Thirty Minutes Every Weeknight, 100+ Episodes — The Korean Drama Slot That Sells No Ads

Korean dramas are getting shorter. Sixteen episodes became twelve, and the reason was never story length — it was the unit in which advertising is sold. But on Monday evening, September 28, one drama starts that runs in exactly the opposite direction. It will pass 100 episodes, it airs five days a week, and not a single commercial runs on its channel.

At a glance

The strangest row here is the fourth. By episode count the daily drama is not even half the miniseries, yet it puts out ten more minutes a week. It feels lighter not because there is less of it, but because each swallow is smaller — which is exactly why this form gets along worst with binge-watching.

Almost nobody opens an app for a single 30-minute episode, but for someone who leaves the TV on while setting the dinner table, 30 minutes is precisely the right length.

A samgyetang cook tells her three grown children to move out

At 8:30 pm on Monday, September 28, KBS 1TV starts a new daily drama called Eomma-ga Michyeosseoyo. Abroad it is being introduced as Mission: Mompossible, and the two titles share not one letter. That mismatch comes back later in this article.

Kim Hee-jung plays Jo Mi-mi, who raised three children alone while running a samgyetang restaurant, after her husband set up a second household. The three siblings are Kang Da-mi (Jung Min-ah), Kang Gang-nam (Kang Eun-tak) and Kang Dae-chi (Kim Jong-hoon). In the teaser released on September 1, Jo Mi-mi collides with each of them in turn — a daughter who will not date, an eldest son who comes home carrying a divorce and money trouble, a youngest son still leaning on his mother. Then, late in the teaser, she declares that she is done, and the story turns.

Across from her stands a mother who lived the opposite life: Jeon Jin-hee (Kang Kyung-heon), who runs a fashion company. Kang Da-mi gets tangled up with that company's head designer, Cha Seung-yoon (Dong-ha). A mother who gave everything to her family, a mother who put her own wants first, and their children knotted together — the announced premise is that one contrast.

The script is by Na Seung-hyun, who wrote Blinded by Love and Crazy Love; the director is Sung Joon-hae. The production companies are Fantagio and Monster Union, the latter a KBS subsidiary founded on June 9, 2016.

A director who once pulled 20.2% is coming back to a slot that now does 11%

Sung Joon-hae's previous work was Bravo, My Life in the very same slot in 2022, which peaked at 20.2%. That is the last time this slot crossed 20%. It is why the trade press is calling this lineup the one that will "turn the daily drama board over."

But take that sentence at face value and you skip a step. What has come down over the past four years is not the shows — it is the slot.

The current title, Our Happy Days, opened at 10.1% — the lowest series premiere in the history of this slot. It sank to 7.6% by episode 15 and climbed back to 11.7% by episode 82. Even allowing for what a rating number actually counts, the 20s have not come back. The same director can return, but a four-year-old number needs the people in front of the screen to be four years old too.

This channel has not sold a commercial since October 1, 1994

The abolition of advertising on KBS 1TV was decided on July 23, 1994, and the last commercial ran on September 30 that year. From October 1 only public-service spots remained. In exchange, the licence fee began to be collected together with the electricity bill on that same day, and KBS's revenue mix moved from roughly 30:70 licence-fee-to-advertising to 50:50.

For a viewer the rule shows up in a very plain form. The programme begins immediately and ends immediately.

Start at 8:30 and finish at 9:00, and all thirty minutes in between are drama.

The difference shows inside the frame too. In a miniseries, product placement is counted in seconds and per episode; on a channel that sells no advertising, that calculation has no starting point. What this slot carries instead is a low budget and a short production schedule — because five episodes a week have to keep coming for five to eight months without a gap.

Three daily dramas run on the same evening

A daily drama is defined by its position, not its genre: five episodes a week, around 30 minutes each, past 100 episodes, in the stretch before the weekday evening news.

Turn the TV on at 7:05 pm and leave it until nine and you will watch three daily dramas back to back before KBS News 9. Knowing how the channels split into tiers shows you one more thing here — the KBS 2TV daily drama and the KBS 1TV daily drama belong to the same broadcaster, but the first carries ads and the second does not. The 40-minute and 30-minute lengths come from that.

But the number of people who keep the set on for those two hours has kept falling. On the broadcast of May 18, 2026, Our Happy Days did 10.2%, KBS 2TV's Red Pearl 7.1%, and MBC's The First Man 5.1%. The three do not share a time slot, so adding them up means nothing — which is precisely what makes one thing clear: only one daily drama cleared double digits that night. Against 2022, when a single title took 20.2% by itself, what shrank is not the appeal of a particular show but the number of people sitting in front of a television at that hour. SBS closing this slot outright in 2017, citing years of weak ratings, was the first signal of that drift.

What this means where you are

Anyone trying to watch this slot from outside Korea meets two walls: the clock and the distribution.

The right-hand column is the problem. KOCOWA+ was built jointly by KBS, MBC and SBS, so terrestrial programming lands there broadly — but its territory is the Americas, Europe and Oceania. It expanded into Europe and Oceania in April 2024 to reach 39 countries, and Asia was not in that expansion. The detour through Viki closed as well when the KOCOWA partnership ended in 2025.

So in Southeast Asia what remains is KBS World, a paid international channel launched on July 1, 2003, carrying Korean-language broadcasts with English, Chinese and Malay subtitles. There is a YouTube live stream too, though what you can see varies by region and rights. The first step is to check whether KBS World is in the channel list of the pay-TV service you already subscribe to; if it is not, this form effectively does not arrive in that country.

One more thing for searching. This drama's Korean title is Eomma-ga Michyeosseoyo and its international title is Mission: Mompossible, and the two overlap in neither sound nor meaning — romanise the Korean title and you will find nothing. Daily dramas often get an international title unrelated to the original, so it is faster to search by channel and time slot than by name. The KBS 1TV daily slot began in May 1969 with Sinbu Ilnyeonsaeng and has run ever since. The titles change; the position does not.

The number that had not appeared by September 2

The total episode count for Eomma-ga Michyeosseoyo is not in any public material as of September 2. The last three shows in this slot ran 120, 125 and 128 episodes, so it is likely to land near there, but until it is announced that is a range, not a number.

The outgoing show's number has not settled either. Our Happy Days is listed as 110, 120 or 122 episodes depending on the source, because it is still on air — some places count episodes broadcast so far and others count the planned total. Two figures that look like the same field are counting different things, so when quoting episode counts for this slot it is safer to use finished runs only. That is why two cells are left blank in the table above.

The premiere date of September 28 is the first Monday after the Chuseok holiday ends. That holiday runs four days, Thursday September 24 through Sunday September 27, and because one of the public holidays fell on a Saturday without a substitute day being granted, the 28th is simply a working day. So the slot avoids the week when holiday specials scramble the schedule and takes the first ordinary weekday after it — and by the time those roughly 120 episodes are done, the season will have turned twice. Somewhere in there, the screen Koreans actually spend the most time on will not be the television. Will the habit of giving up the same thirty minutes every evening still be there?

Read next

• Sixteen episodes became twelve because of advertising, not storytelling
• What a Korean rating number actually counts
• A map of Korean drama time slots
• Terrestrial, cable and OTT are not tiers of quality
• Product placement in Korean dramas has a limit measured in seconds

Sources

• Watch: Kim Hee Jung Is Fed Up With Her 3 Adult Children In "Mission: Mompossible" Teaser — Soompi
• KBS's decisive blow — the "golden" lineup set to turn the daily drama board over (Korean) — TV Report
• Shook off the record-low rating — back into double digits (Korean) — TV Report
• First stills of Jung Min-ah as Kang Da-mi (Korean) — Sports Khan
• New KBS daily drama with Jung Min-ah, Dong-ha, Kim Hee-jung and Kang Kyung-heon (Korean) — Viva100
• KBS 1TV — Wikipedia (Korean)
• Kocowa — Wikipedia
• KBS World (TV channel) — Wikipedia