"Choi Soo-young and Kim Jae-young are genuinely compelling together — it's the murder mystery wrapped around them that never quite gets its footing."
Two leads worth watching in a drama that keeps getting in their way
Idol I has the right ingredients. A top criminal lawyer who has been a secret fangirl for fifteen years. An idol accused of murdering his own bandmate. A premise that sits at the intersection of legal drama, K-pop industry commentary, and romantic comedy. And then there are the leads — Choi Soo-young, doing some of the most enjoyable work of her drama career, and Kim Jae-young, who carries his idol character with the same quiet intensity that made his turn in Judge from Hell so memorable. The problem is not the people. The problem is the story they are stuck inside, which never quite decides what it wants to be and ends up delivering a version of each genre that is less satisfying than the sum of its parts.
The Synopsis
Maeng Se-na (Choi Soo-young) is a star criminal lawyer with a reputation for winning unwinnable cases — and a fifteen-year obsession with Do Ra-ik (Kim Jae-young), the lead vocalist of idol group Gold Boys, that she has kept entirely secret from everyone in her professional life. When Ra-ik is accused of murdering a fellow group member, Se-na takes over as his defense attorney. What she expects is a case she can win. What she finds instead is a man who is nothing like the image she has followed for fifteen years — a person dealing with panic attacks, sasaeng harassment, and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been a product since his teenage years and never quite worked out how to be a person.
Kwak Byeong-gyun (Jung Jae-kwang) hovers around the edges of the investigation as a figure whose motives are not immediately clear, and Hong Hye-joo (Choi Hee-jin) brings a warmth to the supporting cast that the drama uses well in the earlier episodes.
The Cast
Choi Soo-young (Maeng Se-na): She is the best thing in this drama by a considerable margin. Se-na is a genuinely fun character — sharp and formidable in the courtroom, quietly ridiculous in private, and played with a comic physicality that makes the fangirl-hiding-from-her-client scenes some of the most genuinely funny moments in a 2025 legal drama. Choi Soo-young has always been a more capable actress than the roles she is given credit for, and Idol I gives her a character that finally matches her range. It is a shame the writing does not always keep up.
Kim Jae-young (Do Ra-ik): Viewers who know him from Judge from Hell will recognize the same quality he brought to that role — a stillness and interior depth that makes even underwritten scenes feel like they contain more than they actually do. Do Ra-ik is the more difficult role of the two: a character who has been performing for so long that even he is not sure what is genuine, and Kim Jae-young handles that ambiguity carefully throughout. The scenes where Ra-ik’s carefully maintained exterior cracks are the most affecting in the drama.
What Works
The chemistry between Choi Soo-young and Kim Jae-young is real, and the drama knows it — the best episodes are the ones that simply let the two of them share scenes without too much plot machinery grinding around them. The early dynamic, where Se-na has to simultaneously defend her client and hide the fact that she owns fifteen years of his merchandise, is genuinely funny and handled with a lightness the drama occasionally loses sight of later on. The show also does some genuinely interesting work around the idol industry — the panic attacks, the sasaeng culture, the way Ra-ik has been shaped by a system that required him to be a symbol rather than a person — and when it focuses there, it earns its more serious moments.
Where It Falls Short
The murder mystery is the drama’s weakest element, and it is also the element the plot returns to most often. The whodunit never builds the tension it needs to — the investigation stalls repeatedly in the middle episodes, the “he said, she said” structure of the courtroom sequences becomes repetitive, and several of the supporting characters exist primarily to create obstacles without being interesting enough in their own right to justify the screen time. The pacing in episodes six through nine is noticeably flat, and the drama loses the balance between its romantic comedy instincts and its thriller ambitions without ever fully recovering it.
There is also a sense, by the final episodes, that the drama resolved its central mystery with less elegance than the setup promised. Not badly — but not with the payoff the better early episodes suggested was coming.
Final Thoughts
Idol I is worth watching for Choi Soo-young and Kim Jae-young, and not much else. That is not a small thing — both performances are genuinely good, and the scenes where the drama trusts its leads over its plot are the most enjoyable K-drama romantic comedy moments of late 2025. But the mystery that occupies most of the middle stretch is not interesting enough to carry the weight the drama places on it, and the tonal inconsistency between the rom-com and thriller elements never gets resolved. A 6 is honest: watchable, with two leads who deserved better material, and a premise that had more potential than the execution managed to reach.
Looking for more Asian drama recommendations? Browse all reviews on the Asian TV Drama reviews page.
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