Kim Young-kwang and Chae Soo-bin Strike an Electric Deal: Inside Netflix’s Most Shocking Rom-Com Yet

Here’s a premise that has no business working: a man whose mechanical heart is running out of battery, and a woman whose bare touch electrocutes everyone she meets. Put them in the same room and you’d expect a tragedy. Netflix is betting it’s a romance. On September 10, the streamer confirmed that Take Charge of My Heart the electrifying new Korean rom-com known in Korean as 나를 충전해줘 will premiere on Friday, October 9, unveiling its first poster and teaser in the same breath.

And judging by that first look, the gamble might just spark.

A Deal Sealed With a Touch

Adapted from the hit web novel of the same name by author Hae Boon, Take Charge of My Heart is built on a high-concept hook that reads like science fiction but plays like screwball comedy. Baek Ho-rang (Kim Young-kwang) is a coolly composed third-generation chaebol heir and TS Group executive, living on borrowed time as the battery in his artificial heart drains toward empty. Na Bo-bae (Chae Soo-bin) is a woman who, after being struck by lightning, developed an electrical ability so volatile that a single touch shocks anyone near her condemning her to a life of total isolation.

Then their paths cross, and each becomes the other’s improbable solution. Ho-rang proposes a “skin-contact contract” to keep his heart charged; Bo-bae, desperate for a relationship after years of forced solitude, has her own reasons to say yes. The poster’s tagline captures the delicious tension of their arrangement: “Touch to charge, apart to drain, in love electrocuted.” It’s a metaphor so literal it loops back around to being genuinely clever, framing intimacy itself as a life-or-death necessity.

The Teaser’s Killer Hook

The teaser opens on Bo-bae’s confession the lightning strike, the powers, the loneliness before pivoting to Ho-rang’s countdown: his artificial-heart replacement surgery and his looming succession at TS Group, both bearing down at once. Two people at pivotal, high-pressure crossroads, colliding out of pure need.

It ends on the line that will almost certainly become the show’s calling card: “Just charge me for three months, until my re-operation.” The camera catches their clasped hands, and the trailer cuts to black. It’s a small, precise piece of storytelling a ticking clock, a contract with an expiration date, and the unspoken promise that three months is exactly long enough to fall in love. K-drama fans have seen the contract-relationship trope a hundred times; few have grounded it in stakes this vivid.

Two Leads Built for the Genre

The casting is where Take Charge of My Heart quietly stacks the deck. Kim Young-kwang returns to the romance space that made him a fan favorite the towering, effortlessly charming lead of On Your Wedding Day and The Secret Life of My Secretary, more recently seen flexing dramatic range in the thriller Trigger. His particular gift has always been undercutting his cool, chiseled exterior with goofy warmth, exactly the register a “chaebol with a dying heart” needs to avoid tipping into melodrama.

Opposite him, Chae Soo-bin steps into what looks like an ideal fit. Since breaking out in Love in the Moonlight (2016), she’s built a résumé across Strongest Deliveryman, Where Stars Land, the Netflix hit When the Phone Rings, and the fashion-world drama The Fabulous. There’s a delightful irony in her casting, too: in 2017’s I’m Not a Robot, she played an android impersonating a robot for a man allergic to human contact. Nearly a decade later, she’s the human power source for a man whose heart is a machine the mirror image of that premise, and proof that “electric chemistry” is a lane she knows how to drive. In the drama, fittingly, her Na Bo-bae is written as a drama writer herself, a wink that adds a layer of metatextual charm.

Why This One Could Break Out

The fall K-drama calendar is crowded, but Take Charge of My Heart has the ingredients of a sleeper hit. Its premise is instantly explainable “human battery meets dying heart” is the kind of one-line pitch that travels across borders and languages, precisely the sort of concept-driven storytelling that has powered Netflix’s Korean rom-coms to global charts. Director Park Soo-won, known for the sharp comedic texture of Birthcare Center, brings a proven eye for finding warmth inside absurd premises, working from a script by Song Yu-chae.

There’s also a broader trend at play. Korean romantic comedies have increasingly leaned into fantastical, high-concept hooks supernatural abilities, body swaps, time loops as a way to freshen a beloved but well-worn genre. Take Charge of My Heart fits neatly into that wave, using its sci-fi conceit not as a gimmick but as an engine for the oldest story there is: two lonely people learning they’re better together than apart.

The Countdown Begins

Whether audiences plug in will come down to chemistry the one thing no premise can manufacture. But a dying heart, a woman who could kill him with a touch, and a three-month deadline make for one of the more genuinely intriguing setups of the season. The clock starts ticking Friday, October 9, when Take Charge of My Heart goes live worldwide on Netflix. If the sparks land the way that teaser promises, this could be the rom-com that lights up the fall.