Kim Hye-jun's First Rom-Com Is About a Fangirl Who Joins Her Idol's Company, and It's Based on a 600M-View Webtoon

Kim Hye-jun is stepping into her first romantic comedy, and the setup is one that a lot of K-drama viewers will find uncomfortably relatable.

tvN's new Monday-Tuesday drama My Favorite Employee (최애의 사원) aired its first episode on the 3rd, following Nam Da-reum (Kim Hye-jun), a committed fangirl whose entire life has quietly reorganized itself around a single idol. That idol is Lee Chan (Cha Woo-min), a member of the fictional group D.N.X, and Nam Da-reum's devotion to him is, by the show's own accounting, the primary engine of her ambition.

The drama leans into a specific piece of fandom lore from the start: the Korean saying deok-gye-mot, which roughly translates as "a true fan can never actually meet their favorite." It is the fandom equivalent of Murphy's Law, and the show treats it as both the premise and the obstacle.

Nam Da-reum turned her admiration for Lee Chan into a career direction. Because Lee Chan is passionate about fashion, she set her sights on becoming a fashion marketer, holding onto a quiet dream of one day working alongside him. That dream edges closer to reality when she turns down a position at a competitive large company to join Appello, the fashion platform where Lee Chan serves as fashion director. She shows up to every meeting, every after-work dinner, counts down the days until she might finally see him in person.

The universe, predictably, has other plans. In a sequence that will feel painfully familiar to anyone who has ever just missed a celebrity sighting, Lee Chan appears at a company dinner Nam Da-reum skips, and her new colleagues walk away with photos while she gets nothing. The gap between ambition and outcome is where the comedy lives.

The series is adapted from a webtoon that has accumulated over 600 million views, which gives it a built-in audience and a proven emotional grammar before a single scene was filmed. For Kim Hye-jun, it represents a notable shift: she broke through internationally with the dark thriller Killers' Shopping List, which reached the number one spot globally, and My Favorite Employee is her first time in the rom-com genre. The contrast is significant enough that the casting alone carries some curiosity.

Whether the show can hold that curiosity across its run will depend on how well it balances the fandom comedy with something more grounded, but the first episode appears confident in its premise. My Favorite Employee airs Mondays and Tuesdays on tvN.