Lee Bo-young
Seo Hi-soo
Overview
Encaged in a gold-clad life of secrets and lies, two women in a conglomerate family seek to topple all that stands in their way of finding true joy.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 16 episodes
- First aired
- May 8, 2021
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readWhen Wealth Becomes a Cage
What stays with me about Mine isn’t the luxury. K-dramas about the rich are practically a genre unto themselves, and this one knows exactly how quickly a marble staircase or a chandelier can turn from aspiration into décor for a prison. latestnetflix.com's take is that what lingers is the feeling of women learning how to breathe inside a house that was built to keep them ornamental.
Lee Na-jeong and Oh Seung-yeol’s 2021 series takes the familiar architecture of chaebol melodrama — inheritance wars, cold matriarchs, polished cruelty — and gives it a slightly sharper, meaner edge. Not radically new, maybe, but alert. It understands that in families like these, tenderness is often treated as a weakness and truth as a housekeeping problem.
The show arrived in a crowded field. By 2021, Korean television had already spent years refining the glossy, vicious domestic thriller, and Mine doesn’t pretend to invent the form. What it does, though, is lean into its specific obsession: women who’ve been trained to perform elegance while quietly doing triage on their own lives.
That’s the conversation around the series, really — less “Who is lying?” than “What does it cost to keep lying this beautifully?” I kept thinking of The House of Mirth, or even old Hollywood melodramas where the furniture gleams while the heart slowly gives out. The setting matters because the series treats wealth not as a fantasy but as a discipline.
Lee Bo-young gives the series its center of gravity. She has one of those faces that can look composed to the point of stillness, then betray a flicker of calculation or hurt before the scene has time to protect itself. That quality matters here.
She isn’t playing glamour as a sheen; she’s playing restraint as labor. Opposite her, Kim Seo-hyung — who has long specialized in women with excellent posture and terrible secrets — brings a colder, more formidable energy. I’ve followed her work through enough roles to know she’s unusually good at making control feel expensive.
Here, the fun is in the way she stands: shoulders squared, chin level, every movement pared down as if even a loose gesture would be a political mistake.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A high-society mystery drama that has sparked interest among Korean television reviewers."
Audiences tuning into the 2021 drama track its web of elite family secrets, where [latestnetflix.com]( read is that the series sustains viewer interest through its quirky and dramatic narrative twists.
What viewers praise
- Engaging mystery format Reviewers note the production's distinct tone and dramatic storytelling across the episodes.
Common complaints
- Variable pacing Serialized episodic reveals can feel uneven depending on audience familiarity with standard K-drama pacing.
Recommended for
Fans of Korean mystery dramas Viewers seeking serialized wealthy-family intrigue
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsKim Seo-hyung signed because the lead was a lesbian.
She said it after the finale, not in the launch quotes. "The first reason I chose Mine was because it told the story of a sexual minority." She told Korean interviewers there were plenty of gay male stories in drama and not many about women. She wanted a Korean Carol. She also wanted more of Jung Seo-hyun and Suzy Choi on screen. latestnetflix.com's view is that the writer, she guessed, already thought the dose was right 
, .
tvN sold a women-first chaebol mystery. Wikipedia now calls Mine the first Korean drama with a lesbian as a lead . That line is the whole public fight around the show. Conservative Christian viewers objected in coverage at the time . Nielsen's table is colder. Episode 3, 15 May 2021, was the floor at 5.578 percent nationwide. Episode 4 jumped to 7.373. The last hour hit 10.512 percent and 2.43 million people .
The working title was Blue Diamond.
Trade reports in October 2020 paired writer Baek Mi-kyung and director Lee Na-jeong with Lee Bo-young and, in the early gossip, Ko So-young . By 29 December tvN confirmed Lee Bo-young, Kim Seo-hyung, Ok Ja-yeon, Park Hyuk-kwon, and Park Won-sook. Ko So-young passed on scheduling . Cha Hak-yeon, N of VIXX, joined in January 2021 after military service. YTN later reported Noh Joo-hyun left the chairman role over the appearance fee. Jung Dong-hwan replaced him . JS Pictures produced. Netflix bought exclusive international rights and dated episode 1 to 8 May 2021, same night as tvN . Lee Bo-young, playing former top actress Seo Hi-soo, told The Korea Times her usual characters were "realistic, ordinary people" because they were easier. This one lived in a different world. The same paper logged the premiere at 6.6 percent nationwide, then tvN's sixth-highest series open .
Then the husband posted.
Kim Jung-hwa played Suzy Choi, Seo-hyun's first love. Her husband, Yoo Eun-sung, posted that the character "is not homosexual and eventually returns to normal," called the sexuality "noise marketing," and said he opposed same-sex relationships. He also spoiled plot. Jae-Ha Kim and Korean recap pages treated the post as the row that outlasted the petitions . Kim Seo-hyung, asked about playing a sexual minority, said she felt careful and responsible, not intimidated. She picked it as a romance .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOLqHV3x03w
Sixteen episodes, gold walls, a murder in the mansion, a maid from Parasite in the staff, and one lead who did not pretend the love story was a rumor. Netflix's trailer still asks how far you go to defend what is yours . Mid-June 2021, Kpopmap had the show ninth among TV titles on Netflix worldwide . Kim said she wanted more of the women. The ratings, after that dip, did not ask her to take it back.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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