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A 4.2% Debut for a ‘Successful Fan’
What if you took a job just to see your favorite idol — and ended up clashing constantly with the CEO instead? That’s the premise tvN’s Monday-Tuesday drama My Bias’s Employee opened with. According to Nielsen Korea, the nationwide rating for the August 3 premiere was 4.2%. Episode 2 dipped to 3.1%, then episode 3, which aired August 10, climbed back to 3.9%. It’s still early, and too soon to call a direction for the show.
The lead, Nam Da-reum, has spent ten years as a fan of idol Lee Chan. To become a “성덕” — a fan whose devotion actually pays off, in this case by meeting or working near their idol — she takes a job at the fashion platform company Lee Chan founded. Instead, she keeps colliding with the company’s prickly CEO, Kang Ha-gi, more than with her idol himself. Kim Hye-jun, Kang Hoon, and Cha Woo-min play the fan, the CEO, and the idol in this triangle. (KoreaUpClose first introduced the show and this premise when it premiered on August 11.)
The Source Material Is a Webtoon That Already Ended, at 128 Chapters
The drama’s starting point is writer Seong-eun’s Naver Webtoon series My Older Brother Is an Idol. It began serializing in 2017 and wrapped, main story and spin-offs included, at 128 chapters — an all-ages romance still available on the platform today. Naver Webtoon’s own one-line description captures the setup precisely: an obsessive fan, Nam Da-reum, gets a job at the company run by the older-brother figure she’s into.
Production reports and related coverage cite the original’s cumulative global views at 660 million, with a 9.2 rating on Naver Webtoon. That figure isn’t new traffic generated after the drama aired — it’s the total built up over years across multiple language versions. So it would be wrong to read it as “660 million views because of the drama.” The broadcast looks more like a new entry point back into an already-completed hit.
TV Ratings and Source-Material Interest Don’t Move at the Same Speed
A 3-4% TV rating doesn’t mean the source material is getting ignored. A broadcast airs on a schedule, one episode at a time; a webtoon reader can binge from chapter one to the ending at whatever pace they like. As the love triangle intensifies on screen, viewers get curious about the choices made in the original, and start comparing the actors’ performances to the webtoon characters. Being a completed series only makes that binge easier.
Still, the currently available data doesn’t make clear exactly how much the webtoon’s views or paid transactions increased after the broadcast began. Calling it a “reverse surge” would require before-and-after comparisons of views or rankings. What can be said with confidence right now is that the drama re-introduced a long-finished work, and opened a search pathway for readers curious about its setup and ending.
What the Drama Actually Changed
The original and the adaptation share the same basic structure, but putting it on screen changes how quickly audiences absorb the characters. Fan devotion that lived in speech bubbles and facial expressions in the webtoon now comes through in Kim Hye-jun’s voice and body language, and the appeal of both Kang Ha-gi and Lee Chan gets filled in through the actors’ timing. The office and the fashion-platform setting, built as an actual set, also makes the “showing up to work at your bias’s company” fantasy feel more tangible.
The original, in turn, is better suited to revisiting Nam Da-reum’s emotional shifts at whatever pace a reader wants. Watch one episode of the drama, then look up the same stretch in the webtoon, and there’s a particular pleasure in spotting what was adapted and what dialogue survived untouched. Original fans get to guess at the reasoning behind changes; viewers arriving through the drama get to discover a longer version of the story. One story, two different kinds of fan behavior across two media.
The Next Numbers to Watch: Episode 4 and the Webtoon’s Own Metrics
The drama’s ratings went from 4.2% at the premiere to 3.1% in episode 2, then back up to 3.9% in episode 3. Three episodes in, it’s too early to call a stable audience. Whether the momentum holds once the triangle sharpens after episode 4 — and whether online buzz converts into same-night viewership — is the next thing to watch.
On the source-material side, what matters is whether Naver Webtoon releases before-and-after view and transaction figures. If that data appears, it will be much easier to confirm whether “getting read again” is an actual reverse-surge or just a vibe. If you’re opening the original for the first time now, decide first whether you want to know the drama’s ending in advance — it’s a completed, 128-chapter series you can binge in one sitting, so a casual side-by-side read can easily turn into an all-nighter.
Source: Jang Jin-ri, Yonhap News, August 4, 2026; Lee Jae-eun, Money Today, August 11, 2026; Naver Webtoon “My Older Brother Is an Idol” series information, confirmed August 11, 2026.
