Boyfriend on Demand

Seo Mi-rae produces webtoons for a company called Naemo, and the job has worn her down to the point where the only reliable feeling left in her week is exhaustion. When a virtual dating service offers her a free trial, she takes it the way somebody takes a holiday they cannot afford: as a break from herself. The service builds partners to order, each one assembled to be her ideal match, and the first date sweeps her into a world with better lighting than her own.

The trial ends and she pays to keep going. Match by match the fantasy gets more specific and more useful to her, and the line between the app and the office gets harder to see. Park Kyeong-nam, a colleague she spends most of her working life arguing with, keeps turning up on the other side of that line. So does a first love she has not thought about properly in years.

Across ten episodes released in a single day, the drama works through what the service is actually selling. A partner built to agree with you is not a relationship, and Mi-rae's fear of being alone turns out to be easier to sell to than to solve. The comedy is in the dates; the weight is in what she keeps choosing after them.

Seo Kang Joon appears in five of the ten episodes as Seo Eun-ho, one of the matches, in the year between his Daesang win for Undercover High School and his return to leading roles in A Love Other Than Yours.

Development took a longer route than the finished show lets on. The series was originally packaged for MBC before Netflix picked it up as an original production, and casting closed in stages: Jisoo took the offer in August 2024, Seo In-guk joined the following month, and Netflix did not confirm either role publicly until February 2025. Director Kim Jung-sik, who had previously made Work Later, Drink Now and No Gain No Love, described the show to Dong-A Ilbo as an anthology built around Mi-rae, giving her a different job and a different acting register inside each simulated date.

Netflix set Boyfriend on Demand's release date for 6 March 2026, inside the first quarter slate the platform had flagged that January. The show opened at number four on Netflix's global non-English chart, with 25.6 million hours watched in its first three days and a place in the top ten in 34 countries. The following week it climbed to number one on that same chart, with 47.8 million hours watched and a top ten spot in 47 countries, before a piracy dispute in China drew a public complaint from a Sungshin Women's University professor that same month.

The premise is the reason. A virtual dating service that builds partners to specification is a science-fiction idea being used for a romantic comedy, and the drama takes the commercial side of it seriously enough that the free trial, the price at the end of it and the upsell after that all land as jokes and as accusations at the same time. Very few K-dramas about loneliness name the thing selling to it.

For most viewers the draw is Jisoo, carrying a series for the first time, opposite Seo In Guk playing what is functionally two people with one face. That doubling is the whole engineering problem of the show, and it either works for you in the first two episodes or it does not.

Seo Kang Joon is in five of the ten as Seo Eun-ho, one of the built boyfriends. It is a special appearance rather than a role with an arc, and it sits in an interesting place in his year: after the Daesang for Undercover High School, before A Love Other Than Yours. An actor who had just been handed the biggest prize his network gives out spent the following spring playing somebody's algorithmic ideal, which is a funnier piece of casting than the drama ever acknowledges.

The other thing worth knowing before starting is that all ten episodes went up on one day. It was made as a limited series and ends where it ends.