"Lee Jae-wook in a Joseon period drama should be an easy yes — but Dear Hongrang wraps its excellent cast in a plot that loses the thread early and never quite finds it again."
A Joseon mystery with a compelling premise and a script that keeps getting in its own way
Dear Hongrang arrived with the kind of setup that should have made it unmissable. Lee Jae-wook — coming off Alchemy of Souls, one of the most beloved fantasy sageuks in recent memory — in a Joseon period mystery with a genuine identity-thriller premise. A missing heir. A stranger who claims his name. A half-sister who knows something is wrong but cannot prove it. There is a drama in that premise that could have been exceptional. Instead, Dear Hongrang is a drama that looks beautiful, has at least one outstanding performance, and is genuinely difficult to stay engaged with past the halfway point. I dropped it before the finale — and I say that as someone who actively enjoys historical K-dramas and has followed Lee Jae-wook since his earlier work.
The Synopsis
The Sim family runs the Min Family’s Guild — the most powerful merchant house in Joseon. Their only son and heir, Hongrang, disappeared at the age of eight. Twelve years later, a man appears and claims to be him, returning with no memory of his past. His mother, Min Yeon-ui (Uhm Ji-won), accepts him immediately. His half-sister, Sim Jae-yi (Jo Bo-ah), does not. She has spent twelve years searching for her brother and knows in her bones that this man is not him — but proving it is another matter entirely.
Sim Mu-jin (Jung Ga-ram), the adopted son taken in to replace Hongrang as heir, finds himself increasingly threatened by the stranger’s return. And somewhere underneath all of it is a conspiracy involving poison, political scheming, and secrets that stretch back further than Hongrang’s disappearance. The drama is adapted from Jang Da-hye’s 2021 novel Tangeum: Swallowing Gold and directed by Kim Hong-sun.
The Cast
Lee Jae-wook (Sim Hongrang): He is the reason to start watching this drama, and the main reason it is as watchable as it is in the early episodes. The character he is playing — a man with no memory of a past that may or may not be his, navigating a family that wants to believe him and a woman determined to expose him — suits his particular acting strengths exactly. Lee Jae-wook has a quality of contained stillness that makes enigmatic characters feel genuinely unknowable rather than simply mysterious for the sake of it. The performance is not the problem here.
Jo Bo-ah (Sim Jae-yi): She is given a strong character on paper — a woman who is sharp, stubborn, and driven by grief — and she plays it with commitment. The frustration is that the script repeatedly undermines Jae-yi with decisions that make her feel less intelligent than she is established to be, particularly in the middle episodes where she continues to put herself in danger without any apparent survival instinct. Jo Bo-ah does what she can with what she is given.
Jung Ga-ram (Sim Mu-jin): The most consistently interesting character in the drama, and one of the more thankless positions to be in — the adopted son whose entire existence is threatened by a returning stranger, whose loyalty to Jae-yi shades into something more complicated. Jung Ga-ram handles the ambiguity of the role quietly and well.
What the Drama Gets Right
The production is genuinely beautiful. The cinematography makes strong use of the mountain setting — wide shots of traditional architecture against dense greenery, interiors lit with a muted warmth that suits the period without feeling theatrical. The costume design is thoughtful, particularly in the way the stranger’s clothing in white is used deliberately throughout. The OST is atmospheric and unconventional for a sageuk, which some viewers will find off-putting and others will appreciate. The eerie, slightly unsettling tone that director Kim Hong-sun establishes in the first two episodes is genuinely effective.
Where It Lost Me
The mystery at the centre of Dear Hongrang is its biggest selling point and its biggest problem. In the early episodes, the question of whether this man is truly Hongrang is compelling enough to carry the drama forward. But somewhere around the midpoint, the show stops being interested in that question and starts filling time with political subplots, a poisoning arc with internal logic that does not hold together, and a female lead who keeps making choices that the drama frames as brave but read as inconsistent with the intelligence she was established to have.
The pacing becomes genuinely difficult by episode six or seven. Scenes that should move the mystery forward instead circle the same emotional beats repeatedly. The romance develops in ways that feel rushed in some places and stalled in others, without the slow-burn tension the premise was clearly designed to generate. I stopped watching before the ending — not in frustration, exactly, but in the quiet recognition that the drama had stopped giving me a reason to keep going.
Final Thoughts
Dear Hongrang is not a bad drama in the way that some dramas are bad. It is a drama with real craft in its production, a lead performance worth watching, and a premise that genuinely had potential. But the script never fully delivers on what the setup promises, and for viewers who need narrative momentum to stay engaged — especially across eleven hourlong episodes — it is a hard drama to stay with. If you are a Lee Jae-wook fan, the first few episodes are worth your time. Beyond that, Dear Hongrang asks for more patience than the story it is telling has earned.
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