Lee Jong-suk Returns with 'Law and the City' — tvN's Quiet Legal Drama Opens July 5 to No. 1 Cable Ratings

Lee Jong-suk returned to Korean television on July 5, 2025, with tvN's 'Law and the City' — his first drama in three years since 'Big Mouth' wrapped in September 2022. The premiere episode recorded a nationwide average viewership rating of 4.6 percent, peaking at 5.4 percent, to claim first place across all cable drama time slots. That opening landed above the 3.6 percent premiere of its direct predecessor in the same time slot and confirmed that the three-year anticipation for Lee Jong-suk's return had converted into actual Saturday-night viewership rather than remaining an industry storyline without an audience.

The drama also premiered simultaneously on Disney+ in international markets — a distribution arrangement that had become standard for CJ ENM's prestige cable productions but which carried particular strategic importance for a show designed to function across cultural contexts. 'Law and the City' is set in Seoul's Seocho Judicial Town, the district whose significance as Korea's legal and financial center the show explains within its own narrative rather than assuming as background knowledge. That combination of specific setting and built-in orientation would later drive the drama into the Rakuten Viki top five across the United States, Brazil, France, the UAE, and India — a global reach that was still weeks away but whose infrastructure was already in place on premiere night.

A Legal Drama Built Against the Genre's Conventions

The most significant thing about 'Law and the City' is what it is not. The Korean legal drama format has historically been constructed around courtroom confrontations, high-stakes case outcomes, and procedural revelations that shift power between prosecution and defense. Director Park Seung-woo — reuniting with Lee Jong-suk for the first time since 'W: Two Worlds Apart' in 2016 — makes no attempt to place the show within that tradition. The five young lawyers at the center of 'Law and the City' are not solving landmark cases. They are calibrating their idealism against law firm hierarchy, navigating overwork, and building the collegial relationships that form in shared professional grinding.

Writer Lee Seung-hyun, a former practicing lawyer, constructed the show's premise from inside the profession rather than from genre convention. The resulting tone — slow, character-accumulative, resistant to courtroom spectacle — positioned 'Law and the City' alongside the ensemble dramas that had built sustained cable audiences through patience rather than event escalation. The premise asked whether the Saturday 21:20 audience would follow a legal drama that spent its first hour establishing character texture rather than setting up a case reversal. The 4.6 percent premiere suggested they would.

The Rating Curve and What It Predicted

The episode-to-episode progression told the more complete story. Episode 2 on July 6 recorded 5.1 percent, confirming that the premiere audience had returned rather than sampled. Episode 4 scored 5.6 percent — a new series high at that point — and Episode 6 climbed to an average of 6.1 percent with a peak of 7.3 percent. The trajectory followed the pattern that quiet ensemble dramas typically produce: a solid launch, a brief consolidation, then a sustained upward curve as committed viewers experienced the payoff of the relationship groundwork laid in the early episodes.

The comparison with the predecessor drama's 3.6 percent premiere is instructive. The time slot's baseline audience was not large, but it was loyal and demonstrably willing to follow ensemble dramas through their slower early episodes. The 1 percent difference between the predecessor's open and 'Law and the City's' represented both the value of Lee Jong-suk's three-year brand equity and the efficiency of the simultaneous streaming distribution in generating first-night sampling beyond the cable base.

Cast Assembly and the Ensemble Architecture

The casting of Moon Ga-young opposite Lee Jong-suk served the drama's structural logic precisely. Her character, Kang Hee-ji, is a second-year associate whose idealism about justice sits in direct contrast to Ahn Ju-hyeong's nine years of compliance. The tension that emerges from their professional friction — not a romantic premise but a values collision between two different phases of the same career — gave the premiere a dramatic engine that required no case outcome to generate stakes. The three supporting characters, played by Kang You-seok, Ryu Hye-young, and Im Seong-jae, completed an ensemble distribution that spread narrative weight across the full law firm rather than positioning Lee Jong-suk as a conventional drama lead with satellite characters.

The directorial reunion between Park Seung-woo and Lee Jong-suk added production continuity that the show's promotional materials leaned into. 'W: Two Worlds Apart,' their 2016 collaboration, had established Lee Jong-suk as a premium cable commodity. The same director in a dramatically different genre register — introspective ensemble rather than high-concept thriller — was a statement about where both Lee Jong-suk's career and Korean television's appetite for character-driven drama had arrived by mid-2025.

What the July 5 Open Actually Confirmed

What the July 5 premiere confirmed was more specific: that a legal drama built on character accumulation rather than courtroom spectacle could open cable prime-time at above-baseline ratings, and that Lee Jong-suk's three-year absence had sustained rather than eroded his audience. The quiet drama model had enough pull to claim the Saturday cable slot, compete with genre alternatives in the same time window, and establish the distribution infrastructure for global streaming pickup. By the end of its August 10 run, 'Law and the City' would prove that the model traveled. The premiere simply established that the model deserved the opportunity to prove it.