Park Hae-soo Returns to TV 5 Years After Squid Game

Park Hae-soo is returning to Korean television, and fans of the actor — who became a household name worldwide after starring in Netflix's Squid Game — have been waiting for exactly this moment. The actor will headline Scarecrow (허수아비), a new Monday-Tuesday crime thriller on ENA, set to premiere on April 20, 2026 at 10 PM KST. It is his first TV drama in approximately five years, and the project has been generating significant anticipation since his casting was announced.

Park Hae-soo plays Detective Kang Tae-ju, an ace investigator with sharp instincts who gets reassigned to his hometown and finds himself pulled into a decades-old serial murder case. The investigation forces him into an unexpected and deeply unwanted alliance with prosecutor Cha Si-young, played by Lee Hee-jun — a man Kang Tae-ju despises and has a history with going back to their school days. What begins as a clash becomes a grudging cooperation, and as the case deepens, so do the complications between the two men.

From Squid Game to Scarecrow

Park Hae-soo first made a strong impression on Korean audiences in 2017 with Prison Playbook (슬기로운 감빵생활), a warmly received drama that showcased his ability to carry a complex lead role with both humor and depth. But it was his turn as Cho Sang-woo in Netflix's Squid Game in 2021 that brought him to a genuinely global audience. The show became the most-watched non-English title in Netflix history, and Cho Sang-woo — a desperate former finance prodigy with a tragic arc — was one of its most discussed and debated characters.

That level of international recognition opened new doors. Park Hae-soo went on to appear in Money Heist: Korea — Joint Economic Area (2022), a Korean adaptation of the acclaimed Spanish series, where he played the character Berlin. The role demonstrated his range and confirmed his status as one of Korea's most in-demand dramatic actors for international projects as well as domestic ones.

Despite all of that, he stepped back from television for a stretch — which makes his return with Scarecrow all the more anticipated. "I feel like I'm greeting everyone for the first time again," he said about the role. "There's nervousness, but there's also genuine excitement about what this project can be."

The Real Case at the Heart of the Story

Scarecrow draws its central premise from one of Korea's most haunting unsolved crime sagas: the Hwaseong serial murders, a series of killings that took place between 1986 and 1991 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. Ten victims were killed over that period, and the case remained officially unsolved for over three decades — one of the longest-running cold cases in Korean criminal history. The investigations that took place across those years consumed enormous resources, involved hundreds of thousands of suspects, and left an entire region living with unresolved dread.

The case was finally resolved in 2019 when a DNA match identified Lee Chun-jae as the perpetrator. He had already been serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime. The revelation shocked the country and reignited national interest in the case that had never fully gone away. Several Korean films and dramas have drawn on the Hwaseong case for inspiration, but the 2019 resolution gave storytellers a definitive ending to work with — and a new set of uncomfortable questions about justice, time, and what it means for truth to arrive too late for some.

The drama's title references a detail from the actual investigation: law enforcement allegedly placed a scarecrow-like figure in the area with a written warning to the killer. It is a striking image, and one that the drama uses to anchor its unsettling tone. Scarecrow spans from 1988 to 2019 — 31 years of history, guilt, and unanswered questions — and asks what it costs two men to finally arrive at the truth together.

A Trusted Creative Team

One of the strongest signals that Scarecrow is worth watching is the team behind it. Director Park Jun-woo previously helmed Taxi Driver (모범택시) — the popular ENA action-thriller series that aired in 2021 and 2022 — as well as the recent Crash. Writer Lee Ji-hyun also worked on Taxi Driver, giving the two a well-established creative partnership built on exactly the kind of genre work Scarecrow is attempting.

Taxi Driver was notable for its blend of visceral action sequences and emotionally grounded character work, and the expectation is that Scarecrow will carry a similar sensibility into darker, more psychological territory. The show is produced under the KT Studio Geni umbrella, and will be available through KT Genie TV and Tving — giving it broad distribution across the Korean streaming landscape beyond the ENA broadcast.

Full Cast and What They Bring

Alongside Park Hae-soo and Lee Hee-jun, the cast includes several notable names. Yoo Seung-mok, known for his memorable work in The Conclave of Mr. Kim (김 부장 이야기), plays Cha Mu-jin, a politician with a military background who also happens to be the father of Lee Hee-jun's character Cha Si-young. That casting adds a layer of political and personal complexity to the investigation — the father-son dynamic promises to intersect with the murder case in ways that complicate everyone's motives.

Kwak Sun-young, Song Gun-hee, Seo Ji-hye, and Jung Moon-sung round out the ensemble. Lee Hee-jun, for his part, is well-regarded by Korean drama audiences for his work in The World of the Married and My Mister, and his casting as an elite prosecutor at odds with Park Hae-soo's detective sets up the kind of sustained friction that drives compelling crime drama.

"The relationship between Kang Tae-ju and Cha Si-young is not what it looks like on the surface," Park Hae-soo noted in production materials. "The longer the investigation goes, the more complicated it becomes."

What to Expect on April 20

For viewers tuning in from outside Korea, Scarecrow offers a particularly compelling entry point: a high-stakes crime thriller starring one of the most recognized Korean actors in the world, backed by a director with a strong track record in the genre, and rooted in a real historical case that still carries emotional weight in Korea. It is precisely the kind of project that travels well — serious, well-cast, and grounded in something real.

ENA has established itself in recent years as a network willing to greenlight ambitious genre drama — Taxi Driver was a major hit, and the channel has continued to develop projects with mainstream appeal and genuine production ambition. Scarecrow fits squarely within that identity.

Park Hae-soo's return to television after his Squid Game moment is, on its own, a major event for Korean drama fans at home and abroad. That he's returning in a project this carefully assembled — with a respected director, a credible co-lead, and a story drawn from one of Korea's most significant criminal cases — only deepens the anticipation. Scarecrow premieres April 20 on ENA, with simultaneous streaming on KT Genie TV and Tving.