When tvN and TVING’s “Chef in the Army” (취사병 전설이 되다) wrapped on June 16, it left behind more than just ratings numbers. According to TV Report, the source webtoon’s views surged 61-fold and the original web novel’s views jumped 170-fold after the drama premiered — a reminder that in Korea’s content market right now, a hit screen adaptation doesn’t just promote itself, it sends audiences straight back to hunt down where the story started (TV Report, May 24, 2026).
The drama is based on a 2017 web novel and its 2019 webtoon adaptation, both credited to writer Jay Robin, with art by Lee Jin-su for the webtoon version. The premise is exactly what it sounds like: a story about an army cook turned unlikely legend, the kind of military-comedy setup that’s been a reliable genre in Korean web fiction for years. What changed in May 2026 is that the drama version, led by actor Park Ji-hoon, turned a niche favorite into one of the platform’s bigger conversations of the spring.
The Ratings Case for Why People Went Looking for the Original
The surge in original-IP views didn’t happen in a vacuum. Per TV Report, “Chef in the Army” hit a peak rating of 9.9% within its first two weeks on air — strong enough to take the No. 1 spot in its timeslot among the entire 20-49 demographic across tvN, including terrestrial broadcasters, not just within cable (TV Report, May 24, 2026). On the streaming side, the same report notes the show ranked No. 1 on TVING’s paid-subscriber-contribution chart by its third and fourth episodes, meaning it was doing more than any other title on the platform to convert viewers into paying subscribers. A separate report from Nate/Cine Play corroborates the web novel’s viewership jump specifically, citing the same roughly 170-fold increase in original-source readership after the drama’s release (Nate/Cine Play, 2026).
That combination — strong linear ratings, a No. 1 streaming-conversion ranking, and a triple-digit multiple jump in source-material readership — is a fairly rare trifecta. Most adaptations get one or two of those wins. Getting all three in the same run is usually a sign the drama didn’t just attract an audience; it converted casual viewers into people curious enough to go find out how the story originally ended.
What This Says About Where Webtoon IP Is Headed
For Korea’s webtoon and web-novel platforms, this is the upside case for adaptation deals that doesn’t get talked about as much as box-office or streaming numbers: a successful screen version functions as a discovery engine for the back catalog. A 61-times jump in webtoon views and a 170-times jump in web-novel views, per TV Report’s May 24 figures, represent thousands of readers who almost certainly never knew “Chef in the Army” existed as a written story before the drama aired. That’s a different kind of payoff than licensing revenue — it’s new, durable readership for IP that had been sitting quietly on a platform since 2017 and 2019.
It’s also a pattern that’s shown up repeatedly across Korea’s adaptation pipeline this year: a screen hit doesn’t cannibalize interest in the source material, it resurrects it. For an industry increasingly betting its production slates on existing webtoon and web-novel IP, that’s the clearest evidence yet that the bet keeps paying for itself in both directions.
Sources: TV Report, “원작 찢고 나왔다…방영 하자마자 동시간대 ‘1위’→OTT 잡고 경쟁작 뒤엎은 韓 드라마,” May 24, 2026; Nate/Cine Play, “티빙 휩쓴 박지훈 ‘취사병 전설이 되다’…원작 조회수 170배 폭등,” 2026.
