Cashero

Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.

Lee Jun-ho’s post-King the Land and post-Typhoon Family career is at an interesting inflection point — he’s proven he can anchor a prestige romance and carry a hit film, and here he’s doing something more low-key difficult: playing a fundamentally unimpressive person with complete sincerity. Sang-ung is not a hero who secretly always had greatness in him. He’s a civil servant who wanted to buy a house, got handed a bizarre superpower, and spent eight episodes genuinely trying to refuse the call. That reluctance is what makes him work. Lee Jun-ho plays it without winking at the camera.

The divisive question about Cashero is the writing. Critics were sharp on this — the pacing is uneven, the tonal lurches between comedy and genuine stakes are sometimes jarring, and the Jo family’s villainy is more stated than felt. All of that is fair. What those reviews undersell is how much the show gets right in the ensemble. Kim Byung-chul playing a superhero whose power requires him to slowly destroy his liver is a genuinely great comedic performance, and Kim Hyang-gi’s Bang Eun-mi — a teenage girl who has to overeat bread to use her telekinesis and treats this as primarily a dieting inconvenience — brings a specific kind of deadpan energy that elevates every scene she’s in.

Cashero is not a tightly plotted drama. It is a drama with a genuinely original idea, a cast that commits fully, and a thesis — that heroism costs something real and ordinary people pay it anyway — that it delivers on in the final episode in spite of its structural messiness. It’s more fun than its reviews suggest, more emotional than its premise implies, and more interesting than a show about a man whose strength is proportional to his cash has any business being. Come for the concept. Stay for Kim Byung-chul’s performance art.