Kim Jung-hyun, Lee Yi-kyung, Sohn Seung-won
JTBC has a new youth drama on the way, and yay, School 2017’s swoony bad boy Kim Jung-hyun has signed on to headline. I adore that boy. The series is about a trio of friends just trying to get through life, and it’s called Woohoo Waikiki (the Korean title is Eurachacha Waikiki, and eurachacha is an exclamation of excitement or encouragement, like “woohoo” or “fighting”).
The drama is a laugh-out-loud comedy about three boys who are failing and flailing through life, who come to run a guesthouse called Waikiki. Kim Jung-hyun stars as “icon of misfortune Kang Dong-gu,” who dreams of becoming a movie director. He wants to be the next Bong Joon-ho, but he’s only book-smart and not very streetwise, and always ends up on the losing end because he has a soft heart. He was once a promising young director who swept the awards at short film festivals, but the film world turned out to be very harsh, and his constant stream of misfortunes has turned him cynical.
The always hilarious Lee Yi-kyung (Go Back Spouses) will play “crazy troublemaker actor Chun Joon-ki,” the shameless, cunning, but lovable friend who’s always getting the trio into some new mess. His father is a famous A-list actor, and so he dreams of following in his footsteps, but in reality he’s a glorified extra who’s barely making a subsistence living. It’s his bright idea to run a guesthouse in order to earn money to produce their own film, and convinces his two best friends of the scheme… which is where it all starts to go wrong.
The third buddy will be played by Sohn Seung-won, aka Park Eun-bin’s love interest from both seasons of Age of Youth. He plays “the fox that’s like a bear, Bong Doo-shik.” He’s an unemployed freelance writer who came up to Seoul to be a screenwriter, but ends up spending all of his time doing part-time gigs writing stuff for other people. He’s kind and mild-tempered, but also sly and quick-thinking when the situation calls for it.
The drama is about their comical adventures as they start running this guesthouse together, where a single mother and a baby will suddenly enter their lives. The drama comes from writer Kim Ki-ho of the wacky bromance comedy Modern Farmer (and sitcoms like Blue Tower, Hello Franceska, and Nonstop before that), and PD Lee Chang-min of Man to Man and Remember–Son’s War. I love this cast of three up-and-comers, who have all managed to showcase comedic and dramatic chops in their roles till now, and are going to be a hoot together as a group of misfits. Can’t wait.
Woohoo Waikiki is slated to follow Just Between Lovers on Mondays and Tuesdays beginning in February.