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When Netflix first greenlit a Korean series about a special-forces officer dispatched to intervene in school bullying cases, nobody expected it to end up in the living rooms of 91 countries. But “Teach You a Lesson”
— now in its fourth consecutive week atop the platform’s Global Top 10 Non-English Series chart, with 7.3 million views in the week of June 22–28 alone — has done exactly that, racking up appearances in the Top 10 across markets as varied as Argentina, Germany, Japan, Malaysia and Australia.
Educators and parents from countries with no particular cultural overlap with Korea have been writing in to say they recognized their own schools on screen.
For director Hong Jong-chan, the scale of that response remains genuinely disorienting. “It still doesn’t feel entirely real,” he says.
What Hong set out to make was something more modest in ambition: a story about the moment Korean society could no longer afford to look away from its schools. The systemic failures — teacher authority collapsing, bullying left to fester, institutions designed to resolve conflict instead protecting themselves — were the raw material. The fictional Educational Rights Protection Bureau, or ERPB, a covert squad of inspectors who intervene where official channels won’t, was the vehicle.
“In many ways, fantasy begins where reality becomes unbearable,” Hong says. “That simple idea became the foundation of my directing approach.”
The principle shaped every tonal decision on the show. Hong describes his guiding rule as keeping emotions realistic while making resolutions genre-driven. The pain of victims had to feel completely authentic, he explains, so that audiences would become invested — but when the ERPB moved to act, those sequences were calibrated for exhilaration, almost like an action film. Dark comedy served a parallel function. “Through satire,” he says, the underlying message could land with more sharpness than earnestness alone would allow. “The heavier reality becomes, the more powerful the catharsis of breaking through it with action.”
What Hong was most determined to avoid was the lone-hero structure that the premise could easily have defaulted to. The series builds its weight across an ensemble: Lee Sung-min as Choi Gang-seok, the Education Minister who founded the bureau and defends its purpose while under sustained public pressure; Jin Ki-joo as Im Han-rim, a junior inspector whose surface politeness gives way to something relentless in the field; and Pyo Ji-hoon as Bong Geun-dae, a KAIST-educated administrative officer who begins treating the job as just an assignment before the realities of school life draw him in. “Behind Na Hwa-jin’s overwhelming presence,” Hong says, “Choi Kang-seok quietly shoulders enormous responsibility. Im Han-rim fights alongside him on the front lines, while Bong Geun-dae brings warmth and humanity to the team. Each character stands with victims in their own way.”
Hong is careful to say the ERPB was never meant to be presented as a clean moral model. “The ERPB is a fantasy,” he says. “It’s an organization that would be difficult to imagine existing in reality, and some of its methods could certainly be controversial.” What interested him was the question the bureau’s existence poses rather than any answer it provides: when institutions fail, where does justice come from, and how much are people willing to sacrifice to stand beside victims? “I wanted viewers to wrestle with those questions themselves,” he says. “I believe stories that leave audiences thinking long after the credits roll are ultimately more meaningful than stories that provide all the answers.”
Kim Moo-yul, who plays ERPB inspector Na Hwa-jin, approached the character’s ethical ambiguity with equal care. He resists both the hero and antihero labels. “If a hero is someone who saves victims and delivers justice,” Kim says, “then Hwa-jin is more of a person driven by responsibility – someone who gives others the opportunity and guidance they need to move forward with their lives.” The character, he adds, doesn’t fit the antihero frame either, because he isn’t motivated solely by personal desire. “I’m actually very curious to hear how viewers interpret Na Hwa-jin,” Kim says.
What drew him to the role, he explains, was precisely that the character carries his own unresolved damage. “He’s a victim himself who chooses to reach out and help other victims,” Hong says. “That’s where his true strength comes from.” A flawless hero, Hong argues, would have been far less convincing. “Kim Moo-yul captured that aspect of the character beautifully. Not only did he bring the qualities audiences already associate with him, but he also revealed new dimensions of himself that we hadn’t seen before.”
That interiority required as much preparation as the show’s extensive action sequences. Kim says he spent more time thinking through the scenes with victims than the physical confrontations that would become the series’ most-clipped moments online. “I needed to understand the victims’ circumstances while also conveying Na Hwa-jin’s personality,” he says, “and I worked hard to find the right balance so that he would come across as neither overly emotional nor too cold.” In confrontations with perpetrators, by contrast, the task was conveying decisiveness and overwhelming physical presence. Since the character comes from a special-forces background, Kim adjusted his training and conditioning before filming began so that Na Hwa-jin’s movements would read as light and efficient rather than performatively imposing.
The emotional scenes, he says, were where the series’ central argument had to be won or lost. Hong frames those moments in explicitly moral terms. “Whenever Na Hwa-jin and the inspectors tell victims, ‘We’ll protect you,'” he says, “I wanted those words to feel more than just dialogue. I wanted them to convey the genuine responsibility of adults and the sincere compassion of one human being for another.” Without that foundation, he says, none of the action would feel justified — it would amount to spectacle. “The action isn’t there simply to entertain. It’s an expression of lifting people back up after they’ve been broken by what they’ve endured.”
The show is Hong’s second sustained engagement with institutions that fail young people, following “Juvenile Justice,” his 2022 Netflix series examining the Korean juvenile court system. He sees a throughline between the two works, but locates it somewhere other than the obvious institutional critique. The deeper preoccupation, he says, is communication, or its collapse. “I believe the greatest source of conflict in our society today stems from our inability to communicate with one another,” he adds. Working on “Juvenile Justice,” he came to understand that juvenile crime is never only about the offender — it is always tangled up with families, schools and society as a whole. “Teach You a Lesson” continues that thinking. The difference is tonal: where the earlier series examined systemic complexity through a restrained and balanced lens, the new one pushes deliberately toward catharsis.
The scale of the international response has clarified something for Hong about how specific storytelling travels. The show’s conversations about Korean education — the collapse of respect for teachers, the inadequacy of institutional responses to bullying, the question of what adults owe children — have been picked up and reprocessed by viewers in contexts Hong could not have anticipated. Teachers in other countries have been interpreting the series through the lens of their own classrooms. A line from the show — “It takes an entire village to raise a child” — has circulated well beyond its original context. “The more faithfully we portray the specific realities of Korean society,” Hong says, “the more universal the story becomes. The more specific and authentic a story is, the more people are able to see themselves in it.”
He draws a pointed conclusion from that: neither diluting a story for international audiences nor overemphasizing its Korean-ness produces genuine cross-border resonance. “Authenticity is what ultimately travels across borders,” he says. It is a position that cuts against the more calculating approaches to global content — the impulse to sand down local particularity in search of a universal average – and Hong credits the show’s refusal of that impulse as central to its success.
Kim had worried about exactly this problem during production. “Because the series is set within Korea’s education system,” he says, “I worried that global viewers might find it difficult to relate to or feel some distance from the story.” The fact that so many did not is what has surprised him most about the show’s reception. “I hope that, with all the love it has received,” he says, “this series will remain in viewers’ hearts and memories for a long time.”
Beyond the viewing numbers, Hong says, what he had actually hoped for was that “Teach You a Lesson” would generate meaningful social conversations — and watching that happen has been more gratifying than any metric. “It’s also been fascinating and deeply moving,” he says, “to see teachers and parents in other countries interpret the story through the lens of their own societies and experiences.”
Hong says he would welcome the chance to return for a second season. He is also still thinking about schools more broadly — about the stories within them that haven’t been told yet. Whatever comes next, the question he says he returns to at the start of every project remains the same. “What is the story that people most need to hear right now?” he says. “Whatever the genre may be, I believe every story must ultimately be about people.”
