My Happy Ending

A fast rundown of what this one’s about.

CompletedREVENGE MELODRAMA PICK

My Happy Ending

나의 해피엔드 (Naui Haepiendeu) · 2023 · South Korea

WriterBaek Seon-hee

DirectorJo Soo-won, Kim Sang-hoon

Episodes16 eps · ~65 min each

Where to Watch✅ Viki, Hulu, Netflix

⏱️

Binge Time17h 20m

AiredDec 30, 2023 – Feb 25, 2024

GenreMystery · Melodrama · Thriller

Content RatingTV-14

VikiVIUHuluNetflix

RevengeBetrayalPsychologicalCorporate PowerMotherhood

Everything that matters, at a glance.

The family, the friend, and the investigators tangled in Seo Jae-won’s unraveling.

Jang Na-ra

Seo Jae-won

Lead

Lee Ki-taek

Yoon Tae-oh

Lead

Oh Hyun-joong

Baek Seung-kyu

Supporting

Son Ho-jun

Heo Soon-young

Supporting

So Yi-hyun

Kwon Yoon-jin

Supporting

Kim Hong-pa

Seo Chang-seok

Supporting

Park Ho-san

Nam Tae-ju

Supporting

Kim Myung-soo

Chairman Kwon Young-ik

Supporting

Jung Jin-woo

Detective Lee

Supporting

Choi So-yul

Heo A-rin

Supporting

Kim Soo-jin

Detective Oh Soo-jin

Supporting

Jo Eun-sol

Seo Jae-won (young)

Supporting

A light recap per episode — nothing more than a nudge.

EP 01

The Life She Filmed

Dec 30, 2023

Seo Jae-won has the life her feed promises — a design label, a professor husband, a daughter — and the premiere takes a scalpel to all of it in one night. A stalker forces his way into her office after hours; an insurance investigator arrives implying her mother’s long-ago death was murder, with her stepfather the suspect; a message on Soon-young’s phone tells her the marriage is already gone. The hour is built around how fast a curated life unravels once someone starts pulling threads.

EP 02

Burying the Attack

Dec 31, 2023

Jae-won wakes in a hospital bed and makes a cold calculation: with a product launch days away and no idea who attacked her, she buries the incident rather than let it derail the company. Unable to trust anyone close to her, she hires Nam Tae-ju to investigate her own household. Her guilt about suspecting her stepfather sits uneasily next to her growing certainty about her husband’s affair — the episode’s real subject is a woman deciding which betrayals she can afford to confront right now.

EP 03

The Voice on the Recording

Jan 6, 2024

Tae-oh warns Yoon-jin away from Soon-young, the first sign he sees more of this household than his job title suggests. Jae-won learns her stepfather spent her mother’s insurance payout clearing gambling debts, which complicates the murder theory instead of settling it. Tae-oh restores the audio from the night of the attack and hears who was behind it — a reveal the show hands the audience while keeping Jae-won in the dark, so the tension shifts to what he will do with it.

EP 04

A Twin That Isn’t There

Jan 7, 2024

Tae-oh goes to confront the stalker and finds him unconscious after an accident, the trail cut before it leads anywhere. Jae-won chases a different theory, hunting for Chi-young, the twin brother of an old classmate, convinced his existence explains the strange things closing in around her. Both lines of inquiry dead-end into new questions. The episode is a study in how a person under siege builds elaborate explanations, because the alternative — that the people she loves are doing this — is worse.

EP 05

Pesticide in the Past

Jan 13, 2024

Soon-young admits the affair with Yoon-jin and asks for a divorce, then demands custody of A-rin, and Jae-won refuses on the spot. She discovers Yoon-jin has quietly been collecting A-rin from kindergarten, a detail that reframes the affair as something closer to a plan. Episode 5 also lands the season’s first hard fact about the past: Jae-won’s stepfather killed her mother with pesticide. The custody fight and the buried crime start to rhyme.

EP 06

A Weakness of Her Own

Jan 14, 2024

Facing a custody case she is likely to lose on time-spent-with-A-rin alone, Jae-won manufactures leverage and frames Soon-young for leaking confidential company documents. Doing it forces her to confront an equal weakness of her own, one she has spent years managing in private. Tae-ju keeps digging into who tried to kill Baek Seung-kyu. This is Jae-won at her most calculating and least sympathetic, which is exactly where the drama wants her.

EP 07

Not His Daughter

Jan 20, 2024

The affair gets its context: Soon-young once received an email revealing A-rin is not his biological child, and the betrayal he chose was an answer to that one. When Jae-won understands why he strayed, she apologizes, and he refuses to take it. She agrees to his terms and gives up A-rin — a surrender the show frames as exhaustion rather than growth. Two people who have wounded each other past repair stop pretending a deal can fix it.

EP 08

Broken or Performing

Jan 21, 2024

Jae-won moves through the house as if the last months were wiped clean, gentle and blank, and no one can tell how much of it is real. Yoon-jin tries to exploit the opening; Soon-young, of all people, tells her to keep her distance. He takes Jae-won’s pills to a doctor to learn what they treat, and starts working with Tae-oh to find A-rin’s biological father. The peak-rated episode runs on the unease of not knowing whether Jae-won has cracked or is acting.

EP 09

What the Men Decided

Jan 27, 2024

Yoon-jin tells Jae-won’s father about the affair, and his fury forces a conversation about what Soon-young actually intends. The two men agree to keep Jae-won uninformed, a protective instinct that plays as one more person deciding what she can handle. Soon-young finds A-rin’s biological father and, with him, the full shape of what happened to Jae-won seven years ago. The secret moves from the audience’s hands into the characters’.

EP 10

Poisoned, and Arrested

Jan 28, 2024

Soon-young is dead, poisoned, and Jae-won is arrested for it. The circumstantial case is strong but the police cannot find the one piece that would indict her, and she walks on insufficient evidence into a scrum of reporters and her father’s house. While she is under suspicion, Chairman Kwon calls a shareholders’ meeting to strip her of the CEO seat. Losing her husband, her freedom, and her company arrives in a single hour, and the drama does not slow down to let any of it land softly.

EP 11

Building the Case

Feb 3, 2024

Jae-won and her father send A-rin to America, conceding that safety now means distance. Released from a psychiatric facility, Jae-won stops grieving in public and starts assembling a case around who actually killed Soon-young. She also gets hold of data showing Kim Sang-bum manipulated a clinical trial — the first thread that ties the personal wreckage to something institutional.

EP 12

Coming for You

Feb 4, 2024

Discharged and moving with purpose, Jae-won walks into Dereve and tells Yoon-jin plainly that she is coming for her. Detective Oh Soo-jin reopens Soon-young’s file and notices the seams the first investigation missed. Jae-won confronts Kwon Young-ik with a choice between his ministerial career and his daughter — the episode’s clearest signal that the fight was never really with Yoon-jin. The target has always been higher up.

EP 13

Named in Parliament

Feb 17, 2024

Kwon Young-ik tries to kill Jae-won with pesticide, the same method used on Soon-young, and Tae-oh reaches her in time. At a parliamentary inspection of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Jae-won names him publicly for her kidnapping and her husband’s murder, and he is arrested on the spot. It is the payoff the season has been building, and the drama immediately undercuts the relief — Jae-won says it does not feel finished, because Yoon-jin is still standing.

EP 14

No Hesitation

Feb 18, 2024

Yoon-jin tracks down Baek Seung-kyu, who has been hiding from her, fails to bring him back onto her side, and kills him without a flicker of hesitation. She stages the murder to point at Nam Tae-ju, who disappears rather than be caught inside her frame. Jae-won, meanwhile, goes looking for anyone who knew her mother — the case and the childhood wound are converging on the same people.

EP 15

The Last Witness

Feb 24, 2024

Yoon-jin decides Nam Tae-ju is too dangerous to leave breathing and moves to eliminate him before he can use his last piece of leverage. The attempt fails, and Tae-ju walks into court to take the stand. Jae-won secures the video that corroborates him and offers Yoon-jin one chance to confess on her own terms. When Yoon-jin refuses, Jae-won stops trying to reach the friend she used to have.

EP 16

A Small Happy Ending

Feb 25, 2024

Yoon-jin takes A-rin, and the finale becomes a search that ends without the confrontation it seemed to promise — she cannot hurt the child, and she is killed by a car in the street. A-rin is found safe at home. A year on, Jae-won has left the CEO chair to work as an independent designer, her father lives with her and A-rin, and Tae-oh, now running Dereve, finally says out loud what he has felt since they were children. The last note is quiet: the losses stay lost, and Jae-won carries them without letting them steer.

Everything that happens in the finale, explained in full — spoilers ahead.

Who actually killed Soon-young Heo Soon-young is poisoned with pesticide in Episode 10 and Jae-won is arrested for it, but the killer is Chairman Kwon Young-ik — Yoon-jin’s father. Soon-young had gotten too close to what Young-ik spent seven years burying, so Young-ik silenced him and let the circumstantial evidence point at Jae-won. He uses the same method — pesticide, the poison Jae-won’s stepfather once used on her mother — and turns it on Jae-won herself in Episode 13 before Tae-oh stops him.

What Yoon-jin was really avenging Yoon-jin spends most of the series certain that Jae-won slept with her fiancé seven years ago and cost her an unborn child. The truth, revealed late, is uglier: that fiancé, Kim Sang-bum, drugged and raped Jae-won at a work conference, and Yoon-jin’s own father orchestrated the cover-up. Yoon-jin aimed her grief at the wrong person for years — her father did not just take her child, he let her hate her friend for it. Kim Sang-bum is also A-rin’s biological father.

How Yoon-jin’s story ends In the finale Yoon-jin abducts A-rin, the one move that would make her irredeemable — and she cannot go through with it. She lets the girl go, and moments later she is struck by a car crossing the road and killed. The drama denies both women the catharsis of a last confrontation; Jae-won had already given up on the friendship in Episode 15, and Yoon-jin dies still, in the show’s framing, mostly a victim of her father.

The reckoning for everyone else Kwon Young-ik is arrested publicly at a parliamentary inspection in Episode 13, named by Jae-won for the kidnapping and the murder, and Nam Tae-ju’s court testimony plus the video Jae-won recovers close the case against the conspiracy. Jae-won’s stepfather, Seo Chang-seok, who killed her mother years earlier, is not written out by the plot but reconciled with her — by the end he lives with Jae-won and A-rin, a choice the drama makes and some viewers will not forgive.

Jae-won’s happy ending, and what the title means One year later Jae-won has walked away from the CEO seat to work as a freelance designer, A-rin is home from the US, and her father lives with them. Tae-oh, who has run Dereve since she left and has quietly loved her since they were children in the same orphanage, finally tells her so. The happy ending the title promises is deliberately small — not the empire or the marriage restored, but a woman who has stopped letting her worst memories set her course.