General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

A Model Family (모범가족)

A Model Family (모범가족) is a 2022 South Korean crime thriller series released on Netflix, in which a cash-strapped college lecturer who unwittingly steals money belonging to a drug cartel becomes a drug courier to save his collapsing family. All ten episodes were released on August 12, 2022.¹

Key fact	Detail
Native title	모범가족 (Mobeomgajok)
Network / release	Netflix, August 12, 2022, all 10 episodes at once¹
Director	Kim Jin-woo, known for Good Doctor (2013) and Netflix's Love Alarm 2 (2021)²
Screenwriter	Lee Jae-gon¹
Lead cast	Jung Woo, Park Hee-soon, Yoon Jin-seo, Park Ji-yeon³
Format	10 episodes of about 45 minutes; TV-MA age rating³
Audience score	6.6/10 on IMDb from about 1,900 votes⁴

Spoilers

Premise

Park Dong-ha (Jung Woo) is a part-time lecturer at a college and the head of a household on the verge of bankruptcy and divorce. He has failed to get tenure, his wife Kang Eun-ju (Yoon Jin-seo) asks for a divorce, and he has lost the money needed for his sick son's surgery. One day he comes across a pile of cash next to a dead body and takes it, not knowing it belongs to a drug cartel. With both the police and the cartel after the money, the cartel's second-in-command, Ma Gwang-chul (Park Hee-soon), offers Dong-ha a way out: working for him as a drug courier.²

Detective Kang Joo-hyun (Park Ji-yeon), leader of an anti-drug crime team, investigates both Dong-ha and Gwang-chul.¹ The supporting cast includes Choi Mu-sung as Hwang Yong-soo, Kim Sung-oh as Choi Kang-jun, Oh Kwang-rok as Park Deuk-soo, Kim Shin-rock as Moon Jeong-gook, and Shin Eun-soo as Park Yeon-woo, Dong-ha's daughter.³

Production and direction

Director Kim Jin-woo described the series as a mixture of Korean and European styles of thriller. In his account, Korean thrillers build fast-paced tension around the protagonist and the villain, while European-style series put more detail into the sub-characters, and he tried to blend the two approaches.⁵

The title's irony was central to his conception. At the series' press conference in Seoul he said that a person looking in from the outside might call a family a model family, but a closer look raises the question of whether it can truly be called ideal, and that "family" holds a particular sense of uniqueness in Korean culture.² He also said he wanted to explore different definitions of family, including the distorted, unconventional one that holds within a cartel gang, and that the conflicts within Dong-ha's family are mostly caused by a lack of communication.⁵

Lead actor Jung Woo said he took the role because of the multi-layered character: a normal person who turns into a monster as he is pushed to the edge, with trauma from his past bringing out a different side of him.²

Reception

Before release, the series drew comparisons to the Netflix original Ozark and the American crime series Breaking Bad.⁶ Critics were divided. Pierce Conran, reviewing for the South China Morning Post, gave it 1.5 out of 5 stars, writing that the title is a misnomer since the family is highly dysfunctional, and that the series itself falls apart within a few episodes.⁷ Joel Keller of Decider found the scenario somewhat familiar but with its own intriguing twists and turns.⁸ An NME review described the show as twisting through domestic drama and organized crime over its 10-episode run to draw out the implications of its title.⁹

On IMDb the series holds a 6.6/10 rating from about 1,900 users, with individual first-season episodes ranging from 6.5 to 7.4.⁴ TVmaze lists the show's status as Ended, with no second season produced.¹⁰

Availability

The series streams on Netflix, including in 4K with Dolby Atmos audio, and is available with Korean original audio plus dubbed and subtitled options in many languages across Netflix's international catalogs.³^•¹¹ In South Korea it carries a 15 rating, restricting it to viewers aged 15 and over.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Korean contemporary drama › Thriller, crime, and mystery series › Crime and mystery thrillers

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?