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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Song Ha-yoon, Lee Dong-ha (Super Junior)
Latest Nielsen rating: 0.39 per cent
Youngsimi, a popular South Korean animated show from the early 1990s based on a comic book, 14-Year-Old Youngsim, has been revived in live-action drama series Oh! Youngsim, starring Song Ha-yoon (Fight for My Way) and Lee Dong-hae, a member of the K-pop band Super Junior.
In this follow-up, the lead character, Oh Young-sim (Song), has grown up into a tenacious but struggling reality-television producer in her mid-30s.
She has a gift for convincing big names to appear on her shows – she likes to call herself the “Queen of Casting” – but, alas, her programmes inevitably wind up getting the axe.
Meanwhile, junior producers including her former subordinates keep moving ahead of her.


We get our first taste of Young-sim’s grit and determination as she pedals her bicycle furiously alongside the Han River, trying to convince a young celebrity to appear on her current show.
Not taking his repeated and emphatic “noes” for an answer, she challenges the athletic young man to a race, and winds up crashing almost as soon as she takes off.
She walks back into the OSN television network headquarters with a limp, but has also landed the big name for her show.
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Alas, after stepping into the office of her boss Heo Gil-dong (Lee Do-yub), she learns that her latest programme has been unceremoniously dropped as well. Undaunted, Young-sim swipes from his desk plans for a proposed project he has been struggling to get off the ground, and decides to take it on herself.
The project is Love Lines, a dating show. Young-sim beams that she is a dating expert, but her assistant Lee Chae-dong (Lee Min-jae), who clearly has a thing for her, thinks otherwise. He starts counting off the years that she has been single – she stops him after he gets to five.
Young-sim lives at home with several siblings and their father, Oh Dae-gwang (Song Young-jae). Dae-gwang is a comic-book artist who was inspired by Youngsim’s antics as a child to write the hit comic book 14-Year-Old Youngsim. This became the even more successful animated show Youngsimi, which made the real Young-shim a minor celebrity 20 years earlier.

Part of the original story focuses on the possibility of young love between Young-sim and Wang Kyung-tae, a local boy with a crush on her.
She refused his advances at first but was slowly won over by him, until she eventually relented and agreed to go on a date with him on his birthday, only he never shows up. She is crestfallen to learn that he has gone to study in America with his family and is not expected to return.
Young-sim busies herself casting her new programme, which will feature three women and three men going on dates suggested by an AI programme. Among the people she casts are her arrogant friend Gu Wul-sook (Jung Woo-yeon), a YouTuber with a dating channel, but the hardest slot for her to fill is that of the last male participant.
Her staff recommends that she go after Mark Wang (Lee), the mysterious head of the start-up Kingsvely, a company that uses AI to recommend fashion to its users. As luck would have it, Young-sim’s younger sister Oh Soon-shim (Gayoung, member of the K-pop outfit Stellar) has just started working there and helps to put them in touch.

Mark is convinced to appear on the show but Young-sim gets a big shock on the day of shooting when she discovers that this mysterious entrepreneur is none other than the grown-up Wang Kyung-tae.
She gets another shock when one of the female contestants gets into an accident and needs to be replaced. With no time or other options available to her, Young-sim puts herself into the show.
High jinks ensue as Young-sim goes on a series of awful dates with the contestants, during which she wolfs down spicy rice cakes and vomits on a pedal boat. Her date with Mark turns into a confrontational karaoke battle.
As an original series for the relatively small streaming service Genie TV – though it is also airing on ENA – Oh! Youngsim does not benefit from the same budget as shows on other services, and it shows.

With dull visuals, awkward sound effects and a slapstick sense of humour, the series feels like it belongs on a K-drama schedule from 2003, rather than 2023. Then again, given the show’s hearkening back to an older Korean programme, it can occasionally get away with this.
The show’s roots are the strongest thing about it. The flashback sequences to Young-sim as a 14-year-old, which include some of the original animation, are quaint and delightful.
The concept of the grown-up version of a popular character fending for herself is also intriguing, though decidedly this is no Gone Girl, the David Fincher film which employs a similar gambit for its female lead.
Song throws herself into her role as Young-sim with a cute and bubbly performance, but the spark is not quite there. Yet it is hard to place all the blame at her feet. The character she inhabits is woefully stereotypical and it is hard for that K-drama charm to shine through owing to the lower than usual budget.

For all its faults, what Oh! Youngsim does have going for it is brevity. Episodes are 45 minutes or less and the season only has 10 of them, so at least investigating a little further after a rocky start should not be too much of a hardship.
Oh! Youngsim is streaming on Viu.


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Song Ha-yoon in a still from “Oh! Youngsim”.

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A popular Korean cartoon from the 1990s is revived in Oh! Youngsim, a grown-up, live-action follow-up that finds Oh Young-sim (Song Ha-yoon) in her mid-30s
While Song throws herself into her leading role, the spark is not quite there – the visuals are dull and the sound effects awkward, given the show’s low budget


Korean drama Oh! Youngsim is a rocky update of a 1990s animated series based on a Korean pop-culture figure. Song Ha-yoon stars as Oh Young-sim, with Super Junior’s Lee Dong-hae co-starring.
