KBS has a new webtoon adaptation drama on the way called Your House Helper, and the webtoon’s concept is unusual, but I totally get where the fantasy comes from. It’s about a pretty flower boy housekeeper who descends upon young career women’s disheveled and disorganized homes and cleans up their lives in more ways than one. Where can I order one and does he also cook? Ha Suk-jin (Radiant Office) has been cast as the housekeeper, which is certainly a departure from the executive directors he usually plays, and Cosmic Girls’ Bona (Lingerie Girls’ Generation) is considering an offer to co-star.
The original webtoon of the same name is an omnibus series with three seasons available on Olleh KTOON, and follows one housekeeper through the various house cleaning jobs he takes on, spending a couple of episodes on each client’s mini arc. I don’t know how the drama adaptation plans to deal with the omnibus structure of the original, but I would expect them to focus entirely on one heroine and add a few supporting clients at most. The adaptation will be helmed by PD Jeon Woo-sung of Strongest Deliveryman and writer Kim Ji-sun, one of the junior writers on The Producers.
Ha Suk-jin will star as Kim Ji-woon, the wealthy son of an assemblyman father and a doctor mother. He began a career at a major conglomerate but chose to protect his pride and ended up getting cut off from his family, and somehow ends up working as a housekeeper. He’s got a gruff personality but finds satisfaction in creating order out of chaos. Bona has been offered the role of Im Da-young, a character taken from the second season of the webtoon. She’s an ambitious intern at an ad agency trying to make up for her lack of specs and land a permanent job, whose friendly and placating demeanor gets mistaken for flirting by her colleagues.
I have no idea how an intern can afford a housekeeper to organize her life, but I’m sure there’s some logical explanation for it. I haven’t seen much of Bona but people seemed to like her in Lingerie Girls’ Generation, so I’ll keep my hopes up about her. Ha Suk-jin so often plays the stereotypical prickly boss in dramas that I can’t really imagine him as a housekeeper (the flower boy part I get, for obvious reasons). But from the few episodes of the webtoon that I’ve read, he’s just as rude and bossy… but now he’s wearing an apron and cleaning your house while judging you outwardly. And then you pay him. I don’t know, collecting a paycheck to be his assistant doesn’t seem so bad now.
Your House Helper has been scheduled in KBS’s Wednesday-Thursday lineup following Mystery Queen 2 and Suits, which puts the premiere in June.
