"Lee Jong-suk is exactly as watchable as you would expect — it's just that the romance the drama is built around never convinces you it's actually there."
A warm slice-of-life legal drama that works best when it forgets it’s supposed to be a love story
Law and the City is the kind of K-drama that is easy to appreciate and genuinely difficult to be passionate about. Lee Jong-suk returns to a legal drama — his third in a row after Big Mouth and W: Two Worlds — and if you are watching this for him, you will not be disappointed. He is doing exactly what he does well: playing a contained, quietly complex man whose emotional life exists entirely below the surface. The problem is that the drama built around him is a slow-paced ensemble slice-of-life show that keeps insisting on a romance between its two leads that simply does not generate the chemistry it needs to make that insistence feel earned. I dropped it before the finale. The Lee Jong-suk scenes were not enough to hold me through sixteen hours of warm but largely uneventful television.
The Synopsis
Set in Seoul’s Seocho-dong legal district — a dense cluster of law firms, courts, and courtrooms in the heart of the city — Law and the City follows five associate lawyers who work in the same building and have fallen into the habit of eating dinner together at the end of each day. An Ju-hyeong (Lee Jong-suk) is a ninth-year senior associate: logical, efficient, detached, and completely uninterested in the idea that lawyers are supposed to protect the weak or make the world better. He became a lawyer because he finds cases intellectually interesting. He has never once looked further than that.
Kang Hee-ji (Moon Ga-young) is a second-year associate who believes the opposite of everything Ju-hyeong stands for — passionate, idealistic, and perpetually in conflict with a system that keeps asking her to compromise. Cho Chang-won (Kang You-seok), Bae Mun-jeong (Ryu Hye-young), and Ha Sang-gi (Im Sung-jae) round out the group, each carrying their own professional and personal complications through the drama’s sixteen episodes.
The Cast
Lee Jong-suk (An Ju-hyeong): He carries the drama on his back and largely succeeds. Ju-hyeong is a character who reveals himself in small increments — a man whose coldness is a habit rather than a personality, slowly made uncomfortable by the warmth of the people he keeps accidentally choosing to spend time with. Lee Jong-suk plays this with the quiet intelligence that has always made him one of the more reliable male leads in Korean drama, and the character work in the earlier episodes is genuinely good. The 7 rating is mostly for him.
Moon Ga-young (Kang Hee-ji): She is a capable actress who has done better work elsewhere, and none of that is her fault here. Hee-ji is written as Ju-hyeong’s ideological opposite and eventual love interest, but the drama never convincingly closes the gap between those two positions. Their scenes together are pleasant without generating any particular tension or warmth, and the romantic development between them feels more like a conclusion the show has decided to reach than something that grew organically from the characters. The chemistry simply is not there, and no amount of late-night restaurant scenes changes that.
Kang You-seok (Cho Chang-won): The ensemble around the two leads is where the drama is often more interesting than its central romance. Kang You-seok brings an energy that the show needs in its quieter stretches, and the friendship dynamics among the five lawyers are the most consistently enjoyable part of Law and the City.
What Works
The ensemble is genuinely warm. The drama at its best feels like spending time with people who like each other, and that is not a nothing quality — plenty of K-dramas fail at basic group dynamics. The legal cases, which skew toward civil rather than criminal law, are handled with more realism than the genre usually bothers with. There is no corruption arc, no villain monologuing in a courtroom, no dramatic last-minute revelation. Just working lawyers dealing with working-lawyer problems, which is either refreshing or frustrating depending on what you came for. The production is clean throughout, and the tvN polish is evident in every frame.
Why I Stopped Watching
Sixteen episodes is a long time to spend with a drama whose central romance is not working. The slice-of-life pacing, which suits the show’s tone, also means there is very little pulling you forward episode to episode. The cases are interesting in isolation but do not build toward anything. The friendships are pleasant but not gripping. And the romance between Ju-hyeong and Hee-ji, which the drama increasingly centres in the back half, kept asking me to feel something I simply could not locate. I stopped somewhere around episode ten — not in frustration, but in the quiet acknowledgment that I was watching out of loyalty to the male lead rather than investment in where the story was going.
Final Thoughts
Law and the City is a well-made drama that simply did not hold me. If you are a Lee Jong-suk fan, the early episodes are entirely worth your time — his character work here is some of his most understated and interesting in years. If you prefer your slice-of-life ensemble dramas without too much plot pressure and enjoy the idea of five lawyers eating dinner together and talking about their feelings, you will probably enjoy this more than I did. But if you need the central romance to actually convince you it exists, Law and the City is going to be a harder watch. A 7 because Lee Jong-suk earns it. The rest of the drama earns something closer to a 6.
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