Song Kang and Lee Joon-young's Four Hands Climbs to 7.3% in 3 Weeks

Song Kang's return from military service couldn't have landed more cleanly. His post-enlistment debut in tvN's Four Hands has carried the drama from a 3.4% premiere rating all the way to 7.3% (Nielsen Korea, national basis), and the two leads are now holding the top two spots on Korea's weekly buzz rankings, with no sign of slowing down.

What the show is actually about

Four Hands, airing on tvN's Saturday-Sunday slot, follows two piano prodigies who meet at an arts high school and spend years bound together by rivalry, friendship, and unresolved feeling. Song Kang plays Kang Bi-o, a pianist who must constantly prove himself to his grandfather, a world-renowned conductor. Lee Joon-young plays Choi Jeong-yo, a musician of overwhelming natural talent who carries a deep-seated trauma that has kept him from the instrument.

The early episodes built their pull from the gap between those two positions: Song Kang's character genuinely loves Joon-young's playing, while quietly feeling the wall of innate talent he cannot cross. Lee Joon-young's character, meanwhile, uses that relationship to inch past the fears that shut him down. The dynamic has drawn comparisons to a romantic lead pairing in terms of emotional depth, which has clearly helped the word-of-mouth spread beyond the classical music niche the show occupies.

That word-of-mouth showed up fast in the numbers. The drama launched at 3.4%, climbed steadily across its first half, and has now reached 7.3%. In a weekend slot typically dominated by action-heavy crowd-pleasers, pulling those figures with a story centered on concert halls and Chopin is a real result.

Three weeks at the top

GoodData Corporation's FUNdex TV-OTT integrated buzz survey for the second week of September ranked Four Hands first among all dramas, marking its third consecutive week at the top. In the individual cast chart, Lee Joon-young placed first and Song Kang second, giving the show a clean sweep of the top two positions.

For Song Kang, the timing is significant. He enlisted after his previous run of leading roles and Four Hands is his first leading part since discharge. The concern with any actor returning from mandatory military service is whether the momentum carries, and the worry fans sometimes call gunbaegi (the gap left by enlistment) is visible enough in the industry that erasing it is considered an achievement in itself. His performance here, capturing the particular mix of youthful sincerity and anxiety that Bi-o carries, has been well-reviewed, and the school-uniform scenes have drawn genuine affection rather than discomfort, which is not always a given for actors in their late twenties playing high schoolers.

Lee Joon-young is coming at the situation from the opposite direction. He enlisted in July, making Four Hands his last project before service. The fact that it is generating this level of attention while he is already in the military means he enters his enlistment period with momentum already banked, a position most actors can only hope for.

He had already built that momentum through New Employee CEO Kang, the JTBC drama that wrapped in July. Back-to-back hit credits in the same year, with the second one continuing to perform after he has already left, solidifies his standing as a reliable lead rather than a promising one.

What happens in episode 6

Four Hands passed its halfway point with episode 6, which closed on a significant turn: the long-absent Choi Jeong-yo returns, and when he does, he has become a world-class conductor. The shift in status between the two characters reframes everything the first half established, and the question of how their relationship plays out now that the power dynamic has changed is generating real anticipation. Ratings are widely expected to keep climbing through the second half.