Shin’s Project

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

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🔥 tvN 2025 Hit

Shin’s Project

신사장 프로젝트 (Sinsajang Peurojekteu) · 2025 · South Korea

WriterBan Ki-ri

DirectorShin Kyung-soo

Episodes12 eps · ~60 min each

⏱️ Binge Time12h 0m

AiredSep 15 – Oct 28, 2025

GenreBlack Comedy · Mystery · Drama

Content RatingtvN Cable · 15+

TVING
Viu

Negotiation
Black Comedy
Justice
Found Family
Corruption
Mystery
Social Commentary

One box. Everything you need to decide.

The trio at the heart of Shin’s Project — and the full ensemble that brings Gangchun City to life.

Han Suk-kyu

Shin Jae-il

Lead

Bae Hyeon-seong

Jo Philip

Lead

Lee Re

Lee Si-on

Lead

Kim Seung-o

Choi Cheol

Supporting

Woo Mi-hwa

Madam Cho

Supporting

Kim Sang-ho

Kim Sang-geun

Supporting

Jung Eun-pyo

Kim Su-dong

Supporting

Woo Hyeon

Kwon Chil-bong

Supporting

Jo Hyun-sik

Jang Tong-wu

Supporting

Lee Ji-ha

Lee Ju-in

Supporting

Jeon Kuk-hwan

Park Myeong-jin

Antagonist

Lee Jong-hyun

Baek Seung-woo

Villain

All 12 episodes — spoiler-light recaps with the moments that matter.

EP 01

Judge Working at Chicken Restaurant

September 15, 2025

We meet Shin Jae-il — chicken shop owner by day, crisis whisperer by unofficial appointment. When a man on the edge threatens to jump, Shin talks him down with nothing but calm precision and a few perfectly chosen words, leaving bystanders speechless. Rookie judge Jo Philip arrives expecting a standard reassignment; what he finds instead is a man who has quietly rewritten every rule Philip was trained to follow. Their first meeting sets the tone perfectly: two opposite philosophies, one very small kitchen.

EP 02

Conspiracy Discovered

September 15, 2025

A seemingly trivial dispute over fermented fish sauce between market vendors in Gangchun City unravels into something much larger — a conspiracy tied to a massive resort development deal and the politicians protecting it. Shin navigates the mediation with trademark cool, nearly walking into a physical confrontation but emerging with the upper hand. Philip, increasingly unsettled by how much Shin seems to know about everything, quietly begins digging into his past. A bomb vest video posted to a government petition board signals that the next crisis won’t be so easy to talk down.

EP 03

Representing the Hostage-Taker

September 22, 2025

A desperate man traps himself and the local mayor inside a container rigged with explosives, and the authorities are paralyzed. Shin steps in on the most unexpected side of the equation — as the negotiator representing the man holding the detonator. What follows is one of the drama’s most gripping sequences: Shin patiently excavating the injustice and grief that drove this ordinary person to such an extreme, using empathy as his only tool. He saves both lives. Philip watches, equal parts horrified and in awe.

EP 04

Si-on Being Harassed

September 22, 2025

When Si-on is targeted by a former classmate while out on a delivery run, Philip steps in to defend her — and gets a bruised ego for his trouble. Shin, learning that someone under his care has been harmed, makes it quietly clear that this will not stand. The episode is gentler than those around it, focused on character rather than crisis: the trio’s bond deepens, Si-on’s backstory gains texture, and the chemistry between all three leads settles into something that feels genuinely earned. Hints of the larger corruption web they’re circling begin to crystallize.

EP 05

The Candidacy of Mr. Shin

September 29, 2025

A corrupt local politician named Choi Ung-sik has been causing quiet devastation in Gangchun, and conventional channels have failed to stop him. Shin’s solution is characteristically audacious: he declares himself a candidate for city council. It is not a campaign — it is a trap, carefully designed to use Choi’s own political machinery against him. Watching Shin navigate the theatre of local politics with the same cool precision he brings to hostage crises is deeply satisfying, and the episode lands one of the series’ best comedic sequences without ever undercutting the stakes.

EP 06

Security Deposit, Unsettled Grief

September 29, 2025

On the anniversary of his son Jun’s death, Shin visits Yoon Dong-hui — the man convicted of the murder — in prison. It is the episode where the mask slips: the man who resolves every crisis with unshakeable calm is revealed to be carrying a wound that has never fully closed. Unexpectedly, he encounters Detective Choi Cheol at the prison — the officer who originally handled the case — and the encounter raises more questions than it answers. The external case involving a neighborhood landlord-tenant dispute provides a quieter backdrop that makes the episode’s emotional core hit harder by contrast.

EP 07

Vanished

October 6, 2025

A key figure disappears, and the revelation that Yoon Dong-hui was connected to a far larger criminal network changes the shape of everything Shin thought he knew about his son’s death. The episode shifts gear from procedural to thriller: Philip and Si-on begin cross-referencing details from Shin’s past with the present-day cases, and the picture emerging is darker than either expected. What started as a mystery about one man carrying private grief is now something considerably more dangerous.

EP 08

Yoon Dong-hee’s Secret Account

October 6, 2025

Investigators uncover a hidden financial account linked to Yoon — and it’s immediately clear he was not working alone. Money trails rarely lie, and this one points upward toward someone with the resources and motive to have engineered Jun’s death as a cover-up for something even larger. Philip’s legal instincts sharpen into something almost dangerous; Si-on’s street-level intelligence closes gaps that institutional investigation never could. The trio is finally operating as a unit, and it shows.

EP 09

Pursuit of the Truth

October 13, 2025

The trio closes the distance on the real mastermind behind Jun’s death, with Shin making a series of calculated, chess-like moves designed to draw out the truth without tipping his hand. A memorable guest appearance adds weight to the episode’s pivotal confrontation. The writing here is at its most precise — every action Shin takes is filtered through the same principle he has lived by for fifteen years: patience and psychology will always outlast brute force. The personal and the procedural are finally converging.

EP 10

Bait for Yoon Dong-hee

October 13, 2025

Shin devises his most daring plan yet: positioning himself as bait to lure Yoon Dong-hee out of hiding. It is a move that only someone who has spent fifteen years planning would attempt — and only someone who fully trusts his team could execute. Philip and Si-on, transformed almost without noticing by months under Shin’s mentorship, hold their nerve. The episode is methodical and tense in the way that good final-arc episodes should be, accumulating dread rather than releasing it.

EP 11

Negotiator for Mr. Shin

October 20, 2025

The series’ highest-rated episode at 9.12% nationwide, and it earns every number. Shin’s grief over his son — fifteen years of quiet, controlled devastation — is finally laid fully bare, and Han Suk-kyu delivers a performance that belongs on any year-end highlight reel. When the danger becomes personal, Philip and Si-on do something Shin never expected: they step forward to protect him. It is the payoff the entire found-family arc has been building toward, and it lands without sentiment or excess. The finale is set.

EP 12

Shin’s Project (Finale)

October 28, 2025

The full truth behind Jun’s death surfaces: Director Lee Heo-jun, head of the National Legal Hospital, orchestrated Yoon Dong-hui as a disposable pawn to cover up wider institutional corruption. Shin springs his final trap — making himself the target — and the confrontation that follows is both physically intense and deeply personal. Shin defeats Yoon and extracts the full confession he has waited fifteen years to hear. What the finale does best is its quiet aftermath: Shin at his son’s memorial, finally able to breathe; Philip returning to the courts carrying a new understanding of what justice actually requires; Si-on stepping into her next chapter with hard-won confidence. The found family parts, but nothing between them has diminished.

Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.

The real mastermind revealed. The finale’s first revelation is not so much a surprise as a confirmation of what careful viewers have suspected since Episode 8: Director Lee Heo-jun, the powerful head of the National Legal Hospital, was the architect of everything. Yoon Dong-hui didn’t kill Shin’s son Jun out of personal malice — he was a tool, manipulated into the act to protect a web of institutional corruption that Lee had spent years carefully insulating from scrutiny. Shin’s fifteen-year grief was caused not by one broken man but by a system that enabled him, and the weight of that distinction lands hard in the early scenes of Episode 12.

The psychological trap. Shin’s final gambit is pure distillation of everything the drama has argued for twelve episodes: that words are more powerful than weapons, and that patience defeats force every time. Rather than wait for the legal system to catch up — a system he knows can be corrupted — Shin positions himself as vulnerable, as bait, engineering a scenario in which Yoon has every apparent incentive to act and every emotional reason to break. It is a negotiation in the classical sense: identifying what the other person needs to say out loud, and creating the space in which saying it becomes inevitable.

The confrontation and confession. The showdown itself manages to be physically tense and emotionally quiet at the same time — a difficult tonal balance that director Shin Kyung-soo navigates by keeping the camera close to Han Suk-kyu’s face throughout. Shin defeats Yoon not by overpowering him but by waiting for the moment when the psychological pressure he has methodically built becomes unbearable. The confession that follows — Yoon laying out exactly what happened to Jun, who gave the order, and why — is not triumphant. Shin listens with his eyes closed, and the expression on his face is closer to exhaustion than victory.

Closure and release. The finale’s emotional climax is not the confrontation — it is the scene that follows it. Shin visits Jun’s memorial alone, and the scene is deliberately simple: no music, no speech, just a man who has spent fifteen years carrying a weight finally setting it down. Han Suk-kyu plays the moment in almost total stillness, and it is more affecting for it. Director Lee Heo-jun’s culpability is exposed, the institutional corruption dismantled through Philip’s renewed commitment to the law done properly, and Shin walks away from the case that has defined him — without knowing yet whether he’ll return to professional negotiation or stay in his chicken shop.

Where they end up. The final scenes are domestic and warm: Philip, changed in ways he is only beginning to understand, prepares to return to the judiciary carrying a different definition of justice. Si-on, more grounded and more herself than she was in Episode 1, steps forward into whatever comes next with quiet confidence. Shin surveys his small shop — the fryer, the counter, the chairs where all of it began — and the drama closes without telling us what he decides. It is the right ending: a man at peace with who he is, with all options still open. Shin’s Project is ultimately not a story about revenge — it is a story about what it costs to carry grief, and what it feels like to finally put it down.