Think the Greatest Spy Thriller Ever Can’t Be Topped? Disney+ Might Prove You Wrong

File this under remakes I did not see coming but immediately make sense: Disney+ is turning FX's The Americans into a Korean series, and the setup sounds like it could hit just as hard as the original.

The quick version

Disney+ is mounting a big-budget Korean remake of The Americans with Lee Byung-hun ('Squid Game', 'No Other Choice') and Han Ji-min ('Miss Baek') in the leads. The new take moves the action to the 1990s and follows two North Korean spies who have quietly built lives in South Korea, posing as a happily married couple with kids while working to undermine the South from within. Park Eun-kyo (co-writer of Bong Joon-ho's 'Mother ' and Disney+'s 'Made in Korea') is writing and adapting the series, and Ahn Gil-ho ('The Glory') is directing every episode.

Wait, remind me why this is a big deal?

FX's The Americans (2013–2018) is one of TV's best spy dramas, period. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys played Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two deep-cover KGB officers living in Falls Church in the Washington, D.C. area, juggling covert ops and the very un-covert problem of raising their American-born kids. Joe Weisberg created the show, and across six seasons it never really slipped: Rotten Tomatoes scores for the seasons range from 88% to 100%, and the show picked up two Peabody Awards, several Primetime Emmys, and a Golden Globe along the way. If you somehow missed it, it is streaming on Hulu right now.

So what is Disney+ actually changing?

This version keeps the core engine (spies masquerading as a normal family ) and shifts it to a different fault line: North vs. South Korea in the 1990s. Same domestic pressure-cooker, different history and stakes. Lee Byung-hun and Han Ji-min will play the couple, smiling at school events by day while working a mission to destabilize the South at night.

Why this could really work

• The premise lands differently in Korea: The peninsula is still divided, which gives a 1990s-set story real present-day bite. There is also room to explore the very real grief of families split since the 1950s, which could widen the show beyond tradecraft into something human and messy.
• The creative team is stacked: Park Eun-kyo co-wrote 'Mother', one of Bong Joon-ho's sharpest films, and Ahn Gil-ho steering every episode suggests a unified tone and pace from start to finish.
• Lee Byung-hun knows this terrain: He led 2009's 'IRIS', a KBS spy thriller that was both a critical and commercial hit, playing a South Korean Special Forces operative betrayed by his own side and entangled with the North. That is a pretty great audition reel for this.

And yes, the bar is high

Remakes rarely outrun their source, and The Americans is already top-tier. But swapping Cold War Washington for 90s Seoul could open up story angles the original never had, while letting the show tackle long-running wounds that are still very much alive. If Disney+ gives the series room to be bold, this has a real shot at being more than a copy-and-paste.

Side note: If your spy diet runs from Bond and 'Mission: Impossible ' to TV staples like 'Homeland', '24', and 'Alias', this setup feels designed to hook you from episode one.