Made in Korea season 2 arrives this September.

Disney+ renewed this 1970s crime noir before a single episode had aired, and the second season lands in September with the teaser already out.

I put six episodes of Made in Korea on one evening in January expecting a decent period thriller and finished it wondering why nobody had told me about it. It turned out plenty of people had; it just took a while for word to travel outside Asia.

Two men, one country, no clean hands!

Here's what you're getting into:

- Hyun Bin plays Baek Ki-tae, a KCIA operative in 1970s South Korea who runs a smuggling operation on the side and uses it to climb the agency, fund its work and protect his younger brother.

- Jung Woo-sung plays Jang Geon-young, a prosecutor who cannot be bought and decides Ki-tae is going down regardless of who's protecting him.

- Woo Do-hwan plays Baek Ki-hyun, Ki-tae's brother, a Korea Military Academy graduate whose own ambitions complicate everything.

Hyun Bin is the draw for most international viewers, since Crash Landing on You made him famous well beyond Korea, and this is about as far from that register as he's gone. Jung Woo-sung, a fixture of Korean cinema rather than television, is the reason the confrontation works at all; neither man is written as the hero and neither performance asks you to pick. Ki-tae is charming and monstrous in the same scene; Geon-young is right about everything and almost impossible to like.

Who made it, and why does it look like a film?

Woo Min-ho directed, and if you've seen The Man Standing Next or Inside Men, the DNA is unmistakable. He makes political thrillers about the machinery of Korean power, and Made in Korea is essentially that same project condensed into six hours of television. The 1970s setting is not decoration either: the KCIA, the smuggling networks and the political pressure on prosecutors are all drawn from a period Korean cinema has returned to repeatedly.

Park Eun-kyo and Park Joon-seok wrote it, and Hive Media Corp produced, the outfit behind Inside Men and 12.12: The Day. That pedigree explains the look: this doesn't shoot like a streaming series, it shoots like a film that happens to run in instalments. Take the first two episodes as a double bill, because they premiered together and were clearly built to be watched that way.

It became Disney+'s most-watched Korean original of everything the platform released in 2025, topped drama charts across Korea and the Asia-Pacific, and TIME later named it one of the most anticipated Korean dramas of 2026. It also picked up recognition at this year's Global OTT Awards. All of that came from word of mouth rather than a marketing blitz, which is unusual for a show carrying two names this size.

Everything we know about season two!

The renewal came before season one had even premiered, announced at a Disney+ preview event with the cast and director present, which tells you how confident the platform was. It's now confirmed for September 2026, with the teaser poster and pre-teaser released in the last couple of weeks.

The story jumps nine years forward. Ki-tae has reached the top and, judging by the teaser, discovered that arriving there settled nothing. Jang Geon-young returns as a disgraced prosecutor who failed to bring him down. Ki-hyun begins his own climb by a different route, and the confrontation between the two brothers looks like the spine of the new season. Woo Min-ho is back directing, with Seo Eun-soo, Won Ji-an, Jung Sung-il and Noh Jae-won joining.

Six episodes is a short catch-up before September, and you can watch them on whatever screen is nearest without committing to anything beyond the month you're paying for. A month of Disney+ runs to roughly what a large popcorn and a drink cost at the cinema, which is a reasonable trade for something shot this well.

If ruthless men manoeuvring against each other inside a system that rewards exactly that behaviour appeals to you, Muhteşem Yüzyıl does the same thing four centuries earlier and remains the benchmark. See what people who are already watching are saying in the comments on my website: https://en.altertv.site, and https://en.altertv.site sets out what each service actually carries if you're comparing them.

What sold me wasn't the plotting, which is good but familiar. It's that the show never once suggests the incorruptible prosecutor is going to win.