SBS's 'My Ugly Duckling' Turns 10: The PD Behind Korea's Longest-Running Sunday Variety Show Reflects on What Kept It Alive

SBS variety show Miun Uri Saekki (titled My Ugly Duckling for international audiences) turns 10 on August 26, making it one of the longest-running Sunday entertainment programs in Korean broadcast television. The show first aired on August 26, 2016, and has since become a fixture of SBS's weekend lineup, building an audience that returns not for spectacle but for something closer to the rhythms of family life.

Director Jeong Seong-won, in remarks released through SBS ahead of the anniversary, described the milestone as "a dream for the production team and an honor that is difficult to encounter even once in a lifetime." He credited the show's durability to the mothers who appear as studio panelists each week, the cast, the crew, and the viewers who, as he put it, have laughed and cried with the show over a long stretch of time.

The motherly gaze as editorial engine

Jeong identified the show's central creative mechanism with some precision. The mothers on the panel, collectively nicknamed the "Mobengers" by fans, function as a kind of reframing device. When a celebrity guest does something embarrassing or thoughtless, the mothers' sighs and affectionate scolding pull the moment out of judgment and into recognition. Behavior that might read as strange or off-putting from a stranger becomes understandable, even sympathetic, when filtered through a family's eyes.

"Family scolds flaws more harshly than others would," Jeong said, "but in the end, it embraces even those shortcomings with warmth." That tension, between frank criticism and unconditional acceptance, is something few variety formats manage to sustain over time, and Jeong credits it as the primary reason the show has remained distinct.

The format's peak ratings support the claim. A December 30, 2018 broadcast drew a metropolitan audience rating of 28.5% by Nielsen Korea, a figure that SBS says is the highest recorded by any variety program to debut since 2016. Singer Hong Jin-young and her sister appeared in that episode.

How the casting criteria changed

Perhaps the most substantive thing Jeong shared was how the show's approach to selecting guests has evolved. In the early years, the show organized itself around the idea of the "pitiable older bachelor," a middle-aged single man whose daily life was presented as something to feel wistfully sorry for. That framing was, for a time, the engine of the format.

Jeong said the production has moved away from it deliberately. "Now we prioritize how proactively and honestly someone lives their own life," he explained, "whether there is a gap between their public image and their actual daily routine, and whether they carry the same anxieties as viewers do." The emphasis has shifted from social circumstance to character, from the pathos of not being married to the texture of how someone actually moves through the world.

This tracks with a broader shift in how Korean audiences relate to single-person households. As living alone and choosing not to marry have become more normalized across age groups, a format that treats bachelorhood as inherently poignant would age poorly. Jeong acknowledged as much, saying he wants to expand the show's scope toward "respect for diverse lifestyles and preferences" rather than framing its subjects as objects of sympathy.

The MCs and the guest Jeong still wants to book

Jeong spoke warmly about the show's two long-running MCs. He described Shin Dong-yeop as "a mother figure" responsible for the studio's harmony and ease, and Seo Jang-hoon as "a warm but strict father figure" whose candid, practical advice grounds the conversation differently. The two have anchored the format since its early years and, in Jeong's reading, embody the same family dynamic the show is built around.

For a future guest, Jeong named singer Shin Seung-hun, a balladeer who has maintained a distinctive public persona for decades. "I want viewers to see the human wit hidden behind that warm, quiet smile of his," Jeong said. The choice is telling: Shin Seung-hun carries a certain gravitas that the show does not usually associate with its guests, and booking him would be a statement about how far the format has stretched from its original premise.

What comes next

Jeong framed the next phase of the show as a deliberate effort to resist the inertia that long-running programs tend to accumulate. "I want to guard against the complacency that comes easily to programs with a long run," he said, "and to breathe in step with a world that changes every day."

The goal, as he described it, is to remain what he called a "young, trendy human sitcom" that can bring multiple generations into the same conversation on a Sunday evening. For a show that has been on the air for a decade, that is less a relaunch than a recalibration, one that the anniversary gives Jeong a clear occasion to articulate publicly.