Ghost, also titled Phantom (The original title is "유령", romanized as "Yuryeong", and can translate to either title) is a 2012 mystery, psychological, and police procedural South Korean show directed by Kim Hyung-sik and Park Shin-woo, produced by Choi Moon-suk, and written by Kim Eun-hee. This show stars So Ji-sub as Kim Woo-hyun/Park Gi-young and Lee Yeon-hee as Yoo Kang-mi. It aired on the SBS network May through August 2012 for 20 episodes.
Kim Woo-hyun is a young police detective trying to be the best he can be and he succeeds. He gets assigned to the cyber investigations unit, and finds himself trying to take down a hacker named Hades. He finds the hacker's location, which is apparently an apartment building, and he gets there just in time to see an actress fall to her death from a high-rise. It looks like a suicide case, but it turns out to be a conspiracy orchestrated by a mysterious person, and the conspiracy is even connected to Woo-hyun in some way.
This show provides examples of:
- Dead Person Impersonation: Kim Woo-hyun actually gets killed off in an explosion. His former friend the hacker takes over his identity, gets plastic surgery and comes back as the cyber cop one year later.
- Everything Is Online: Woo-hyun manages to find the most obscure facts on the internet.
- Fair Cop: Yoo Kang-mi is a cop and a pretty one at that.
- Friend on the Force: Kang-mi was in a relationship with the real Woo-hyun, and assists the fake Woo-hyun with his investigations.
- Hired to Hunt Yourself: Park Ki-young becomes Kim Woo-hyun to find his friend's killer, but ends up pretending to track himself (his online persona) and also discovering possible dirty deeds by Woo-hyun.
- Inspector Javert: Detective Kwon Hyuk-joo, who is a grunt detective assigned to the Cyber Security Squad for the sole purpose of personally arresting Detective Kim for crimes that occurred years ago.
- Rapid-Fire Typing: Whenever Woo-hyun is at a keyboard.
- Scare Chord: The opening theme from Frank Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera plays on any computer which just got hacked by Phantom.
- Sherlock Homage: Park Ki-young
- Sinister Surveillance: The villas owned by the Sekang Corporation have CCTV outside to track the comings and goings of the vehicles (but not the front doors of the individual villas).
- The Stoic: Kim Woo-hyun is not the emotional type.