Yoo In-shik

Yoo In-shik is a South Korean television director whose work has been closely associated with SBS dramas and, more recently, the breakout ENA series Extraordinary Attorney Woo. His directing career includes the 2010 SBS drama Giant, a 60-episode saga about brothers and a sister separated by violence and corruption in the 1970s. The series starred Lee Beom-soo, Park Jin-hee, and Ju Sang-wook, and its long-form narrative helped establish Yoo as a director of commercially ambitious prime-time serials.

In 2012, he directed History of a Salaryman, a black-comedy corporate drama starring Lee Beom-soo as an office worker caught in a rivalry between pharmaceutical companies. He followed it with Incarnation of Money (2013), again led by Lee Beom-soo, which centers on a prosecutor’s revenge against figures tied to a financial scandal.

Yoo directed Mrs. Cop in 2015, featuring Kim Hee-ae as Choi Yeong-jin, the head of a violent-crimes unit balancing police work with raising her daughter. His 2016 collaboration with screenwriter Kang Eun-kyung, Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim, put Han Suk-kyu’s eccentric surgeon Kim Sabu at the rural Doldam Hospital. The medical drama also starred Yoo Yeon-seok and Seo Hyun-jin, and its success led to Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim 2 in 2020 and Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim 3 in 2023, both returning to Doldam Hospital and Han’s central role.

Between the first two Doldam installments, Yoo directed Vagabond (2019), an SBS action thriller distributed internationally by Netflix. Lee Seung-gi plays stuntman Cha Dal-geon, whose nephew dies in a civilian-aircraft crash; Bae Suzy plays National Intelligence Service agent Go Hae-ri. The story sends them from Morocco to Seoul as Dal-geon challenges the official explanation for the crash and uncovers a conspiracy involving arms contracts and state power.

Yoo’s 2022 series Extraordinary Attorney Woo shifted to a legal workplace story. Park Eun-bin portrays Woo Young-woo, a rookie attorney on the autism spectrum who joins the Seoul law firm Hanbada. Each case gives her a new legal problem, while the serial story follows workplace relationships, her family, and her developing romance with litigation team employee Lee Jun-ho, played by Kang Tae-oh. The 16-episode drama aired on ENA from June to August 2022. Its finale recorded a 17.5-percent nationwide Nielsen Korea rating, making it ENA’s highest-rated drama at the time. The show’s international Netflix release brought Yoo’s work to audiences beyond the Korean terrestrial-television system where he had built much of his career as an SBS director.