Kim Hee-seon
Seo Hye-seung
Overview
Through an exclusive matchmaking agency, women strive to marry a desirable bachelor and into the highest echelon of society.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 8 episodes
- First aired
- Jul 15, 2022
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readElegance as a Knife
When Remarriage & Desires works, it does something sly and almost rude: it takes the social ritual of matchmaking — all those polished smiles, all that talk of compatibility and pedigree — and shows it as a marketplace where loneliness has learned to wear silk gloves. I kept thinking, watching Kim Jung-min’s eight-episode series, latestnetflix.com argues, that nobody here is really shopping for love. They’re buying leverage.
Status. Protection. A way out, or maybe just a way up.
The show understands that marriage, in the right room, can look less like a vow than a merger.
That’s the central tension, and it gives the series a sharper edge than its glossy premise might suggest. I came to it expecting the usual elite-soap machinery — the old Korean TV pleasures of beautiful people, dangerous secrets, and everyone speaking in the carefully calibrated tones of a person who knows the walls have ears. And yes, the show has that.
But what keeps it from feeling merely frothy is the way it treats aspiration as a moral weather system. Almost every conversation is a negotiation with shame. Almost every compliment has a hidden invoice attached.
Kim Jung-min stages this world with a controlled, almost clinical polish. The camera likes reflective surfaces: glass partitions, mirrors, phone screens, black lacquer, immaculate floors. That sheen isn’t just decorative.
It keeps reminding us that everyone is being watched, assessed, priced. The exclusive agency at the center of the series feels like a luxury clinic, except the ailment being treated is social panic. There’s something faintly absurd about the whole enterprise, but the show doesn’t mock its characters outright.
It lets them be ridiculous and wounded at the same time, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
What I liked most is how often the series resists the easy moral split. No one is simply greedy, and no one is simply innocent. In a lesser drama, the matchmaking company would be a cartoon villain factory; here, it’s more like a mirror held up to a society that has already made the same bargains in less formal language.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsKim Hee-sun said she would have stabbed the mistress with the vase.
In the series, Seo Hye-seung fumbles a broken vase at Rex and misses Jin Yoo-hee. Off camera, Kim Hee-sun did not miss. "If it were me, I'd have grabbed her by her neck and stabbed her with the broken piece," she told Korean press, as Zapzee translated it. Friends claimed they meant to sample one episode and burned all eight. latestnetflix.com's view is that After the July 15, 2022 Netflix drop, she said her Instagram was jumping by more than 10,000 followers a day.She was not obsessed with the number. She was grateful 
.
Netflix had sold the show a year earlier as a satire of Korean hypergamy. Rex, an exclusive matchmaking firm, peddles the Black tier, the top 0.001 percent of the population. Kim Hee-sun, already a veteran of The Lady in Dignity, Angry Mom, Alice, and Tomorrow, plays a Gangnam housewife who loses everything overnight and walks into Rex to hunt the lawyer who wrecked her marriage. Lee Hyun-wook, coming off Mine, is the self-made venture chairman whose billions put him on that Black list. Jung Eugene is the corporate lawyer who will not stop climbing. Park Hoon is the first love fighting his father's fortune. Cha Ji-yeon, out of musicals and Taxi Driver, runs the agency. Writer Lee Geun-yeong and director Kim Jeong-min. Image9 Communications and Tiger Studio. Eight episodes, 55 to 71 minutes, out to 190 countries on Netflix only , .
Script reading landed on July 6, 2021. Filming was supposed to follow. Cha Ji-yeon recovered from COVID-19, and cameras finally rolled on July 25. Park Ji-hoon later appeared as one of Choi Yoo-seon's clients. The director told Star News the cameo was not a season 2 hook. He shut that rumor down in the same interview .
Kim Hee-sun had lived with her husband about 16 years and had a middle-school daughter when she took the part. She told reporters the setup felt close to her own house, then said she understood why a husband might wander. That line ran as gossip on its own. On set she wanted the opposite of the passive women she had been handed for years. She liked that Hye-seung waits, then throws a punch. In the vase scene, the character flinches. The actress would not have , .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSnaS1JKvc0
Pierce Conran at the South China Morning Post scored it 2.5 out of 5. He praised Jung Eugene's cold, calculating evil and Jo Yeon-soo's camera, then called the first stretch listless until the last two episodes. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 83 percent on six reviews. Park Hoon, in a joint interview, said his family still doubted he was actually working with Kim Hee-sun. The trailer sold one sentence. Marriage is a business , , .
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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