Kim Min's 90-Year-Old Fixer-Upper Is the Ratings Cure I Live Alone Needs

MBC's I Live Alone recorded a 3.5% national rating on the 25th, its lowest figure in the show's recent run and part of a steady slide that began after a 6.5% peak in late August. The broader context matters: the program has now shed three percentage points across five consecutive episodes, and a staging controversy involving a Jeon Hyun-moo impromptu-travel segment has clouded its credibility along the way.

The production team acknowledged in September that some scenes in that episode had been directed rather than spontaneous, a concession that drew pointed responses online. "Just cancel it," wrote some viewers; others said the show no longer felt like the program they once followed. For a variety series now in its 13th year, the slippage carries extra weight.

The bet on Kim Min

The card the show is playing this week is actor Kim Min, whose episode airs October 2. He opens the preview with a line that sets the tone immediately: "I've been living alone for 28 years." What follows in the teaser isn't the standard celebrity home tour of sleek new apartments and tasteful furniture. Kim Min's home is a 80-to-90-year-old guok, an old traditional house, in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province, a satellite city about 40 kilometers north of Seoul that rarely appears in this kind of television.

The interior reflects a life assembled from multiple directions. Kim Min spent time abroad before returning to Korea, and the objects he brought back sit alongside Korean folding screens (byeongpung), worn furniture, and small items whose origins are genuinely hard to place. The result is less a curated space than an accumulated one, and the show appears to lean into that distinction.

Because the house is old, it also requires regular attention. Kim Min is shown patching and repairing parts of the structure himself, a detail that several viewers in preview reactions noted felt closer to the show's early-season ethos, when the premise was about observing how people actually live rather than where they live. His morning routine is equally unadorned: waking up, sitting in front of a folding screen, and eating a baguette with coffee.

A second life outside the set

The episode also surfaces something most of his recent projects haven't shown. After leaving home by motorcycle, Kim Min arrives at a hapkido gym where he teaches as a certified instructor. On screen he runs a class with the kind of composed authority his acting roles tend to project, but when younger students complain or goof off, he drops into something considerably warmer. The contrast is useful television, and it's a side of him that hasn't been publicly documented before.

Kim Min built his profile through a run of genre work that rewarded a specific physical and dramatic presence. He registered widely as John in Disney+'s Casino, then appeared in The Roundup: No Way Out, Smugglers, Netflix's Delivery Man, and Robbers: Sword of Justice. His most sustained role came in Disney+'s Killing Shopping Mall, where he played Pashin, an action-heavy character he reprised for the second season. He currently appears in Wavve's Reverse and tvN's Four Hands.

Whether one episode can arrest a multi-week ratings decline is a reasonable question to hold. What the I Live Alone team seems to understand is that the specific complaint about the show, that it has drifted toward performance rather than documentation, is exactly what Kim Min's episode, at least in preview, appears to push against.