Love Scout
2025
12 + 2 episodes
Starring Han Ji Min, Lee Joon Hyuk
Netflix
This is light. Not so melodramatic. Even the villain’s role isn’t that sinister. At least the conflict isn’t enough to spoil your midnight snacks in bed, just an irritant.
Viewers binged on Love Scout enough to give it ratings that went up consistently to double digits, and with chronic K-drama addiction, they awaited its last episode last Valentine’s day. They turned veteran actor Lee Jun Hyuk into a heartthrob daddy—he’s a single dad in the story. And—it doesn’t hurt that apart from his good, clean-cut looks the role calls for, this actor, who ironically has never been typecast as a romcom lead, must have one of the best physiques in K-dramaland. You’ve seen him in Designated Survivor, Vigilante, Along With the Gods—not romantic, like I said—though he was also in the romcom Our Beloved Summer. He’s now the glamorous face of Cartier in Korea.
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And—Lee Jun Hyuk is coming to Manila for a fan meet. (Details to be announced)
Han Ji Min is the actress we remember best for One Spring Night, where she falls in love with the single dad (right, single dad again) played by Jung Hae In, and The Light in Your Eyes, one of the most touching K-dramas on our list, where she plays the younger self of an old woman lost to dementia, with actor Nam Joo Hyuk (Twenty-Five Twenty-One, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo). Han Ji Min is one actress who’s impressed us with how she underplays a role—she doesn’t turn a romantic scene into mush. She can be alluring without being syrupy.
In Love Scout, she plays a driven, robotic headhunter, the CEO of her own search firm who, in a career formation talk, leaves her supposedly idealistic student listeners aghast when she tells them to know your financial worth and market value. Her cold, mercenary pragmatism is established early on in the drama. Her character, Kang JiYun, is a go-getter boss who can’t even call her staff by their names simply because she doesn’t know their names—abysmal EQ.
In contrast, Lee Jun Hyuk plays HR manager Yu Eun Ho, who is a people person, who puts premium on relationships, human values, such as loyalty to his firm and colleagues, and commitment to family life.
At the onset, it is obvious their values are at cross purposes. They first encounter each other while she’s headhunting a valuable executive in Eu Ho’s firm, a hot shot expert Eu Ho likes to keep in his HR’s high-protect manpower list. Cliché, she dismisses his spiel about company loyalty, during their initial meet. Their first encounter is in the temple where both try to corner the executive—Eu Ho to persuade him to stay and JiYun to pirate him. This temple scene is a foretaste of the sweet-sour, comic-sad, romantic-adversarial moments that Eu Ho and JiYun will have. Darkness overtakes them in the temple, as they negotiate the steep steps down the hill. Her phone light runs out of battery, he walks past her indifferently, to leave her groping her way in the dark. But then he steps back and decides to light her path. At the end of the downhill trek, at the foot of the trail, the two face each other, like two rivals not bound for ceasefire. They tell each other—let’s not make the mistake of running into each other again.
It is such sweet antagonism that will create the sizzling chemistry between the lead pair of Love Scout—the unconventional romance that will keep many viewers hooked. For a change in K-drama, it’s the woman who’s the CEO and the man is the subordinate. But actor Lee Jun Hyuk has the charm and expertise to turn his low-on-the-totem-pole character appealing, and actress Han Ji Min knows how to turn her alpha-female character into warm vulnerability.
For a change in K-drama, it’s the woman who’s the CEO and the man is the subordinate
The series’ writer (Ji Eun) and directors (Ham Joon Ho and Kim Jae Hong) project quite convincingly the contrasting worlds of the couple. She comes home to a swanky but dreary apartment—all shades of grey, literally, and bare. He builds for him and his precocious daughter a bright and cheery apartment covered with little-girl stickers and toys. He starts his day cooking breakfast for her.
But then in his own company, he’s put in the freezer by a boss who now holds a deep grudge against him. Flashback: when the boss needed him most, our single dad chose to go on a long paternal leave because his daughter, who is struggling in school, needed him to be around. Long story short, he is set up for failure by the boss (information leak, an offense that robs him of any chance to work in the industry), and is fired. As his ex-classmate puts in, Eu Ho has done many firsts in his batch—married, divorced in his 20s, now a single dad, now getting fired.
She, in contrast, succeeds in establishing her own headhunting firm after—the series gives clues to this early on—a tragic incident in her old company. Her she-devil of a former boss, the series reveals, will never let her be. The corporate success of CEO JiYun comes at the end of a messy corporate trail—and she herself has yet to shake off a traumatic loss from childhood.
HR jobs now off-limits to him, EuHo has nowhere to go and ends up applying to be her secretary. How he becomes her secretary—and how he fares as one, cleaning after her literally messy office, one clutter (i.e. her designer bag) at a time, is the fun of this drama-comedy. She’s a scatterbrain, he’s spic and span.
Her best friend, who serves as her all-around assistant, like a corporate “yaya” (you know the type), delivers the laughs. She is responsible for hiring EuHo as the secretary because she is already going nuts trying to run the office.
The supporting cast is so good at giving us the comic relief we need from the sinister plots hatched by the villainess. Also, the second leads serve as romantic options for the OTP (one true pair): in her case, the male heir of the business tycoon who funds her headhunting firm is in love with her. As the story unfolds, we learn why this business patriarch has financed her firm in the first place.
In the case of our male lead, a woman neighbor, who also happens to be a single mom, helps him look after his daughter. Her “son” is his daughter’s age. He and she share child-rearing chores, like taking turns picking them up in school. She is secretly in love with him.
In short, all’s well in the third-party love scenario.
How EuHo the secretary tries to protect his CEO in every aspect of her career and life, from the mundane to the crucial issues, is what keeps the series going. Now what modern woman would not love this—a suitor (handsome) who watches out even for your designer bag?!
And just as when the story is about to drag, towards the end, you discover the past that links them both, unbeknownst to them until then. Will their love survive this secret from the past?
You kept tuned in all the way to Valentine’s Day—and after.
Now you know why there are fans waiting for Lee Jun Hyuk in Manila.
