“Resident Playbook” is a Korean drama (K-drama) series that aired on weekends from April 12, 2025 to May 18, 2025. The show is a spin-off of “Hospital Playlist” which aired in 2020 and 2021 with two seasons. Given the comfort that “Hospital Playlist” provided during the pandemic, I had extremely high hopes for “Resident Playbook.” While “Hospital Playlist” focused on the lives of assistant professors who have been in their respective positions for years, I liked how the spin-off series focused on the journey of first-year residents. Unlike the original series, which showcased each doctor’s high expertise in their respective fields, “Resident Playbook” showed the hardships of becoming a doctor in the obstetrics and gynaecology (OB-GYN) department.
The show opens with Oh Yi Young (Go Youn Jung) who is in debt after failing out of the field. Unwilling to re-enter the medical field, she is forced into working as a first-year resident at the Yulje Medical Center (referred to as Yulje throughout the series), which she left for a local hospital earlier in her career. Though she starts off hating the hospital and only talking about quitting, her attitude about the profession changes by the end of the series as she meets and treats various patients of various circumstances.
While there is a clear change in her attitude and character by the end of the show, Oh Yi Young persists with her extremely pessimistic views. Her character development is implied through small actions, making it extremely frustrating to watch. She keeps saying that she wants to quit, she keeps saying that she won’t be back next year, she keeps saying that she’s going to be gone soon, yet she stays. Every time she says something about hating the hospital, I only think “then leave.”
Pyo Nam Gyoung (Shin Shi Ah) is another first-year resident at Yulje. Though we have minimal background information about her, we get to see her mother as a patient at the hospital in one episode. She is caught up in a toxic relationship for most of the series, and we get to see her development as a doctor with the various conflicts that she has. I wish there was more focus on Pyo Nam Gyoung’s story and her character development. While there were a few episodes that focused on her, it would have been nice if we got to see more of who she was.
The show also features first-year resident Um Jae Il (Kang Yoo Seok) who is a former K-pop idol whose group was discontinued 12 years ago. He struggles at first with adjusting to the hospital life, but helps bring the first-year residents together, building a close friendship. His backstory is not revealed until later on in the series, where the first-years are at a karaoke. We see him dancing to the most popular HI-BOYZ song. HI-BOYZ, a fictional K-pop group in the series, features two members of Tomorrow by Together (TXT) who have special appearances in the show. HI-BOYZ also appeared on the Korean television show Mnet, which features various K-pop groups. This was a very fun aspect of the show and added a very comedic aspect to some of the more serious tones of the series.
I thought that this was insanely funny. As a huge fan of TXT, it was really cool to watch my favorite K-pop idols on the screen and act as if they debuted a decade ago. Their song “When the Day Comes”—which is featured as one of the original sound tracks (OST) in the series—had youthful lyrics and an upbeat melody that immediately got added to my playlist.
The last first-year resident is Kim Sa Bi (Han Ye Ji), who was always a top student from a very accomplished family of doctors. She is very socially awkward and struggles at the beginning of the show with being more empathetic with patients. She grows throughout the series as she learns that she must be more understanding of a patient’s struggles and pains.
Kim Sa Bi shares a very small and undeveloped romance with Um Jae Il. While I did predict that they would get together by the end of the show, it happens very suddenly after Kim Sa Bi’s confession that she used to be a fan of HI-BOYZ. Um Jae Il starts doing things that make it very obvious that he likes her, yet Kim Sa Bi is completely oblivious to his actions. There is virtually nothing that changes in their relationship, leaving viewers wondering if something will even happen.
The show follows several individual occurrences of each individual residents’ interactions with various patients. Some of them are mothers who have struggles with pregnancy in a time of low birth rates in Korea, while others are cancer patients who are reluctant to get surgery and other forms of treatment due to various reasons. These individual stories lead to character development in each first-year resident, such as Oh Yi Young growing to love the profession or Kim Sa Bi becoming more empathetic as a person.
The show also features a small romance between Gu Do Won (Jung Joon Won), a fourth-year and chief resident of the OB-GYN department, and Oh Yi Young. While it takes a few episodes for the sparks to fly, the awkward start to their relationship and wholesome lines were cute to watch. However, this relationship is extremely underdeveloped and leaves the viewers wondering what happens next in their relationship. By the time the series ends, the two have just declared that they are dating, there is zero conflict between the two and their relationship seemed very superficial. Even before they started dating, there were not enough interactions to justify their relationship.
Despite the amazing character development, the biggest flaw in this series was the conflict resolution. There were some episodes where there was a temporary antagonist towards the main characters; after a nice resolution, in the last few minutes of the episode, there would be a scene that showed the conflict was not resolved and the antagonist was unchanged. For example, Pyo Nam Gyoung had a conflict with one of the nurses at Yulje because she thought that the nurse was making her do excessive work. However, at the end of the episode, she realized that she may have been making assumptions and their interactions in the episode ended with the two of them sharing coffee together. It would have been perfect had the episode ended at that scene, but the last scene of the episode was the nurse calling Pyo Nam Gyoung late at night, asking her to do some work, despite saying that she would call Pyo Nam Gyoung the next morning. This conflict is never revisited in the series and viewers are left wondering what happened to their relationship. It felt like the producers just forgot about these storylines, making it unsatisfying for me to watch.
Overall, “Resident Playbook” was a nice addition to my weekends. With amazing character development in the first-year residents and an opportunity for viewers to see into the life of a resident doctor, it added more depth to the hospital life.