buried someone else’s murder.