Lee Jung-eun and Girls’ Generation’s Sooyoung Pair Up as Mother and Daughter in KBS’s Feel-Good Family Drama

The team behind the smash hit Crash Course in Romance returns to the weekend-drama arena and brings an unlikely, irresistible mother-daughter duo with them.

Some casting announcements simply confirm a project. Others make you lean in. When KBS revealed that Lee Jung-eun the quietly devastating housekeeper from Parasite would share the screen as the mother of Girls’ Generation‘s Choi Soo-young, it fell firmly into the second category. On October 13, the network confirmed the lineup for its new weekend drama I’m Home from School (Hakgyo Danyeowasseumnida), and in doing so assembled one of the more intriguing generational pairings on Korean television in recent memory.

A Comeback Story Built Around a Mother

At the heart of I’m Home from School is Yoon Ok-hee, played by Lee Jung-eun a warm, meddlesome, impossibly busy mother who decides, late in life, to take on the challenge of entering university. She’s the neighborhood fixer who can’t say no, the owner of a bustling tteokbokki shop, a woman for whom 24 hours in a day never seem to be enough. The series follows Ok-hee’s second act and the unexpected connections she gathers along the way, slowly forming a family “thicker than blood.”

It’s a role tailor-made for Lee, an actress who has spent a career finding profound humanity in ordinary women. Global audiences know her best as Moon-gwang, the housekeeper whose mid-film turn in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite reset the entire movie’s temperature. But at home she is one of Korea’s most trusted character actors, equally comfortable anchoring prestige films and warming up primetime melodramas. Handing her a leading matriarch rather than a scene-stealing supporting turn feels like overdue recognition.

The Writer Whose Name Now Guarantees Attention

The project carries another kind of pedigree. It marks the newest work from screenwriter Yang Hee-seung, whose 2023 series Crash Course in Romance (Ilta Scandal) became a cultural phenomenon a sharp, heartfelt dramedy about Korea’s cutthrough private-education world that landed on Netflix and traveled far beyond its home audience. Yang’s gift has always been the same: finding genuine warmth and comfort inside everyday dialogue and brisk humor, exactly the register a multigenerational weekend drama lives or dies by.

What makes this announcement notable is the homecoming attached to it. Yang is returning to the KBS weekend-drama slot for the first time in roughly seven years, since Once Again (Han Beon Danyeowasseumnida). The echo is deliberate, right down to the title Once Again and I’m Home from School share the same linguistic DNA of a family member walking back through the front door. For a writer who made her name on the ensemble family format before conquering the trendier cable space, this is a return to first principles.

Sooyoung’s Steady Pivot and a Clever Casting Contrast

Choi Soo-young takes on Kang Eun-ho, Ok-hee’s eldest daughter: a cynical, no-nonsense radio producer and self-described extreme “T” the kind of person who reads situations through logic rather than feeling, says exactly what she means, and only looks indifferent on the surface. Beneath that cool exterior, she is her mother’s fiercest, if least demonstrative, supporter.

The casting is quietly smart. Lee Jung-eun’s emotional expansiveness against Sooyoung’s clipped pragmatism is a built-in comic engine the warm, overflowing mother and the daughter who loves her by refusing to show it. For Sooyoung, it also continues a steady, deliberate acting career that has long outgrown the “idol trying out drama” framing. From Run On to If You Wish Upon Me and Not Others, she has gravitated toward grounded, modern characters, and a cynical radio PD slots neatly into that lineage. Pairing a globally recognized film actress with a globally recognized idol-turned-actress is also, frankly, a canny play for both domestic and international eyeballs.

An Ensemble Stacked with Range

The supporting cast widens the comedic playing field. Veteran actor Lee Sung-jae plays Kang Ji-cheol, a boxing legend and Ok-hee’s husband whose life is upended by his wife’s new ambitions the actor’s first KBS weekend drama. Jeon Seong-woo takes on Han Seung-woo, a smart, witty star announcer at broadcaster KMS and Eun-ho’s lone close friend, whose relationship with her shifts after an unexpected incident; it’s his second collaboration with Yang.

Rounding out the family is WINNER’s Kang Seung-yoon as Kang Jun, the troublemaking eldest son all swagger and bluster on the outside, oddly endearing underneath who dreams of turning his life around by launching a “boxing diet program” at his father’s gym. Kang is no stranger to acting, with credits in Prison Playbook and Kairos, and said he had been waiting for a story this human: “I think my own mother will draw strength from watching it, which makes me even more excited.”

Why This One Is Worth Watching For

KBS weekend dramas are a particular Korean institution long-running, family-oriented, and ratings juggernauts that unfold across a full year of Saturday and Sunday nights. I’m Home from School is set to inherit that coveted slot in the first half of next year, following Love Is Coming. On paper, it has every ingredient the format rewards: a beloved writer returning to home turf, a leading actress of genuine depth, an idol star in confident control of her craft, and a premise a mother reclaiming her own ambitions that’s both comfortingly familiar and quietly progressive.

The deeper hook, though, is that mother-daughter dynamic. In an industry that too often sidelines older women, a weekend drama built around a middle-aged mom chasing a long-deferred dream with her sharp-tongued daughter cheering from the wings is the kind of story that can turn a ratings staple into something people actually talk about. If Yang Hee-seung’s track record is any guide, the laughs will land, the warmth will be earned, and audiences may find themselves back at this particular front door every weekend for a year.