Review of Suspicious Partner / 수상한 파트너

If you’re new here and stumbled upon this post by the mythical powers of the Internet (most likely Google), welcome! This is my blog, and I often do television/drama, movie, theater, and book reviews on this site. Feel free to click around and see more if you like what you’ve read on this page.

Anyways, greetings aside, I’ve been in a fun mood lately when it comes to dramas. I’ve been maximizing my Viki account while I was unemployed, so there are a ton of Asian drama reviews going to come out in the next few months. I’ve been having a ball working on the blog while I wait for my next opportunity to be granted by the corporate gods.

While I’ve been watching new content a lot, I’ve also realized the sheer amount of backlog throughout the years I’ve created. That said, this blog post is the beginning of me catching up on that backlog, as I have a lot of half-written posts about dramas I’ve watched a hot minute ago.

Suspicious Partner is one of those dramas if you couldn’t tell already. I watched this one a few years back, so this writing comes from that period, as well as when I was updating and reflecting on it now.

So let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know you came to this post to see my thoughts about the show.

When assigned a new partner, a police officer is skeptical about her true intentions.

Despite what the title and tagline I put above may imply, this drama is not as serious as its sounds. With this English title, one could imagine that there would be thriller elements, but the conflict in this show is honestly kept to a minimum throughout.

Our male lead in this show is Ji-wook, a promising prosecutor who’s pretty established in his field. He’s comfortable at his job, but then something new is thrown his way: trainee Eun Bong-hee. She’s bubbly and outgoing, but as we see throughout the show, these two are connected more than from their jobs.

They have a shared history, although they don’t know that at first. Ji-wook will end up switching jobs and becoming an attorney, but when a murder ends up happening, he begins suspecting that Bong-hee is involved. Her ex-boyfriend is found dead inside of her home, and she is unable to provide an alibi.

Hence the name Suspicious Partner, but there’s a lot more of that contained on that show. Ji-wook is the one who has to end up defending her in the court, as she has no alibi and seems pretty guilty in the eye of the law.

The prosecutor on the case comes pretty hard for her based on that, but the conflict in the show goes deeper when we find out that the real killer is somewhere on the loose. The show then kind of pivots into a whodunnit it and figuring out who the killer is before they strike again, especially if they’re after Bong-hee.

As all of this is happening, Bong-hee ends up falling for Ji-wook. She was just so madly swooned by his efforts to defend her that she couldn’t help but to get a little crush on him—classic Korean drama territory, and this feels like a show that came out in the late 2010s now that I’m reflecting on it.

He resists the romantic feelings brewing between them both, but eventually, as we all can suspect and know will happen, he succumbs to his own feelings too. Then the suspicious partner aspect really tends to lapse, and rather becomes a plot point that forced them to interact with each other further beyond a professional setting.

There’s also a healthy dose of childhood trauma to deal with, but that seems like pretty standard fare as well.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a cute show. I think it was honestly one of my favorite shows to come out during this period, although I don’t take the content of it too seriously.

Nam Ji-hyun and Ji Chang-wook has some good chemistry throughout the show, which is probably what helped the plot become a bit more believable. and I think that the show itself was decently written. Some other Korean dramas I’ve watched lately, in 2024, aren’t as good as this show.

I often find myself reflecting on this show when it comes to better Korean dramas—which is a sign it’s pretty decent to me! It’s not artistic in the way that Beyond Evil or Mr. Plankton struck me as, but it gets the job done. And sometimes that’s all you need when watching these kinds of shows.

So go watch it if you haven’t already, or revisit the show if you haven’t seen it in a while. You may find it worth it!

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