Netflix K-drama Idol I: Choi Soo-young, Kim Jae-young lead K-pop-infused legal drama

Lead cast: Choi Soo-young, Kim Jae-young\nLatest Nielsen rating: 2.26 per cent\nAs 2025 draws to a close, viewers are invited back into a Korean courtroom one last time with Idol I (also styled as I Dol I). This time you can leave your lawbooks behind, since the emphasis is squarely on character melodrama rather than legal procedure.\nChoi Soo-young (Second Shot at Love) and Kim Jae-young (The Judge from Hell) team up as a lawyer and a K-pop star, respectively.\n\n\nChoi – herself a member of the K-pop supergroup Girls’ Generation – plays Maeng Se-na, a young partner at her firm known for winning unwinnable cases that others refuse to touch.\nHer latest challenge involves Do Ra-ik (Kim), a solo idol accused of murdering his friend and former bandmate, Kang Woo-sung (Ahn Woo-yeon, King the Land).\nSe-na is accustomed to high-profile cases and immune to the media scrutiny that accompanies them, no matter how viciously she is criticised. However, this specific trial threatens to crash her professional life into her carefully guarded private world.\nOff the clock, Se-na is secretly a devoted K-pop fan whose ultimate idol is none other than Ra-ik himself.\n\nThe series dedicates significant screen time to Se-na’s fixation, while simultaneously contrasting it with Ra-ik’s reality: a star struggling with the immense pressure of a solo career, weighed down by the expectations of fans, management and himself alike.\nWhile Se-na the fangirl is fully realised, Se-na the lawyer or even Se-na the person remains a sketch.\nAfter winning a major but vaguely defined case in the opening, she ignores her colleagues’ celebratory gestures upon her return to the office, skipping a victory party in her honour to rush home and obsess over Ra-ik.\nFlashbacks reveal that Se-na’s devotion is rooted in trauma. As a bullied teenager contemplating suicide by a riverside, she was saved by the sound of Ra-ik busking nearby.\n\nHer fandom was born from that moment of salvation, though he appears to have no memory of the encounter.\nDespite hints at these dramatic underpinnings, the initial episodes largely portray Se-na as a hyper-competent but emotionally vacant automaton. The how of her success is clear, but the why of her personality remains missing.\nThe series demands viewers take Se-na’s prowess on faith. Her antisocial behaviour is treated as comedy, punctuated by aggressive sound effects, while her legal genius is merely asserted by other characters rather than demonstrated in court.\nMomentum builds in the second episode as Se-na agrees to take Ra-ik’s case and the trial begins. She faces off against Kwak Byoung-kyung (Jeong Jae-kwang, A Hundred Memories), an arrogant prosecutor from an elite family.\n\nHe turns out to be yet another figure from Se-na’s past who does not recognise her: her school bully.\nAlso briefly introduced is Choi Hee-jin (Heavenly Ever After) as the mysterious Hong Hye-joo, who repeatedly crosses Ra-ik’s path, catching his attention at various events.\nAlthough framed as a legal series, Idol I shows no ambition to be the next Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Its focus lies in character drama, though the execution remains lopsided for the moment.\nRa-ik has the contours of a character, albeit a thin one, while Se-na feels like a collection of tics and triggers. Despite Choi’s spirited performance, the writing has yet to lift the character off the page.\n\nOne hopes that as the story evolves, the leads will elevate each other – and that the procedural elements will rise to meet the potential of the premise.\nIdol I is streaming on Netflix.\n