Work Later, Drink Now (Season 2)

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

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Work Later, Drink Now (Season 2)

술꾼도시여자들 시즌2 (Sulkkun Dosi Yeojadeul Sijeun 2) · 2022 · South Korea

WriterWi So-young

DirectorPark Soo-won

Episodes12 eps · ~38 min each

Where to Watch✅ Prime Video

⏱️

Binge Time7h 36m

AiredDec 9, 2022 – Jan 13, 2023

GenreComedy · Drama · Slice of Life

Content Rating19+

TVINGVIUPrime Video

FriendshipDrinking CultureThirty-Something LifeSlow-Burn RomanceWebtoon Adaptation

Everything that matters, at a glance.

The trio, the men orbiting them, and the regulars who keep turning up for a round.

Lee Sun-bin

Ahn So-hee

Lead

Han Seon-hwa

Han Ji-yeon

Lead

Jung Eun-ji

Kang Ji-goo

Lead

Choi Si-won

Kang Book-goo

Lead

Yoo In-young

Kim Sun-jung

Supporting

Joo Eo-jin

Kim Sun-kook

Supporting

Yoon Shi-yoon

Woo-ju

Supporting

Jung Hae-na

Writer A-young

Supporting

Kim Jung-min

Hwang Dong-bae

Supporting

Jung Eun-pyo

Ahn Cheol-hwa

Supporting

Lee Soo-min

So-hyun

Supporting

Ha Do-kwon

Nurse

Supporting

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

EP 01

Gone Drinkers (Part 1)

Dec 9, 2022

The season opens on a gut-punch instead of a punchline: So-hee has vanished without a word, and a year later Ji-goo is still holding a greenlit TV project with no host and no explanation for where its writer went. Director Kang finally stops waiting and goes looking for her. It’s a deliberately heavier note to start on, and it signals early that Season 2 is more interested in what happens after the trio’s rituals break than in the rituals themselves.

EP 02

Gone Drinkers (Part 2)

Dec 9, 2022

The reunion doesn’t come with a party. The three end up living clean in the mountains — fresh air, homegrown vegetables, a self-built compost toilet — and completely sober, which the show frames as a kind of quiet misery rather than a wellness win. A white-dress figure in the woods plays the ghost gag for laughs, but the episode’s real point is simpler: without the drinking and without each other’s full attention, none of them are actually okay.

EP 03

Returned Drinkers

Dec 16, 2022

Back in Seoul and flat broke, the friends scatter into survival jobs — Ji-goo on a delivery bike, Ji-yeon teaching yoga, So-hee trying to explain a two-year hole in her resume to an industry that has moved on without her. It’s the most grounded stretch of the season, trading hangout comedy for the specific humiliation of restarting a career in your thirties, and it mostly earns the shift.

EP 04

Warmer Than a Cold Heart

Dec 16, 2022

So-hee’s return to the newsroom curdles fast: her team is off, the dynamic has shifted, and a rockstar who sings about ordinary life becomes the booking every rival production suddenly wants. Then she works out who he actually is. The episode is half workplace satire and half setup for the season’s second romance, and it’s noticeably sharper on the office politics than on the meet-cute.

EP 05

That Kind of Day, If Possible

Dec 23, 2022

The girls gather for a drink on what turns out to be the anniversary of Ji-yeon’s mother’s death, and the night slides from Jeju side dishes into everyone’s unfinished business with their moms. It’s the season’s first real sit-in-it episode, and Han Seon-hwa carries the change in register without tipping into melodrama. The show is better at this than at its slapstick, and this episode makes the case.

EP 06

The History of Our Hardest Drinking

Dec 23, 2022

A delivery run ends with Ji-goo clipping a luxury car she cannot afford to repair, and the panic that follows is the closest Season 2 gets to Season 1’s money-anxiety comedy. The bailout arrives from an unexpected place: a liquor storeroom Ji-yeon’s late mother left behind, equal parts inheritance and emotional landmine. It’s a tidy structural move, letting one plot problem hand the season its next thread.

EP 07

Turns Out It Helped

Dec 30, 2022

Two threads tighten at once. Ji-goo tags along on Woo-ju’s volunteer shift at a trade school and starts to see past the rockstar persona, while So-hee, mid-meeting, is blindsided by a sudden and deeply inconvenient attraction to Book-goo. The show has been circling both pairings for weeks; this is where it stops pretending it hasn’t, and Choi Si-won plays Book-goo’s total obliviousness for exactly the right amount of comedy.

EP 08

Drinker, Baby, and Me

Dec 30, 2022

The bottle episode, literally: Ji-goo takes a short babysitting gig, the mother never comes back, and the trio spends a full night trying to soothe a baby that will not stop crying. It’s a contained, low-stakes farce that works because the show finally lets the three of them just be in a room together again, problem-solving and bickering the way Season 1 did by default. After weeks of separate storylines, it plays like a small relief.

EP 09

The Third Glass

Jan 6, 2023

So-hee brings Book-goo along on a visit to her mother in Gwangju, and he is strangely at home there — a hint the show plants and lets sit. Elsewhere, Sun-jung and Sun-kook’s fight over a family birthday dinner pulls Ji-yeon into someone else’s household drama, while Ji-goo cannot reach Ji-yeon at all. The season is quietly moving its pieces toward the finale here, even if the Gwangju mystery never quite pays off its buildup.

EP 10

Survival Distancing

Jan 6, 2023

The long-simmering friction between Ji-yeon and Ji-goo finally detonates, and this time it does not reset by the next scene. So-hee is stuck in the middle, and Ji-yeon’s decision to parade a blind date in front of the group turns a private rift into a public one. It’s the season’s riskiest move — a genuine falling-out among the leads — and reviews split on whether it felt earned or engineered.

EP 11

The Broken Liquor Jug

Jan 13, 2023

Ji-yeon, out of options, moves into Sun-yeong’s apartment, where Sun-kook’s hyperacusis makes absolute silence the house rule. The premise is a pure sitcom bit — how long can the loudest of the three stay quiet — and the show plays it broad. It lands as a lighter breather before the finale, and whether the timing works depends on how much the episode-10 rift landed for you. The performances keep it watchable even when the writing coasts.

EP 12

Three Hours and One Year

Jan 13, 2023

The finale pays off both romances and the friendship in one crowded hour. So-hee stops calling what she has with Book-goo anything but love, just as his estranged father — alcoholic and slipping into dementia — arrives to complicate it. Woo-ju asks Ji-goo to follow him abroad for his art. A year later the trio drifts back together at a wedding, the rift from episode ten never quite spoken aloud. It’s a warm ending that doesn’t fully close its own loops.

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

What actually happens with So-hee and Book-goo The finale finally lets So-hee stop hedging: she admits — to herself first, then to him — that she wants an actual future with Kang Book-goo, not the vague drinking-buddies-who-sometimes-more arrangement she had been calling it. The complication that walks in is his father: estranged, alcoholic, and sliding into dementia. Rather than run, So-hee pours the man a single drink and makes a deal of it — take this last one, get sober, and she will look after him for the rest of his life. Book-goo watches it happen in tears. The couple settle on moving in together.

Ji-goo and Woo-ju leave the country Ji-goo’s arc closes on the season’s softest note. After a rain-soaked confession and a few too many bottles of soju in his cluttered studio, she and Woo-ju land a first kiss the show plays as shy rather than sweeping. Then he tells her he has been offered work abroad — in London — and asks her to come. In the epilogue’s time skip, she goes. It’s a clean exit for the character, if a slightly abrupt one given how late the relationship actually started.

Ji-yeon and the father she barely knows Ji-yeon’s thread ties off around family she didn’t choose. Having crossed paths with the biological father she barely knows — recognizing him, absurdly, by his elbow — she spends the finale playing fixer for someone else’s fractured household, brokering a reconciliation between Director Kim and her half-brother Sun-kook. It’s in keeping with how the season has used Ji-yeon all along: the one who inserts herself into everyone’s business, finally doing it for something that matters to her.

The falling-out never actually gets resolved The season’s most divisive choice is what it doesn’t do. The serious rift between Ji-yeon and Ji-goo from Survival Distancing is never talked through on screen. After a year apart — Ji-goo abroad, Ji-yeon moved out, So-hee holding the old apartment alone — the three simply drift back together at Hwang Dong-bae’s wedding and slot into their old rhythm mid-anecdote, as if the fight had quietly expired on its own. Whether that reads as true to how real friendships heal, or as the writers dodging a hard scene, depends on the viewer.

The KDW verdict Season 2 ends the way it played throughout: warm, a little shaggy, more interested in landing everyone somewhere kind than in closing its loops cleanly. Both romances get their moment, the friendship survives a genuine rupture, and the show reaffirms its one durable idea — that the right people get you through a year, even a bad one. It’s a gentler finale than Season 1’s, and a less precise one, but it doesn’t betray the characters to get there.