SBS TV’s latest K-drama, Phantom Lawyer, which is also streaming on Netflix globally, premiered last weekend, on March 13, 2026. The spooky tale of a lawyer who can see ghosts and solve their cases has also become a fan-favorite and entered the Top 10 weekly chart of the streaming platform.
While it deals with ghosts, the K-drama is filled with humor, action, and all the emotions that make a K-drama popular among fans. It also features callbacks to iconic roles previously played by the cast. For instance, the premiere Episodes of the latest K-drama feature a scene where Esom appears as a prosecutor named Kang Ha-na, which is actually one of the iconic roles that she played in another fan-favorite K-drama, Taxi Driver.
More on this in our story.
Phantom Lawyer: The SBS K-drama references popular roles of the cast in the premiere Episodes
In the premiere episodes of Phantom Lawyer, Yoo Yeon-seok’s character Shin Yi-rang opens his own law firm after being rejected by all the major law firms. The place that he bought to make his office previously belonged to a Shaman, due to which he began to encounter ghosts.
The first ghost he encounters is Gang-pung, a former gangster who died due to a doctor’s mistake. To help his daughter and the widow, Yi-rang takes up the case and has to go through several life-threatening situations to collect evidence. For instance, going into the drug dealer’s abode to find the EMR record, which would prove the doctor guilty.
However, he is not the only one risking their life as Taebaek’s lawyer, Na-hyeon, also reaches the location to destroy the evidence. While there’s a lot of action, the scenes are also humorous as Na-hyeon tries to trick the crime boss into thinking that she was a prosecutor.
She shows him her badge with the name Kang Ha-na, a prosecutor who wanted to inspect the place. The name is not irrelevant to Esom as it is the name of one of her most popular characters. Ha-na, a Seoul prosecutor, was the role Esom played in SBS’s other popular crime K-drama, Taxi Driver Season 1. Ha-na was among the first characters who were suspicious of Rainbow Taxi’s work and also began to look into it in Season 1 of the beloved K-drama.
Apart from Esom’s fan-favorite character, the premiere episodes of the K-drama also reference one of Yeon-seok’s popular K-dramas as well. In Episode 2 of Phantom Lawyer, when Yi-rang reveals that with the EMR record (a digital record of Gang-pung’s health condition), they won’t need a witness to prove that it was the Doctor’s fault that killed Gang-pung.
Impressed by the information, Gang-pung teases Yi-rang that he should be called Attorney Romantic, a clever callback to Yeon-seok’s popular K-drama, Dr. Romantic, which premiered in 2016.
Along with SBS TV, Phantom Lawyer can also be watched on Netflix, where new episodes will be released every Friday and Saturday.
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Edited by Debashri Roy