An Pan-seok's Final Drama Yeonae Bagsa Debuts at 1.8% with Kim So-hyun's Moving Tribute

Yeonae Bagsa, the last drama completed by director An Pan-seok before his death, premiered on ENA on October 5 to a 1.8% national viewership rating, according to Nielsen Korea. It is a modest but meaningful opening for a series that carries more emotional weight than most: An, long regarded as one of Korean television's finest directors, passed away in August after battling a cerebral hemorrhage.

On the day of the premiere, lead actress Kim So-hyun posted a tribute on social media that captured what many viewers were already feeling. "When I received the script for the first time, the nerves, the worries I carried through filming, the moments we laughed and cried together, all of it flashes before me so vividly," she wrote. She added that she would never forget everything she learned from An, and acknowledged the ache of wishing she had done more: "I keep thinking I could have done better, that I should have done better. But knowing him, I think he would have told me I was fine just as I was, and that makes me miss him even more."

The story and the performances

The premiere introduced the two leads through a sequence of small, well-timed accidents. Park Min-jae (Choo Young-woo), a mechanical engineering PhD student who lost one leg to osteosarcoma, crosses paths with Lim Yu-jin (Kim So-hyun) on the subway, where she falls asleep beside him in a daze. When she wakes and rushes off, she trips and scrapes her knee; he gives her his handkerchief and quietly steadies the broken heel of her shoe before she goes. Their second meeting comes later the same day, when Min-jae witnesses Yu-jin throw herself into a confrontation at a professor's farewell dinner to protect a friend from a classmate's harassment.

Kim So-hyun's performance in that first episode was notably controlled. She distinguished between Yu-jin's two emotional registers, the firm, unhesitating person who steps in for her friend, and the quietly flustered one who can't stop glancing at the back of Choo Young-woo's head on the bus, without telegraphing either. The subtlety feels right for material directed by An Pan-seok, whose work across Haebyeonui Yeoin, Misty, Something in the Rain, and One Spring Night built much of its impact on precisely that kind of restrained observation. Yu-jin's indecision about her future, caught between finishing her master's degree and finding work, gives the character enough texture beyond the romance to make her early choices feel grounded.

Choo Young-woo's Park Min-jae is still coming into focus, but the premiere establishes the dynamic clearly: a man who has learned to move through the world without drawing attention to his prosthetic limb, and who extends small, practical kindnesses almost reflexively. The shoe scene is the episode's neatest directorial touch, functional and romantic without announcing itself as either.

An Pan-seok's legacy

An Pan-seok directed some of the most widely admired Korean dramas of the past two decades. Haebyeonui Yeoin, Misty, Something in the Rain, and One Spring Night earned him a reputation for intimate, adult storytelling centered on female characters navigating desire, compromise, and social pressure. Yeonae Bagsa, which follows a PhD student who lost his leg as a teenager and a graduate student rethinking her future, fits comfortably within that tradition.

He died in August 2026 while undergoing treatment for a cerebral hemorrhage. That the show arrived with Kim So-hyun's tribute and a viewership that, while not large, represents a genuine audience choosing to watch on a weeknight cable channel suggests the premiere did what it needed to do. Yeonae Bagsa airs every Monday and Tuesday at 10 p.m. on ENA.