Seo Kang-joon and Ahn Eun-jin Can't Save a Drama Stuck at 2%

Four episodes into Other Than You (너 말고 다른 연애), the KBS 2TV Saturday-Sunday drama has not moved off a 2% viewership rating since its first broadcast. That number, taken alone, says little at this stage of a run, but it reflects something the episodes themselves make clear: a capable cast is being asked to compensate for a script that has not yet done the work of making its central relationship worth rooting for.

The pairing drew genuine anticipation. Seo Kang-joon won the Grand Prize at the KBS Drama Awards for Undercover High School and brings easy warmth to romantic leads. Ahn Eun-jin built a reputation in melodrama across Lovers and A Kiss That Kills, demonstrating a specific fluency with complicated, inward emotion. On paper this is a strong match.

Where the chemistry works

And in places it is. A scene in which the two exchange half-awake morning calls the day after their breakup, a ten-year habit their bodies haven't registered as finished, lands with the specificity that good romance drama earns rather than announces. Seo Kang-joon layers fatigue and residual longing inside what reads on the surface as simple warmth. Ahn Eun-jin moves between wounded pride and genuine grief without forcing the transition. That two people loved each other for a decade is, in these moments, entirely believable.

The premise is also coherent. Nam Gung-ho (Seo Kang-joon) holds a stable position at a large corporation; Lee Mi-do (Ahn Eun-jin) is a film director who has just been removed from her own project and is watching her livelihood contract around her. The tension built into their situation, that Mi-do receives Ho's generosity as both a comfort and a reminder of her own precariousness, is the kind of specific emotional knot worth spending eight episodes untangling.

The script's structural problem

The problem is not with the actors or the basic setup but with how the script distributes sympathy and consequence.

Nam Gung-ho as written is, as the original Korean reviews have noted, close to a fantasy. He is professionally accomplished, domestically capable, attentive to Mi-do's family, and willing to offer his own savings account to support her filmmaking. Every scene he is in delivers another data point confirming his decency. The drama calls this a "unicorn boyfriend" and leans into the label without complication. What it doesn't provide, at least through four episodes, is the counterweight: where does his responsibility-as-love become its own kind of pressure? That layer exists in the premise but rarely makes it onto the screen.

The consequence is that Mi-do's desire for independence, which should read as a serious conflict, collapses into what looks like a person pushing away someone who is simply very good to her. That is not a problem with the character's design. It is a problem of proportion: the drama shows Ho's devotion far more often than it shows the structural reasons Mi-do finds it suffocating.

Mi-do's more confrontational moments compound this. When she pours liquor over the head of a stranger to inconvenience the lawyer Han Tae-seung (Lee Joo-an), or lodges a brick through his windshield, the intention seems to be to establish her as someone who fights back against an unfair industry. In practice, for a character already struggling financially and already accumulating situations she cannot resolve, the scenes read less as defiance and more as recklessness. The drama hasn't given the viewer enough of Mi-do's interiority before each escalation, so the behavior lands ahead of the sympathy it needs to function.

The An Eun-jin problem

There is a specific and somewhat unfair irony in how Ahn Eun-jin's skill operates here. The more precisely she conveys Mi-do's anger and grievance, the more visible the character's aggression becomes, and the less the script has done to build the foundation that would make that aggression feel earned rather than alienating. Good acting does not automatically produce a character an audience wants to spend time with. What the actor needs is for the writing to provide the connective tissue between Mi-do's past wounds and her present behavior. Four episodes in, that tissue is largely missing.

The supporting cast and what comes next

The two potential alternate love interests, Han Tae-seung and Park Su-a (Jo A-ram), are similarly underserved. Tae-seung reads more as an antagonist with a thin veneer of attraction than as a figure who generates the genuine pull that would give the title's "other relationship" its weight. Su-a appears as a junior colleague chasing a corporate scandal, a role that so far functions mainly to draw Nam Gung-ho into a new storyline rather than to establish her as someone the viewer is curious about. Whether this reflects casting or writing is difficult to say at this point; the material hasn't been generous enough to either actor to make the distinction clear.

What the drama needs from here is not a better lead performance, both of those are already in place, but a redistribution of the script's persuasive effort. Mi-do's choices need to be as legible as Ho's devotion. The new partners need to generate interest on their own terms. Seo Kang-joon and Ahn Eun-jin have already shown, in the scenes that work, that they can carry a decade of shared history between them. The next task belongs to the writers: give the audience a reason to stay for the relationship rather than for the one person in it who currently seems to deserve better.