Where can I watch Resident Playbook?

Resident Playbook is available on Netflix globally. In South Korea, it aired on tvN and is available for streaming on TVING.

How many episodes does Resident Playbook have?

Resident Playbook has 12 episodes, each approximately 83 minutes long. All episodes are now available to stream on Netflix.

Is Resident Playbook worth watching?

Yes — especially if you enjoy warm, character-driven dramas in the Hospital Playlist tradition. Go Youn-jung delivers a grounded lead performance, and the show builds genuine emotional payoffs without melodrama.

Who are the lead actors in Resident Playbook?

Resident Playbook stars Go Youn-jung as Oh Yi-young, Kang You-seok as Um Jae-il, and Jung Joon-won as Goo Do-won, among others.

📺 K-Drama Guide · Medical · Comedy

Resident Playbook

언젠가는 슬기로울 전공의 생활 · 2025

✅ Completed · 12 eps
🎬 Netflix · tvN
⭐ 8.7 / 10 MDL
🔞 15+

⚡ Updated · Apr 7, 2026

📋 Drama Overview

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

Completed
🔥 Medical Must-Watch

Resident Playbook

언젠가는 슬기로울 전공의 생활 · 2025 · South Korea

WriterKim Song-hee

DirectorLee Min-soo

Episodes12 eps · ~83 min each

⏱️ Binge Time16h 36m

AiredApr 12 – May 18, 2025

GenreComedy · Medical · Life

Content Rating15+ · Teens 15 or Older

Netflix
tvN
TVING

Medical Drama
Slice of Life
Friendship
Hospital Playlist Spin-off
Slow Burn Romance

Set at the Jongno branch of Yulje Medical Center, Resident Playbook follows four first-year OB-GYN residents who enter the department at a time when South Korea’s birth rate is at a historic low. Oh Yi-young — debt-ridden, reluctant, and sharp in ways she hasn’t yet learned to trust — leads a quartet that includes a former K-pop idol, a competitive overachiever, and a brilliant but emotionally closed-off top student. None of them chose OB-GYN as their first pick. All of them are about to be changed by it.

A spin-off of the beloved Hospital Playlist, this series trades the established friendships and band nights of Yulje’s professors for the rawer, messier early days of residency. The four residents barely know each other. The department is understaffed. The senior who oversees them runs cold. And yet — slowly, across 12 episodes — something like a real friendship begins to form between people who had every reason to stay strangers.

Episode Progress
12 / 12 ✅ Completed

▶ Official Trailer

🎭 Cast & Characters

Six residents — and one unforgiving department — that will change each other for good.

Go Youn-jung

Oh Yi-young

Lead

Shin Sia

Pyo Nam-kyung

Lead

Han Ye-ji

Kim Sa-bi

Lead

Kang You-seok

Um Jae-il

Lead

Jung Joon-won

Goo Do-won

Supporting

Lee Bong-ryun

Seo Jeong-min

Supporting

🍿 Where to Watch

Stream Resident Playbook on these platforms.

Netflix tvN TVING

📺 Episode Guide

Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.

EP 01

Back to Square One

April 12, 2025

Oh Yi-young returns to Yulje’s OB-GYN department as a repeat first-year — debt-ridden, burned-out, and already dreaming of quitting. The cold open signals immediately that this spin-off has its own tempo: there’s a nightmare sequence, a chaotic helicopter arrival, and a realization that the department she’s walked back into has very little interest in making her comfortable. Her first patient emergency happens before she’s had time to unpack. The other three first-years — Nam-kyung, Sa-bi, and Jae-il — each announce themselves in ways that suggest the season will have plenty of personality collisions ahead.

EP 02

Someone in Your Corner

April 13, 2025

The burnout arrives faster than expected — by episode two, all four residents are already asking themselves whether this was a mistake. Yi-young gets caught in the crossfire of Eun-won’s quiet campaign to make her look incompetent; Jae-il inadvertently reveals that Eun-won has been misattributing OR errors. Goo Do-won steps in to defend Yi-young in front of an anesthesiologist who has been blaming her for someone else’s mistakes. It’s a small moment — but it’s the first real signal that these two are going to matter to each other.

EP 03

The Art of Comfort

April 19, 2025

Jae-il becomes the department’s unexpected fan favorite — his openness and warmth land well with patients in ways that the others are still learning to replicate. Yi-young, Nam-kyung, and Sa-bi each navigate a patient case that tests how much emotional intelligence they actually have versus how much they assumed they did. The episode’s standout case involves a young woman with cervical cancer whose parents respond in ways that infuriate Yi-young — and that quietly reveal something about how far she’ll go for a patient she’s decided to care about.

EP 04

Research and Resentment

April 20, 2025

Prof. Seo recruits Yi-young into a research paper, which immediately triggers Sa-bi’s competitive instincts — she had assumed she would be the one selected. Nam-kyung, trying to mediate a conflict she doesn’t fully understand, ends up making it worse. The episode also delivers a brief but welcome cameo from a Hospital Playlist face, this time from the cardiothoracic surgery wing. The Hospital Playlist universe’s connective tissue is being deployed with care rather than as a crutch.

EP 05

Blunt Force

April 26, 2025

Yi-young’s inability to soften her delivery keeps getting her into trouble — but episode 5 finds her using that same directness to break through to a patient’s frightened child in a way that no one else could. A placenta previa case escalates into a tense consent-form standoff that Yi-young handles with the kind of quiet, inflexible determination that the show is starting to identify as her actual superpower. Jae-il’s perfectionism, meanwhile, tips from charming into exhausting for the colleagues who have to work around it.

EP 06

Credit Where It’s Due

April 27, 2025

Do-won gets quietly sidelined by Eun-won, who positions herself as first author on research she co-developed — and Do-won says nothing. Yi-young does. Their dynamic sharpens here: she’s the one who names things out loud; he’s the one who has learned, through years of institutional experience, to weigh the cost before speaking. Sa-bi and Nam-kyung’s ongoing clash over approach and priorities continues — two people who are more alike than either is willing to admit.

EP 07

The Department Fights Back

May 3, 2025

OB-GYN has been absorbing blame from other departments for weeks — episode 7 is the one where the residents collectively decide they’re done accepting it. The pushback is messy and imperfect, but it marks a turning point in how the group sees themselves as a unit rather than four individuals sharing a department. Nam-kyung, supervising an intern for the first time, discovers that being on the other side of the hierarchy is not as satisfying as she imagined. Hospital Playlist’s Lee Ik-sun makes a brief appearance.

EP 08

Benched

May 4, 2025

Sa-bi collapses at work and spends time on the patient side of the hospital — which, for someone who processes everything through competence metrics, turns out to be the most disorienting experience of her residency so far. The FOMO is real; what she actually learns from it is something else. A new patient challenges Nam-kyung’s empathy in a way that the show handles with genuine delicacy. Hospital Playlist’s Jang Gyeo-ul appears as a visiting surgeon from the main branch.

EP 09

Lights, Camera, Chaos

May 10, 2025

A TV crew descends on the OB-GYN department — and Yi-young’s superior uses the distraction as cover to make her life harder. Jae-il gets taken advantage of by an intern who has read him correctly as too generous to say no. The episode’s highlight is the karaoke sequence: a fan-favorite moment that cracks open Jae-il’s former K-pop idol backstory and briefly turns Sa-bi into someone unrecognizable (in the best possible way). One of the most purely enjoyable hours of the season.

EP 10

Two Sides of the Same Floor

May 11, 2025

Nam-kyung and Yi-young find themselves caught between two competing senior professors, each pulling residents toward their research and their preferred approach. Sa-bi is assigned to a professor known for cruelty — and then discovers what it means to work for someone who isn’t. Hospital Playlist’s Lee Ik-jun and Chae Song-hwa both appear, delivering the season’s most emotionally charged cameo sequence. The episode quietly reframes what it means to have a good mentor.

EP 11

The Secret and the Shift

May 17, 2025

Yi-young is now actively trying to keep her relationship with Do-won hidden from the hospital while simultaneously being assigned hands-on OB-GYN training by the department’s most demanding professor — the one she feared most. The tension between her personal life and professional obligations produces the season’s most textured comedic sequences. Jae-il stays late to care for a terminal patient whose pain isn’t being managed well; it’s the episode that begins his transformation from eager to genuinely good.

EP 12

First Year’s End

May 18, 2025

The first year closes quietly — which is exactly right. Yi-young and Do-won’s relationship is out in the open and the hospital, somehow, already knew. Jae-il receives a co-authorship offer from his professor after his work with the terminal pain patient. Sa-bi and Jae-il end on a “one year rule” that is functionally a very gentle countdown. Nam-kyung gets a final-scene handshake that suggests the next chapter. And Chu Min-ha arrives as the new professor — beating out Eun-won for the position, to the quiet satisfaction of everyone who watched Eun-won operate for twelve episodes. The show ends with a new year beginning, the residents becoming second-years, and a door left very deliberately open. Comfortable, earned, and ready for more.

✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take

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

🏥 Hospital Life, Unfiltered
💛 Slow-Burn Warmth
😄 Gentle Comedy
🤝 Unlikely Friendships
🎵 Hospital Playlist Universe

Go Youn-jung has been doing interesting work since Moving — but Resident Playbook is the first drama to give her a full twelve episodes to carry something. Oh Yi-young is not an easy character to root for at the start: she’s there for the paycheck, she keeps making mistakes, and she spends the first few episodes making it clear she would leave tomorrow if she could. Go Youn-jung makes all of that work without ever making Yi-young unlikable. The gradual reveal of her actual capabilities — the directness, the instinctive advocacy, the quiet way she starts caring about the people in her department — is the backbone of the whole season.

Resident Playbook (2025) — cinematic still

The ensemble is the real surprise. Shin Sia as Nam-kyung is the one who consistently steals scenes — a character who starts as comic relief and ends up carrying some of the season’s most emotionally precise moments. Han Ye-ji (in her debut role) plays Sa-bi’s robot-doctor arc with enough self-awareness that it never tips into parody. Kang You-seok, fresh off When Life Gives You Tangerines, proves that his warmth isn’t character-specific — Jae-il is a completely different person and yet the same quality of generous, lived-in performance. The Hospital Playlist cameos, deployed across all twelve episodes rather than front-loaded, reward fans without confusing newcomers.

The honest caveat: this is a show that earns its ending slowly. The first two episodes require patience, and the pacing throughout remains deliberately unhurried — this is not the kind of medical drama that resolves every case in forty-five minutes of escalating stakes. If you came for twists, it’s not here. If you came for a room full of people learning to trust each other over the course of one hard year, it’s exactly here. The Hospital Playlist franchise found its next chapter — and it found it in the right place.

👍👍👍 BEST FOR 👍👍👍

🏥 Hospital Playlist fans ready for the next generation at Yulje
💛 Viewers who prefer character growth over plot twists
😄 Anyone who wants a warm, funny medical drama without constant emergencies

⚖️ Final Verdict

What works

•Go Youn-jung’s slow-burn lead performance — best she’s been

•Shin Sia as Nam-kyung — the ensemble’s best-kept secret

•Hospital Playlist cameos used with real restraint and payoff

•Emotionally honest patient cases — the OB-GYN setting earns its weight

What to know first

•Episodes 1–2 are slower — the show finds its footing around episode 3

•Not as character-rich as Hospital Playlist — the quartet takes time to bond

•No band, no music nights — this is a different kind of Playbook

•Only 12 episodes — some arcs feel compressed near the end

8.7 / 10Give it three episodes — by the end of episode three, you’ll know if this is your show, and the answer will almost certainly be yes.