📺 K-Drama Guide · Comedy · Romance · Life
Not Others
남남 · 2023
✅ Completed · 12 eps
🎬 ENA · Viki · Prime Video
⭐ 8.4 / 10 MDL 🔞 15+
⚡ Updated · Jul 14, 2026
📋 Drama Overview
Everything you need to know before you hit play.
CompletedMOTHER-DAUGHTER COMEDY PICK
Not Others
남남 (Namnam) · 2023 · South Korea
ENAVikiPrime Video
Mother-Daughter RelationshipFamilySingle MotherSlice of LifePolice
Kim Jin-hee is twenty-nine, a police officer, and still living with her mother — not because she can’t afford otherwise, but because Kim Eun-mi has never once acted like a mother is supposed to. Eun-mi is a physical therapist who dates casually, dresses younger than her daughter, and treats their apartment more like a shared dorm than a household with a hierarchy. Their bickering plays like sibling rivalry more often than parent-child conflict, which is exactly the joke the show is built on — and exactly why it works.
That balance shifts when Park Jin-hong, a doctor with his own quiet mystery, starts showing up in Eun-mi’s life. Jin-hee, who has spent her whole adulthood being the responsible one, suddenly has to reckon with the fact that her mother gets to be a person with her own romantic life too — and that growing up might mean letting go of the idea that Eun-mi owes her a more conventional kind of parenting.
Episode Progress
12 / 12 ✅ Completed
⚡ Quick Verdict
One box. Everything you need to decide.
⭐ Worth it?Yes — a genuinely funny, warm mother-daughter comedy with real heart underneath the bickering
⏱️ Commitment12 episodes · ~60 min each
💛 VibeA mother and daughter who act more like roommates than family, until it matters that they aren’t
📺 Skip if…You want your family dramas played straight instead of for comedy first
⭐ 8.4 / 10
· MDL Score
🎭 Cast & Characters
The mother, the daughter, and the mystery man neither of them saw coming.
Jeon Hye-jin
Kim Eun-mi
Lead
Sooyoung Choi
Kim Jin-hee
Lead
Ahn Jae-wook
Park Jin-hong
Supporting
Park Sung-hoon
Eun Jae-won
Supporting
Kim Hye-eun
Kim Mi-jung
Supporting
Lim Sung-kyun
Kim Jin-soo
Supporting
Seo Ye-hwa
Im Tae-kyung
Supporting
Kim Sang-ho
Park Sang-goo
Supporting
Kim Yeong-ok
Lee Kang-sook
Supporting
Lee Yong-yi
Jung Eun-shim
Supporting
Yang Hee-kyung
Seong Ae-ja
Supporting
Ahn So-yo
Jang Soo-jin
Supporting
🍿 Where to Watch
Stream Not Others on these platforms.
📺 Episode Guide
Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.
EP 01
My Mom’s Secret
Jul 17, 2023
Kim Jin-hee has built her whole adult identity around being the responsible one, which makes living with her free-spirited mother Kim Eun-mi feel like a constant status threat rather than a comfort. Eun-mi, for her part, has no interest in performing the kind of mother Jin-hee thinks she deserves — she dresses how she wants, dates how she wants, and treats her daughter’s embarrassment as background noise. The premiere sets up the joke efficiently: this isn’t a broken family, just two women whose idea of family looks nothing like the template.
EP 02
My Mom’s Man
Jul 18, 2023
Jin-hee’s half-hearted attempt to move out collapses almost as fast as it starts, and Eun-mi’s talent for entangling herself in her daughter’s plans doesn’t help. Park Jin-hong complicates things further — a man who seems to already have some kind of history with Eun-mi that neither of them is explaining yet. Jin-hee’s instinct is suspicion first, curiosity second — a pattern the show clearly plans to keep testing.
EP 03
My Mom’s Boyfriend
Jul 24, 2023
Eun-mi and Jin-hong start dating for real, and Jin-hee responds exactly like a protective daughter who’s forgotten her mother doesn’t need her protection — she starts digging into his background looking for a reason to disapprove. The investigation plays for comedy more than suspense, but it says something true about Jin-hee: she’s more comfortable managing her mother’s life than accepting she doesn’t get a vote in it.
EP 04
My Mom’s Daughter
Jul 25, 2023
Jin-hee keeps meddling and Eun-mi keeps pushing back, asserting a right to her own happiness that Jin-hee has never quite had to reckon with before. The episode finally fills in some of why Eun-mi raised her daughter this unconventionally in the first place, and the answer makes the bickering read differently in hindsight — less dysfunction, more a mother who refused to perform a role she never believed in.
EP 05
My Mom’s Family
Jul 31, 2023
Eun-mi and Jin-hong’s relationship turns more serious, which Jin-hee still isn’t ready for even as she starts to understand it isn’t going away. Her own professional life gives her something to focus on instead, including support from colleagues she wasn’t expecting to lean on. It’s the episode where Jin-hee’s resistance starts quietly cracking, even if she’d never admit it out loud.
EP 06
My Mom’s Decision
Aug 1, 2023
Eun-mi makes a call about where things go with Jin-hong that changes the shape of both women’s lives at once. Jin-hee, watching her mother choose happiness without apologizing for it, starts reconsidering her own stalled romantic and career decisions. Both women are quietly stepping into a new phase here, even if neither says so directly.
EP 07
My Mom’s Secret Past
Aug 7, 2023
A piece of Eun-mi’s past resurfaces that Jin-hee never knew about, and the resulting rift is sharper than any of their earlier bickering. The tone shifts hard here — it’s Jin-hee having to reconcile the mother she thought she knew with a woman who sacrificed more, and hid more, than her daughter ever gave her credit for.
EP 08
My Mom’s True Feelings
Aug 8, 2023
Eun-mi and Jin-hee work through what the last episode uncovered, and the show finally lets them be gentle with each other instead of funny at each other’s expense. Jin-hee offers real emotional support for maybe the first time in the series, and the shift reads as earned rather than sudden.
EP 09
My Mom’s New Life
Aug 14, 2023
Eun-mi steps into new territory in both her personal and professional life, visibly more herself than she’s been all series. Jin-hee’s own path gets clearer too, inspired less by advice than by simply watching her mother refuse to shrink. The two women are growing in parallel now instead of in opposition.
EP 10
My Mom’s Confession
Aug 15, 2023
A confession from Eun-mi finally answers a question the show has been circling since the first act, and the reveal lands with more weight than the show’s comedic setup initially promised. Jin-hee has to fold this new information into her sense of who her mother is — and who she is because of her.
EP 11
My Mom’s Future
Aug 21, 2023
Eun-mi and Jin-hee sit with the aftermath of the confession together instead of separately, which is its own small milestone for two women who’ve spent the whole series managing each other from a distance. Planning for their individual futures becomes a way of finally trusting the other one to have her own.
EP 12
My Mom, My Daughter
Aug 22, 2023
The finale doesn’t resolve the bickering so much as recontextualize it — Eun-mi and Jin-hee were never fighting about who gets to be right, just working out how two very different women build a family without a template. Eun-mi gets to keep her hard-won happiness, Jin-hee gets to stop needing her mother to be conventional, and the show closes on the two of them exactly where it started: annoyed at each other, and completely each other’s person.
🏁 Ending Explained
Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.
⚠️
Spoiler Warning — This section covers the full finale of Not Others. Stop here if you haven’t finished the series.
What actually happened Eun-mi’s confession — the secret the show has been building toward since episode seven — finally gets fully aired between mother and daughter, and it recontextualizes everything Jin-hee thought she understood about why she was raised the way she was. Both women land somewhere neither expected: not a conventional mother-daughter relationship, but a version of family that finally makes sense on its own terms.
Jin-hee stops needing her mother to be someone else The finale’s real work is on Jin-hee’s side of the relationship, not Eun-mi’s. She spends the whole series wanting a more conventional mother, and the ending doesn’t grant that wish — it dissolves it, letting Jin-hee accept Eun-mi exactly as she’s always been instead of as a disappointment to be managed.
Eun-mi gets to keep her happiness The finale lets Eun-mi’s relationship with Park Jin-hong stand as something earned and ongoing rather than a plot device to wrap up and discard, proof the show meant it when it framed romance at any age as worth taking seriously. Eun-mi doesn’t have to choose between being a mother and being a woman with her own life; the ending refuses to force that trade-off.
The supporting cast gets its own small resolutions Jin-hee’s workplace arc with her director Eun Jae-won and the wider Namchon Police Substation cast wraps up alongside the central relationship, giving the show’s comedic subplot enough closure that it doesn’t feel abandoned once the mother-daughter story takes over the finale.
The KDW verdict Not Others ends by making its title’s joke literal: these two women were never actually strangers to each other, no matter how much their bickering sounded like it. The finale earns its warmth by spending eleven episodes on the friction first — the tenderness means more because the show never pretended the relationship was easy.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.
👩👧 Mother As Roommate
😂 Sisters, Not Just Family
💕 Love At Any Age
🚓 Cop Daughter, Free-Spirit Mom
Korean TV has told plenty of stories about mothers who sacrifice everything to raise a ‘proper’ child — The Good Bad Mother is one of the best recent versions of that formula. Not Others runs the opposite experiment: what if the mother refused to be anyone’s idea of proper at all? Jeon Hye-jin plays Eun-mi’s unbotheredness like a genuine philosophy rather than a character quirk, and it’s what keeps the comedy from ever curdling into judgment of her.
Sooyoung’s Jin-hee gets the harder, quieter job — playing a woman who has to unlearn the idea that her mother owes her conventionality, one exasperated argument at a time. The show’s insistence that a woman in her fifties still gets a real, weighty romance plotline recalls Doctor Cha‘s insistence on the same thing — that a woman’s story doesn’t end once she’s somebody’s mother.
The Park Jin-hong mystery plot is the show’s weakest thread, resolving in a way that’s tidy rather than surprising, and some of the police-station comedy runs longer than the jokes justify. Neither complaint does much damage — the show was always about the two women in the apartment, and it never loses sight of that even when the subplots wander.
👍👍👍 BEST FOR 👍👍👍
👩👧 Anyone who wants a mother-daughter relationship played as messy and real, not saintly
💕 Viewers who want a romance for a fiftysomething character taken just as seriously as the young leads
😂 Fans of family comedy that earns its softer, more emotional turns
⚖️ Final Verdict
What works
•Jeon Hye-jin and Sooyoung’s chemistry makes the bickering feel like love, not dysfunction
•Eun-mi’s late-in-life romance gets real narrative weight instead of comic relief treatment
•The mother-daughter dynamic stays specific and unconventional instead of softening into cliché
What to know first
•The Park Jin-hong mystery subplot resolves more predictably than the family story around it
•Some workplace-comedy scenes run longer than they need to
•This is a slow-building comedy — the emotional payoff arrives gradually, not immediately
8.4 / 10— A warm, funny mother-daughter comedy that earns its tenderness by never pretending the relationship was easy to begin with.
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