Wonderful World
Starring: Kim Nam Joo, Cha Eun Woo
14 episodes
Disney+
Wonderful World (not to be mistaken for Wonderfools) is for the many fans who miss top Korean actor/idol Cha Eun Woo, who’s now doing military service (he enlisted in 2025 and will be discharged in 2027). But then again, it’s also for those who aren’t even into Cha Eun Woo. That’s how spellbinding this thriller is—it appeals to both Cha Eun Woo and his band Astro’s Aroha fans, and non-fans.
Even his overly handsome face—which some oddly consider as a setback and distraction from his acting sometimes—doesn’t draw you away from the suspense and the intense drama of this well-written series.
This was this 29-year-old’s last project before his mandatory military enlistment in July 2025—and, surprise, it is no love story. He didn’t leave his fans with a romcom (thank god, nothing like A Good Day to be a Dog), but with a story of revenge and loss that demands intense, in-depth and nuanced portrayal from its leads. Here, Cha Eun Woo’s character, Kwon Seon Yul, is cunning and embittered, bereft of naivete or warmth. His is a silent anger that you take as a sign that Cha Eun Woo is indeed becoming a mature actor who’s into diverse roles.
The story opens into a wonderful world—she’s (Kim Nam Joo as Eun Soo Hyun) a bestselling author and university professor, her husband a top broadcaster (Kim Kang Woo as Kang Su Ho). They have a lovely six-year-old son running around in a lovely house. A family’s world can’t get more wonderful than that.
Early on this top-notch author-academician is shown as a dutiful mother who won’t think twice about cutting short a book tour upon learning that her son is sick. The husband calls her up for fever medication, she tells him what to do. But when anxiety gets the better of her, she flies home. Meanwhile, her husband’s broadcast journalism career is embattled because he’s taking on the big bad guys, his commitment to freedom of the press too fierce for his own good.
Their love for each other is solid, their love for the family even more.
Early in the episode, the story introduces the environment of corruption and sinister deals that the couple move in while pursuing their profession—wheeler-dealer politicians, corrupt top guns in government.
Then the tragedy strikes. Rushing back home from a book tour cut short to attend to her sick son, she walks fast up her house, leaving the gate unlocked, or did she? Same time, in a bar, a bigwig gets a call and drives to the neighborhood of our happy family. Just at this moment, the boy runs out the house, then it happens. The son becomes a hit-and-run victim by the government bigwig who happens to be Cha Eun Woo’s dad.
Hereon, the life of Kim Nam Joo’s Eun Soo Hyun goes downhill, a mother who can’t come to terms with the death of her boy. She just loses it, lies in wait on the road one night, and runs over the unrepentant killer of her son. Kim Nam Joo’s intense portrayal of a mother, who has turned her back to the world, becomes a strong match to Cha Eun Woo’s Kwon Seon Yul, the fair-haired son with a promising medical career who chooses to give it all up, lives as an anonymous laborer in a car shop, and devotes his life to plotting to avenge his father’s death.
She’s sentenced to seven years in prison, doesn’t ask for leniency, and even says she’d do it over again. In prison, she cuts off contact with her husband and family. She keeps to herself but eventually warms up to a fellow inmate, an arsonist, a kind woman who leads her to open up to life again. Terminally ill, this woman gives Eun Soo Hyun some faint hope for redemption. Her dying wish is for Eun Soo Hyun, upon her release, to give the letters she wrote in prison to the only survivor of the fire she caused, an eight-year-old now a grown man working in a car repair shop. Unbeknownst to Eun Soo Hyun, this is the man whose identity Cha Eun Woo’s Kwon Seon Yul has taken over falsely in his plan for vendetta. Cha Eun Woo succeeds in building a sinister mystery around this character—indeed a far cry from his lovable character in True Beauty.
What happens when the paths of a newly released woman convict and the vengeful young man cross is the build-up to the thriller. The two first meet in the grave site, she oblivious to the real identity of the young man offering her an umbrella in the rain. It’s a foreboding scene.
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While the story involves a crime (two crimes, in fact), this is not an action series, it is a psychological thriller centered on the evolution of the characters—the conflicts and doubts, the hatred and love, the betrayal and empathy. Life is a grey area—not black and white—and so is one’s ability to forgive. The story succeeds in presenting the twists and ironies in the lives of the characters, both the leads and those of Eun Soo Hyun’s husband and bestie/adopted sister. It is powerful yet relatable how the characters of Cha Eun Woo and Kim Nam Joo—as well as the highly skilled support cast—transform with each episode: how the two protagonists turn from scheming foes into kindred souls. The series is indeed an actors’ platform, a timely one at that for Cha Eun Woo.
Why you should finish the series? The ending is cathartic. How will the mother and her nemesis, the orphaned young man, come to terms with their intertwined fates, and move on from there. It is a story of redemption—a thriller that lets you exhale in the end. True Beauty has the looks of Cha Eun Woo, Wonderful World has Cha Eun Woo’s inner beauty.
