“Kim Bujang” (“Manager Kim”), the SBS Friday-Saturday action-revenge drama marking So Ji-sub’s return to the network after 13 years, posted a 15.7 percent nationwide rating (per Nielsen Korea) for its second episode, aired June 27 — a 6.2 percentage-point jump from its 9.5 percent premiere, according to a June 28 report by Munhwa Ilbo reporter An Jin-yong. That makes it the fastest any Korean drama has crossed the 15 percent threshold in five years, since “The Penthouse 3” in 2021, and it already tops every other Korean drama that aired in 2026, including MBC’s “21st Century Grand Prince Consort” (13.8 percent), SBS’s “Judge Lee Han-young” (13.6 percent), and tvN’s “Undercover Miss Hong” (13.1 percent).
The premise, based on a webtoon of the same name: So plays Kim Do-hyun, a former black-ops intelligence officer who went undercover as a North Korean military officer, now living as an ordinary father under a promise to his late wife to “live like every dad in the world who’d do anything for his daughter.” Episode 2 breaks that peace when his daughter Min-ji goes missing after a conflict with the daughter of a construction-company family. Kim skips work, tracks down the people responsible, and lets the old black-ops coldness resurface — delivering a line to the delinquents involved that’s become the episode’s most-quoted moment: “Lose a parent and they call you an orphan. Lose a spouse and they call you a widow. There’s no word for a parent who’s lost a child — because it’s too much grief to have anything left to lose. If ‘juvenile offender’ is a fair label for you, then I should be called a ‘lawless middle-aged man.'” He’s arrested by the end of the episode and says nothing under questioning, until his daughter’s number flashes on a phone screen in view of the camera.
For So Ji-sub, this is a homecoming: his SBS credits (“What Happened in Bali,” “Master’s Sun,” “Cain and Abel”) built the actor’s reputation over a run the network is explicitly betting on again, and So told reporters at the press conference that returning felt like coming back to “a familiar hometown” he could shoot in without friction. The show’s rating jump, and a No. 1 spot in TV-OTT combined buzz rankings for the fourth week of June, are being credited to his action sequences and to supporting turns from Choi Dae-hoon, Yoon Kyung-ho (as a group of fellow fathers), and Joo Sang-wook as the villain.
Source: An Jin-yong, Munhwa Ilbo, June 28, 2026.
