Hyeri's Big Drama Comeback Is Pulling Reply 1988 Comparisons, and Losing

Lee Hyeri's last major drama lead pulled a 19.6% peak rating. Her current one just scraped 2.1%.

ENA's Monday-Tuesday romantic comedy I Give It to You hit a series low in its fifth episode, airing on June 27, according to Nielsen Korea data. That 2.1% figure marked the show's worst performance since launch, erasing the modest upward climb it had posted across its first three episodes. Episode six, which aired June 28, nudged back to 2.3%, technically a recovery, but not one anyone on the production team is celebrating.

The show debuted at 2.7%, ticked up to 2.8% in episode two and 2.9% in episode three, then reversed course. Episode four slid back to 2.7%, and episode five dropped another 0.6 percentage points to the series floor. For a cable drama with this cast, staying below 3% is a problem.

The cast is genuinely stacked. Hwang In-yeop plays Woo Su-bin, a prodigy film director who swept international festivals with his debut feature and returns to Korea searching for his first love. Lee Hyeri plays Joo Yi-jae, a burned-out reporter who once dreamed of making films alongside him. Supporting them are Lee Sang-yeop as film company CEO Seo In-wook, Lee Yeol-eum as top actress Oh Ha-na, and Baek Sung-cheol as bit-part actor Shim Yu-geon, who is running out of time to make it before he turns thirty.

Hyeri is the name that drew the most pre-broadcast attention, and the comparison doing the rounds right now is an uncomfortable one. Her breakout role as Sung Deok-sun in tvN's Reply 1988 (2015) turned into one of the highest-rated cable dramas in Korean television history. A 19.6% peak on cable is not a number most actors ever touch. Coming into I Give It to You as a lead, the expectations were real.

Episodes five and six did what the show does best, lean into guilt, old wounds, and slow-burn tension. Episode five revealed that Woo Su-bin has spent fifteen years carrying responsibility for a traffic accident that left Joo Yi-jae with a leg scar. The truth came out in a confrontation with his abusive father Woo Cheol-gyu (played by Jung Hae-gyun), who pressed the knife in further by telling Su-bin he has a talent for ruining people. Episode six picked up the fallout: Su-bin in tears, Yi-jae taking a hit from her assistant director's gossip behind her back, and their emotional distance widening right when it should be closing.

A secondary storyline had Shim Yu-geon taking Oh Ha-na for a late-night motorbike ride after a drunk audience member said something cruel to her. She opened up about feeling trapped inside a fake world built by her mother, framing it around the ending of The Truman Show, and that scene landed with more warmth than the main couple managed this week.

Meanwhile, Seo In-wook's subplot added a different kind of tension: after spending the night with Choi Sa-rang (played by Lee Ji-min) and then finding himself blocked on her phone, he signs up for a love reality show called Love Chain that she writes for. Whether that's desperation or a strategy is the question the show is leaving open.

The writing is doing serious work on theme, guilt, inherited trauma, dreams deferred, but I Give It to You hasn't yet translated that into numbers. Whether the story's emotional payoff arrives before audience patience runs out is the real question heading into episode seven, which airs July 3 at 10 p.m. KST on ENA.