This is a spoiler-light review of the first four episodes of The Remarried Empress, which are now available to stream on Disney+.
In the streaming wars, Disney has the obvious and not insignificant edge on princess stories. However, that edge tends to come in their kids/family content, which makes their biggest Korean drama swing yet — a big-budget romantasy epic called The Remarried Empress — kind of a brilliant programming decision. The 10-episode series is a live-action adaptation of a very popular web novel-turned-webtoon; the latter has accumulated almost three billion views on Naver. While technically the main character is an Empress and not a Princess, try telling that to her dresses, her gaggle of ladies-in-waiting, and her Beauty and the Beast-esque ballroom dance scene.
The Remarried Empress stars Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha's Shin Min-a as Navier, the elegant empress of the fictional Eastern Empire and wife to Emperor Sovieshu (The Trauma Code’s Ju Ji-hoon). Navier and Sovieshu share a respectful if not particularly passionate marriage, maintaining a stable royal leadership for the Eastern Empire. However, they have yet to have a child. When Sovieshu rescues escaped slave Rashta (The Red Sleeve’s Lee Se-young) from bounty hunters, he quickly falls for her, forcing Naiver to accept Rashta as an imperial mistress.
In a more stereotypical princess story, rags-to-riches Rashta would be the aspirational protagonist, and there’s a lot of potential in subverting that trope. However, The Remarried Empress does not live up to it, in large part due to the shallowness of its characters.
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