RACE

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

CompletedWORKPLACE UNDERDOG PICK

RACE

레이스 (Re-i-seu) · 2023 · South Korea

WriterKim Roo-ri

DirectorLee Dong-yoon

Episodes12 eps · ~60 min each

Where to Watch✅ Disney+, Hulu

⏱️

Binge Time12h 0m

AiredMay 10 – Jun 14, 2023

GenreDrama · Office · Business

Content Rating15+

Disney+HuluHotstar

Workplace DramaDiversity HiringCorporate PoliticsMentorshipSelf-Discovery

One box. Everything you need to decide.

The mentors, rivals, and skeptics standing between Yoon-jo and a career she has to build from scratch.

Lee Yeon-hee

Park Yoon-jo

Lead

Hong Jong-hyun

Ryu Jae-min

Lead

Moon So-ri

Koo Yi-jung

Supporting

U-KNOW Yunho

Seo Dong-hoon

Supporting

Baek Ji-won

Kim Hee-young

Supporting

Cho Han-cheul

Song Sun-tae

Supporting

Kim Ye-eun

Heo Eun

Supporting

Yoon Seok-hyun

Maeng Chul-jun

Supporting

Ha Sung-kwang

Jin Byung-man

Supporting

Ma Jeong-pil

Cho Jin-seo

Supporting

Park Jong-moo

Ko Dong-kyun

Supporting

Kim Min-ju

Lee Seung-hee

Supporting

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

EP 01

The Race Begins

May 10, 2023

Park Yoon-jo lands a job at Seyong, a major PR firm, without the elite credentials most of her coworkers walked in with — and the room lets her know it immediately. The excitement of getting hired barely survives contact with colleagues who’ve already decided her diversity-program placement means she doesn’t belong. This episode does the basic, necessary work of making that hostility feel specific instead of generic, which is what makes the rest of the season worth watching.

EP 02

The Weight of Expectations

May 11, 2023

A high-stakes presentation becomes Yoon-jo’s first real test, and the subtle hostility from teammates makes an already hard task harder. Her mentor Ryu Jae-min doesn’t hand her answers — he pushes her toward finding her own approach instead of imitating everyone else’s. It’s a small distinction, but it’s the one that starts separating Yoon-jo’s arc from a standard office-underdog template.

EP 03

Unveiling the Truth

May 17, 2023

Yoon-jo finds a discrepancy in a major client’s campaign and has to decide whether raising it is worth the risk to a job she’s already fighting to keep. A senior colleague dismisses her outright, which only sharpens the actual question the episode is asking: does she trust her own read on the situation more than she fears the consequences. She goes with the truth, and the show treats that choice as character-defining rather than a plot device.

EP 04

A Mentor’s Shadow

May 18, 2023

Ryu Jae-min’s past decisions catch up to his current projects, and the episode lets him be genuinely uncertain about his own leadership instead of unshakably competent. Yoon-jo watches him struggle and starts understanding that authority at Seyong comes with its own cost, not just its own privileges. The mentor-mentee relationship gets more complicated here — less guidance flowing one direction, more two people figuring things out in parallel.

EP 05

The Power of Connection

May 24, 2023

A joint project forces Yoon-jo into close collaboration with Seo Dong-hoon, the CEO of a rival firm, and their early friction cools into something closer to mutual respect. Dong-hoon backing her unconventional ideas matters more than it should, mostly because almost nobody at Seyong has done that yet. It’s a good episode for showing how Yoon-jo’s actual talent reads to people who aren’t already primed to dismiss her.

EP 06

Personal and Professional Lines

May 25, 2023

A family crisis pulls at Yoon-jo’s attention right when she can least afford the distraction, and the episode doesn’t pretend those two pressures stay neatly separated. Jae-min offers support without making it a public gesture, which fits the quieter version of their bond the show’s been building. Watching Yoon-jo hold both halves of her life together says more about her than any office win could.

EP 07

The Diversity Initiative Under Scrutiny

May 31, 2023

The program that got Yoon-jo hired comes under internal review, and suddenly her entire position depends on convincing people the initiative did what it was supposed to do. She has to make the case for her own value without sounding like she’s begging to keep her job — a nearly impossible needle to thread. This is the episode where the show’s actual argument about diversity hiring finally gets stated out loud instead of implied.

EP 08

Confronting the Past

Jun 1, 2023

An old mistake by a senior executive resurfaces and turns into a full crisis Seyong’s PR team has to manage in real time. Yoon-jo’s outsider perspective turns out to be exactly what the situation needs, and even some of her earlier skeptics can’t deny it worked. It’s the episode where her competence stops being debatable, even to people who’d rather keep debating it.

EP 09

Shifting Alliances

Jun 7, 2023

A looming merger turns Seyong’s executive floor into a minefield of quiet betrayals and repositioning, and Yoon-jo has to learn fast who’s actually on her side. The corporate-politics machinery gets more explicit here than anywhere else in the season, and it’s genuinely tense instead of just plot-mechanical. Figuring out real allies from convenient ones becomes its own kind of education.

EP 10

Defining Success

Jun 8, 2023

Yoon-jo gets handed a major campaign to lead, and the pressure that comes with it nearly convinces her to play it safe rather than trust her own instincts. She works through the self-doubt and lands somewhere the show’s been building toward all season: success on her own terms, not the terms she walked in trying to meet. It’s the most thematically direct episode of the run, and it doesn’t oversell the realization.

EP 11

The Final Pitch

Jun 13, 2023

The merger forces a make-or-break presentation, and Yoon-jo’s team spends the episode preparing for a pitch with real consequences attached. What she delivers isn’t just a business case — she builds the human argument into it too, the thing her early critics assumed she didn’t understand well enough to include. The tension here earns its weight because the show’s spent ten episodes proving what losing would actually cost her.

EP 12

The End of the Race, The Start of a New Journey

Jun 14, 2023

Yoon-jo closes out the season as someone Seyong actually respects, not just tolerates, with Jae-min still in her corner and Dong-hoon hinting at future work together. By the finale, the diversity-hire label that opened the season as a liability barely registers as a liability at all — she’s simply good at the job now, full stop. RACE spends its last episode making the season’s whole argument plain: Yoon-jo never needed a head start, she needed the chance to run the race everyone else already got to run without an asterisk attached.

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

How RACE actually ends for Yoon-jo RACE ends with Park Yoon-jo delivering the final pitch that seals Seyong’s merger and, more importantly, seals her own standing at the company — not as the diversity hire people whispered about in episode one, but as someone the department actually needs. Ryu Jae-min stays in her corner through the finish, and Seo Dong-hoon leaves the door open for future collaboration instead of disappearing as a plot device once his usefulness runs out. The show resists the temptation to wrap her arc in a romance; her win stays a career win, full stop.

What the diversity-hire scrutiny actually resolves The internal review that threatened Yoon-jo’s position back in episode seven doesn’t get a dramatic reversal — it just stops mattering, because by the finale her work speaks louder than the hiring program that got her in the door. RACE never pretends the initial skepticism was fair, but it also doesn’t let Yoon-jo’s victory hinge on proving the program right. Her success is hers, separate from the debate that almost defined her.

Why Koo Yi-jung matters more than her screen time suggests Moon So-ri’s Koo Yi-jung spends the season as proof that the kind of professional Yoon-jo wants to become already exists inside Seyong — competent, respected, unbothered by the noise around her. She’s not positioned as a rival or a gatekeeper; she’s a version of the finish line, quietly present in the background of almost every major turn. By the end, Yoon-jo isn’t trying to become Yi-jung exactly, but she’s clearly closer to that version of herself than the one who walked in during episode one.

What the merger subplot was actually testing The corporate merger that dominates the back half of the season works less as a plot engine and more as a pressure test — it’s the mechanism the show uses to force every character’s real priorities into the open. Executives who talked about loyalty get exposed by how they act once the stakes are real, and Yoon-jo’s steadiness under that same pressure is what finally silences her critics. The business plot and the character arc resolve at exactly the same moment, which is why the finale doesn’t feel like two separate endings stitched together.

The ending’s actual argument By the finale, the diversity-hire label that opened the season as a liability barely registers as one at all — she’s simply good at the job now, full stop. RACE spends its last episode making the season’s whole argument plain: Yoon-jo never needed a head start, she needed the chance to run the same race everyone else got to run without an asterisk attached to her name.