*Teach You a Lesson* Director Defends the Breast Reduction Line and Corporal Punishment

Hong Jong-chan, director of Netflix's *Teach You a Lesson*, sat down for an interview at a café in Seoul's Samcheong-ro on the 11th to explain two of the show's most criticized creative choices: a teacher's breast reduction quip and the series' use of corporal punishment.

*Teach You a Lesson* is based on a popular webtoon of the same name and follows a fictional Teacher Rights Protection Bureau created to restore order in schools overrun by out-of-line students, parents, and faculty. The source material generated significant backlash before the adaptation was even announced — critics flagged racist depictions of people of color, a scene in which slapping a feminist-education teacher is framed as cathartic, and an equation of feminist pedagogy with anti-communist indoctrination. Naver Webtoon eventually pulled the series from its North American platform.

The show also went through two high-profile casting rejections before landing its lead. Kim Nam-gil turned down the role of Na Hwa-jin twice; Kim Moo-yeol ultimately took it. Combined with the webtoon controversy, the double rejection drew unusual industry attention.

Asked which episode shocked him most as a director, Hong pointed to episode nine's "Wi-Fi shuttle" storyline. "Episode one is physical violence — you can see it," he said. "The Wi-Fi shuttle is invisible. Some people might say it's nothing. But from the perspective of the kid going through it, it's hell. It's a different kind of school violence from the past."

On the breast reduction scene — in which teacher Im Han-rim (Jin Ki-joo) responds to students mocking her for plastic surgery by saying she had one procedure, a reduction, and that no one in the room appears to need one — Hong said the production drew a line at webtoon content it found uncomfortable. "We excluded things we felt would be off-putting from the source material. That was the first-pass filter," he said. "The producers and crew continued cutting through the editing process right up to the end."

On corporal punishment, Hong was direct about his personal view and equally direct about the dramatic rationale. "Personally, corporal punishment cannot be condoned in any form. It's wrong," he said. "In our drama, you can think of corporal punishment as having been incorporated as an entertaining element — a fun factor. A good story that only we can enjoy has no meaning. We have to make it entertaining so that viewers enjoy it too. Consider it used as an entertaining element."

He added: "We've thrown out a topic for discussion, and just having people talk about it from various angles is meaningful and significant. What comes after that doesn't feel like our territory."

*Teach You a Lesson* launched on Netflix across more than 190 countries on the 5th. Within three days it logged 6.4 million views — measured as watch time divided by total runtime — and reached number one on the Global Top 10 Non-English TV chart. The series topped charts in ten countries including South Korea, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, and landed in the Top 10 in 48 countries total.

"사이다" (sai-da) — literally "cider" — is Korean internet slang for a scene that feels cathartic or satisfying, the way a cold soda cuts through heat. Critics used it to describe how the webtoon framed hitting a feminist teacher.

slang for a cathartic, wish-fulfillment moment; here used critically to describe the webtoon's framing of teacher-slapping as crowd-pleasing