Cheer Up

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

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Cheer Up

치얼업 (Chieoreop) · 2022 · South Korea

WriterCha Hae-Won

DirectorHan Tae-Seob

Episodes16 eps · ~70 min each

Where to Watch✅ Netflix, Prime Video, OnDemandKorea, Kocowa

⏱️

Binge Time18h 40m

AiredOct 3 – Dec 13, 2022

GenreRomantic Comedy · Youth · Mystery

Content RatingTV-14

SBSNetflixPrime VideoViuOnDemandKoreaKocowaFOD

Campus LifeCheerleadingLove TriangleComing-of-AgeFriendship

One box. Everything you need to decide.

A cheerleading squad’s found-family energy, one persistent love triangle, and a mystery nobody in Theia wants to say out loud.

Han Ji-hyeon

Do Hae-yi

Lead

Bae In-hyuk

Park Jung-woo

Lead

Kim Hyun-jin

Jin Seon-ho

Supporting

Jang Gyu-ri

Tae Cho-hee

Supporting

Lee Eun-saem

Joo Seon-ja

Supporting

Yang Dong-geun

Bae Young-woong

Supporting

Han Su-ah

Choi So-yoon

Supporting

Kim Shin-bi

Im Yong-il

Supporting

Hyun Woo-seok

Kim Min-jae

Supporting

Baek Ji-won

Hwang Jin-hee

Supporting

Jang Young-nam

Sung Choon-yang

Supporting

Ryu Hyun-kyung

Shin Ji-young

Supporting

Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.

EP 01

The Three Prophecies of Theia

Oct 3, 2022

Do Hae-yi joins Theia, Yonhee University’s storied cheerleading squad, for one reason only: the stipend it pays members who can’t otherwise afford tuition. Captain Park Jung-woo’s rigid, by-the-book leadership rubs her the wrong way immediately — right up until she watches him command the stage at the orientation pep rally and has to quietly revise her opinion. Hovering over all of it is an old, half-joking prophecy about a death in the squad, the kind of detail this show clearly isn’t done with yet.

EP 02

Joint Pep Rally

Oct 4, 2022

Training doesn’t get easier just because Hae-yi is committed to the money, and neither does her family’s financial situation. Jin Seon-ho, Theia’s resident charming med student, starts circling with an offer to help her out financially — the kind of favor that always complicates things later. Underneath the rom-com setup, the mystery pushes back for the first time: someone sends Hae-yi a message telling her, flatly, to quit the squad.

EP 03

Hae-yi’s Choice

Oct 10, 2022

A mission to steal a rival university’s cheer set list goes wrong fast, and Hae-yi ends up locked in a storage room mid-panic attack — the first time Jung-woo’s steadiness reads as something more than discipline. She also learns exactly who Theia is up against: Jung-woo’s ex-girlfriend, Lee Ha-jin, now captain of the rival squad. It’s the kind of detail that turns a simple rivalry into something Hae-yi has feelings about before she’s ready to admit it.

EP 04

Joint Pep Rally D-day

Oct 11, 2022

Word that Jung-woo and Ha-jin used to date lands hard on Hae-yi, right up until she finds out they’re already broken up — which somehow doesn’t make her feel better. The joint pep rally itself turns dangerous: a stage light nearly comes down on Hae-yi mid-performance, too specific and too well-timed to file away as an accident.

EP 05

Theia’s Field Trip

Oct 17, 2022

A team trip gives Jung-woo and Hae-yi their first real one-on-one moment, stargazing in a way that says more than either of them will admit out loud. Hae-yi gets drunk at the group outing later, and watching both Jung-woo and Seon-ho scramble to handle it is its own kind of answer to the love-triangle question. Then the show reintroduces Yoo-min, Jung-woo’s first love, who vanished after an accident two years ago — and clearly isn’t done being relevant to this story.

EP 06

Yoo-min’s Return

Oct 18, 2022

Theia loses several freshmen all at once, and the squad’s stability starts to look genuinely shaky rather than just dramatically inconvenient. Yoo-min’s return complicates things for Hae-yi specifically — she can feel Jung-woo’s attention pulling somewhere else, and she doesn’t love how much that bothers her. The mystery ties itself tighter, too: Yoo-min, it turns out, was also once locked in that same storage room.

EP 07

Misunderstanding

Oct 24, 2022

Hae-yi is done being patient with Jung-woo’s mixed signals, and episode seven finally has her say so directly, pushing for an answer instead of reading tea leaves. The squad’s informal investigation into the threats keeps circling a hard question neither of them wants to land on: what if whoever’s doing this is already inside Theia?

EP 08

Sun-ho’s Weakness

Oct 25, 2022

Seon-ho finally stops performing easy charm long enough to sit with whatever pain he’s actually been avoiding, and it changes what he’s willing to say to Hae-yi. The threats against Theia stop being a private worry and become public knowledge, forcing the squad into an official response. Then Seon-ho says the thing he’s been circling all season: he tells Hae-yi how he feels, plainly, and the triangle stops being subtext.

EP 09

Glorious, Yonhee Festival

Oct 31, 2022

The Yonhee Festival should be Theia’s big showcase moment, and instead it becomes the episode where everything gets harder at once. A photo of Seon-ho and Hae-yi hugging goes around campus and turns into exactly the kind of rumor neither of them asked for. Jung-woo and Yoo-min, meanwhile, get pulled away from the festival chasing the person behind the threats — straight into what turns out to be a deliberate distraction.

EP 10

Theia’s Field Trip

Nov 1, 2022

The Busan trip that was supposed to be a break turns into the opposite for Hae-yi, the mystery closing in tighter than it has all season. Jung-woo finally says the quiet part out loud — he flirted with her on purpose, and his feelings were never just teasing. Seon-ho isn’t backing off either, setting off fireworks with Hae-yi in a moment clearly meant to compete for the same ground Jung-woo just claimed.

EP 11

The Final Choice

Nov 7, 2022

After Busan and an assigned pretend-dating exercise that stopped feeling pretend a while ago, Hae-yi finally stops stalling. She turns Seon-ho down directly, addressing the kiss he took while she was drunk without letting him spin it into something it wasn’t, and tells Jung-woo plainly where her feelings actually are. It’s less a twist than a relief — the show has been building to exactly this for ten episodes.

EP 12

Summer Training

Nov 8, 2022

Hae-yi and Jung-woo are together now, quietly and happily, which immediately runs into the one rule Theia enforces without exception: captains don’t date. Keeping it secret works right up until Seon-ja, Hae-yi’s best friend, feels shut out and lets her frustration slip at exactly the wrong moment — in front of the entire squad at cheer camp.

EP 13

Jin-il’s Reasons

Nov 14, 2022

The threats against Hae-yi stop being ambiguous the moment Jin-il’s behavior turns openly dangerous rather than just unsettling. Theia rallies around her as a unit, less a squad protecting a teammate than a found family closing ranks. The show finally starts handing over motive, and it’s uglier and more personal than the earlier episodes let on.

EP 14

Yonhee-Hokyung Rivalry

Nov 15, 2022

The Yonhee-Hokyung rivalry finally arrives, and joint practice sessions between the two squads read like barely-contained tension rather than sportsmanship. The competition mirrors what’s happening inside Theia itself — everyone still absorbing the fallout from Jin-il’s threats while trying to perform like nothing’s wrong.

EP 15

Hae-yi’s Tragedy

Dec 12, 2022

Cheer Up finally lets its mystery cost something real, and Hae-yi is the one left to carry it. What holds her together isn’t a plot twist — it’s Theia itself, the entire squad showing up for her without being asked. It’s a quieter episode than the season’s louder mid-run twists, and it earns that quiet.

EP 16

The Future of Theia

Dec 13, 2022

Jin-il’s threat finally ends, and with it the shadow that’s been hanging over Theia since the first episode’s prophecy. Hae-yi gets to just enjoy cheerleading and her relationship with Jung-woo without an ongoing danger attached to either. Seon-ho, to his credit, accepts the outcome and turns his attention back toward medical school rather than lingering on what didn’t happen. Theia closes out the season the way it opened — as a squad, bruised but intact, with its whole messy found-family energy finally allowed to just be happy.

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

What actually happens to Jin-il The season-long campaign of threats against Theia traces back to Kim Jin-il, whose obsession with the squad — and specifically with the accident that shaped Jung-woo’s and Yoo-min’s shared history — finally gets named outright in the finale. Once Jin-il is stopped, the danger that’s been shadowing every field trip, festival, and quiet hallway conversation since episode one simply lifts. Hae-yi walks away from the season’s central threat unharmed, and Cheer Up doesn’t dwell on the confrontation itself so much as what it frees everyone up to do next.

That’s a deliberate choice — Cheer Up was never really a mystery-thriller wearing a rom-com’s clothes, whatever the marketing implied. The threat plot exists to put pressure on the squad’s bonds, not to deliver a twisty final confrontation, and the finale spends far more time on relief and reunion than on unmasking a villain.

What it means for Jung-woo Jung-woo’s arc closes on him finally leading Theia without the guilt he’s been quietly carrying since Yoo-min’s accident two years earlier. Choosing Hae-yi, and choosing to stop treating leadership as penance, are presented as the same decision — he can only really have one once he’s let go of the other.

It’s a tidy resolution, maybe tidier than the messiness of the middle episodes earned, but it fits a show that was always more interested in emotional closure than in loose threads.

The KDW verdict on the ending Seon-ho’s ending is the season’s most graceful small mercy: he accepts Hae-yi’s choice without a last-minute reversal, and redirects his energy toward the medical career the show kept sidelining for romance. Theia itself gets the real send-off — not a couple, but a squad, still standing after a season that tried repeatedly to break it apart. Cheer Up’s ending isn’t subtle about what it values: the friendships outlast the love triangle, and that’s presented as the point all along.