The Penthouse (Season 1)

The short briefing before you dive in.

CompletedREVENGE MELODRAMA PICK

The Penthouse (Season 1)

펜트하우스 (Penteuhauseu) · 2020 · South Korea

WriterKim Soon-ok

DirectorJoo Dong-min

Episodes21 eps · ~70 min each

Where to Watch✅ Viki

⏱️

Binge Time24h 30m

AiredOct 26, 2020 – Jan 5, 2021

GenreDrama · Mystery · Melodrama

Content RatingTV-14

SBSViki

RevengeChaebolClass ConflictMysteryMelodrama

One box. Everything you need to decide.

Three women, one tower, and a body count that keeps climbing.

Lee Ji-ah

Shim Su-ryeon

Lead

Kim So-yeon

Cheon Seo-jin

Lead

Eugene

Oh Yoon-hee

Supporting

Uhm Ki-joon

Joo Dan-tae

Supporting

Shin Eun-kyung

Kang Ma-ri

Supporting

Bong Tae-gyu

Lee Gyu-jin

Supporting

Yoon Jong-hoon

Ha Yoon-chul

Supporting

Park Eun-seok

Logan Lee

Supporting

Yoon Joo-hee

Go Sang-ah

Supporting

Ha Do-kwon

Ma Doo-gi

Supporting

Kim Hyeon-soo

Bae Ro-na

Supporting

Jin Ji-hee

Yoo Je-ni

Supporting

Episode-by-episode, spoiler-light — a refresher, not a rewatch.

EP 01

A Building With Its Own Rules

Oct 26, 2020

Bae Ro-na wants to sing, and her mother Oh Yoon-hee — a fish-cake seller with no connections and no patience for how Hera Palace works — is determined to get her there anyway. The premiere spends its runtime setting the board: the elite tower where money buys school admissions, the reigning queen who decides who gets to belong, and the outsider who just walked in the front door refusing to know her place. Nothing violent happens yet. It doesn’t need to.

EP 02

The Audition Everyone’s Fighting For

Oct 27, 2020

Every Hera Club kid wants the same handful of spots at Cheong-ah Arts High, and their mothers want it more. Ro-na throws herself into lessons alongside Min Seol-ah, the one other contender whose talent nobody can dismiss — which is exactly what makes her dangerous to the families already used to winning. The episode is quietly ominous: this is a competition being decided by parents, not kids, and parents here don’t lose gracefully.

EP 03

Sign or Else

Nov 2, 2020

Cheon Seo-jin corners Min Seol-ah and demands she sign away her acceptance to Cheong-ah, and Seol-ah — a teenager with nothing like Seo-jin’s resources — refuses outright and doesn’t flinch doing it. It’s the bravest anyone has been all series so far, and the show frames it that way on purpose. Seo-jin isn’t used to no. What she does next is the whole reason this drama exists.

EP 04

The Waitlist Fills Itself

Nov 3, 2020

Min Seol-ah is dead, and Ro-na — first on the waitlist — gets her spot at Cheong-ah automatically. Ro-na is thrilled. Yoon-hee is not; something about the timing, the convenience of it, sits wrong with her in a way she can’t yet articulate. This is the pivot the whole series turns on: a school-rivalry drama becomes a murder mystery in the space of one acceptance letter, and it never looks back.

EP 05

Who Gets to Be the Villain

Nov 9, 2020

Footage of Hera Club kids bullying Seol-ah gets out, and the Hera parents do what Hera parents do: close ranks, spin the story, and find someone outside the group to blame. Yoon-hee, still the newcomer with no old-money protection, gets pushed into the role, and Ro-na is suspended for a crime that was never really hers. Watching a wealthy family manufacture a scapegoat in real time is uglier than any of the melodrama that follows.

EP 06

An Accident, Allegedly

Nov 10, 2020

Shim Su-ryeon confronts a sitting congressman about a decades-old scandal — orphans adopted overseas and quietly deported back once they became inconvenient — and the confrontation turns physical fast. Joo Dan-tae steps in and the congressman ends up dead, framed cleanly as an accident. It’s the first time the show shows its hand about who Dan-tae really is underneath the real estate empire, and it’s not subtle about it.

EP 07

A House Worth Killing For

Nov 16, 2020

Yoon-hee decides to finally sell the Bosuk Village house she bought for Ro-na’s sake, and on the exact day she’s set to close the sale, news breaks of a redevelopment plan that would make the property worth a fortune. It’s the kind of coincidence this show trades in constantly — money appearing right when someone’s most desperate — and it drags Yoon-hee directly into Dan-tae and Seo-jin’s orbit for good.

EP 08

Su-ryeon Shows Her Hand

Nov 17, 2020

Su-ryeon deliberately lets Yoon-hee walk in on her own husband having an affair with Seo-jin — not out of cruelty, but as the opening move of a much longer plan. She’s been playing sympathetic outsider since episode one, and this is the first real proof that every kindness she’s shown Yoon-hee has had a purpose. Whatever Su-ryeon actually wants from Joo Dan-tae, she’s willing to use anyone to get it.

EP 09

The Deal Yoon-hee Won’t Take

Nov 23, 2020

Yoon-hee wins the auction on the valuable Myeongdong property, putting her directly in Dan-tae’s way, and he tries the thing that’s worked on everyone else — an offer designed to make the problem disappear. She turns him down flat. It’s a small scene with a big function: establishing that Yoon-hee, unlike everyone circling Hera Palace, genuinely can’t be bought, which is exactly what makes her useful to Su-ryeon and dangerous to Dan-tae.

EP 10

Welcome to Hera Palace

Nov 24, 2020

Yoon-hee actually moves into Hera Palace, and the reveal that it was Dan-tae himself who wrote her recommendation letter lands as a small earthquake among the residents who spent five episodes trying to keep her out. She and Ro-na get one genuinely happy evening enjoying the place before the show goes back to work on tearing it apart around them. Dan-tae doesn’t do favors. Everyone in the building knows that except Yoon-hee, for now.

EP 11

Caught

Nov 30, 2020

Ha Yoon-chul finally sees his wife Seo-jin with Dan-tae with his own eyes and decides, quietly and immediately, to file for divorce — no scene, no confrontation, just a decision made. Meanwhile the school’s next competition, the Cheong-ah Ambassador audition, kicks off and pulls every kid back into their mothers’ war. Two very different kinds of ending begin here: one marriage, and one round of the same fight the kids never asked to be part of.

EP 12

Practice Makes Desperate

Dec 1, 2020

The Ambassador audition pushes everyone into overdrive, and Ha Eun-byeol in particular starts unraveling under the pressure of competing against Ro-na and Seok-kyung for a title that was supposed to be hers by default. Watching a teenager come apart because her mother’s status depends on her winning is one of the more quietly cruel threads this show runs — the kids never chose Hera Palace’s rules, and they’re the ones paying for them.

EP 13

Setting the Trap

Dec 7, 2020

Yoon-hee learns exactly how badly Dan-tae needs a meeting with the elusive Logan Lee to close his Myeongdong deal, and she and Su-ryeon start engineering that meeting themselves — on their own terms, not his. It’s the first time the two women openly coordinate rather than just orbiting the same conflicts separately, and the shift matters: Dan-tae has been running this tower’s economy alone for a long time.

EP 14

A Warning Nobody Wanted

Dec 8, 2020

Dan-tae throws a lighting ceremony specifically to impress Logan Lee, and it goes sideways the moment another anonymous warning about Min Seol-ah’s death surfaces in front of everyone. Whoever’s been sending these knows exactly how to time maximum damage, and the entire Hera Club spends the rest of the episode looking sideways at each other, trying to work out who among them actually knows the truth.

EP 15

Payback, Overdue

Dec 14, 2020

Yoon-hee discovers Ro-na has spent months misreading her relationship with Yoon-chul, and instead of just correcting it quietly, she redirects the anger somewhere it’s actually earned — straight at Seo-jin, for using her own daughter as a pawn against Eun-byeol. It’s a satisfying turn after fourteen episodes of Yoon-hee mostly reacting to what’s done to her. Here, for once, she throws the first punch.

EP 16

A Convenient Heart Attack

Dec 15, 2020

Seo-jin quietly rewrites her father’s death as a heart attack and steps into his old role as director of the Cheong-ah Arts Foundation without so much as a flinch. She has now buried one inconvenient death and profited directly from another, and the show doesn’t bother hiding how calculated that pattern is anymore. Whatever grief looks like for Cheon Seo-jin, it isn’t this.

EP 17

The Memory Yoon-hee Buried

Dec 21, 2020

Yoon-hee finally lets herself remember the night Min Seol-ah died, and the truth is worse than anything she’s suspected about anyone else: she was the one who pushed her off the 47th-floor balcony. Before she can even process it, Su-ryeon reveals she’s known this the whole time — every scrap of kindness across sixteen episodes was leverage, aimed at getting exactly here. The show’s central mystery stops being who did it and becomes what happens now that everyone knows.

EP 18

Partners in the Cover-up

Dec 22, 2020

Yoon-hee sees an opportunity in Dan-tae — a way to elevate Ro-na’s standing at school — and partners with him to help bury the fact that she killed Min Seol-ah, even as guilt over drifting from Su-ryeon eats at her. Eun-byeol, separately, learns about her mother’s affair with Dan-tae and reacts with pure disgust. Nobody in this building keeps a secret without also somehow being buried by a new one.

EP 19

The Text That Changes Everything

Dec 28, 2020

On the day Seo-jin is inaugurated as director of the Cheong-ah Foundation, an anonymous text exposes her for forging Eun-byeol’s admission, and the accusation spreads through the school in minutes. Dan-tae’s day is no better: he’s sued for embezzlement and finds out Logan Lee is the one who reported him. Two of this show’s most untouchable people get touched in the same episode, and it’s about time.

EP 20

Turn Yourselves In

Dec 29, 2020

With everything unraveling, Seo-jin and Yoon-hee both beg Su-ryeon to call off whatever she’s still planning — they can’t watch their daughters suffer for their own crimes any longer. Su-ryeon’s answer is simple and unmoved: turn yourselves in, and pay for what happened to Min Seol-ah. After nineteen episodes of manipulation, it’s the closest thing to a moral position the show has let her state out loud.

EP 21

Freedom, for the Wrong Two People

Jan 5, 2021

Yoon-hee confesses to killing Su-ryeon and gets arrested for it — except she didn’t do it. Dan-tae and Seo-jin murdered Su-ryeon together and built the frame around Yoon-hee from the start, and the finale’s last image is the two of them enjoying their freedom while she takes the fall for a death she had nothing to do with. Twenty episodes of scheming end with the actual killers walking away clean, which is exactly the cliffhanger this show wants you furious about.

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

Who actually killed Shim Su-ryeon Not Oh Yoon-hee, despite her own confession at the police station. Joo Dan-tae and Cheon Seo-jin killed Su-ryeon together and spent the back half of the season quietly building the frame that lands on Yoon-hee instead — using her guilt over Min Seol-ah’s death, and her belief that Su-ryeon had already turned on her, to make a false confession feel like the only way out. The literal answer to “who did it” is the two people who have gotten away with everything else all season.

The frame works specifically because Yoon-hee is already carrying real guilt — she genuinely did push Min Seol-ah off that balcony back in episode 17, even if it wasn’t premeditated the way Dan-tae and Seo-jin’s murder of Su-ryeon was. The show is careful about that distinction. Yoon-hee’s arrest at the end isn’t simple injustice; it’s injustice built on top of a truth she’d spent four episodes hiding, which is exactly the kind of moral tangle this drama specializes in.

Why Su-ryeon spent the whole season manipulating everyone Su-ryeon’s endgame was never really about Yoon-hee — it was about exposing what happened to Min Seol-ah and, more broadly, what Dan-tae and the Hera Club have been getting away with for years. Using Yoon-hee’s sympathy, her guilt, and eventually her confession was always in service of a bigger case Su-ryeon was building against people with far more power than either of them. She just never got to see it through, because the people she was building the case against killed her first.

That’s also what makes the finale land as a cliffhanger instead of a resolution: Su-ryeon’s death doesn’t end her investigation, it just removes the one person capable of finishing it in a way anyone would believe. Everyone left standing — Seo-jin, Dan-tae, Yoon-hee — now has a direct, personal reason to keep fighting into Season 2, and none of their reasons are the same as they were in episode one.

The KDW verdict Season 1 was never trying to close the story — it was building the fullest possible case for why these three women can’t simply walk away from each other, and by the final scene it’s done exactly that. Ending on the real killers celebrating while an innocent woman gets arrested is a deliberately enraging note to hold a cliffhanger on, and it works precisely because the show earned the anger across 21 episodes of escalating, meticulously plotted betrayal.