[News] Ryu Jin ruins his image for sitcom Standby.

[News] Ryu Jin ruins his image for sitcom Standby.
Cr. - dramabeans

With High Kick 3 nearing its end, MBC’s gearing up for a new daily sitcom to take over its timeslot, Standby, and has cast Ryu Jin in what sounds like a hilarious character.

The sitcom is set at a broadcast station, where Ryu plays an announcer whose goal is to anchor for the 9 o’clock news. He looks cool and collected on the outside, but his real personality is described as a bit of a pathetic loser. Ryu Jin’s played lots of competent businessman types with polished, sophisticated personas, but this role promises to “ruin” that image thoroughly. He looks the part of the ice man, but he can be pretty hilarious when he goes counter to that image, as he occasionally did in Baby-Faced Beauty.

In his rookie days, Ryu’s character made a few key mistakes during live broadcasts and spent the next several years being bypassed by his colleagues and even juniors. Naturally this is a source of stress, so he resolves to make his breakthrough before he gets any older, starting a skincare regimen and writing glowing praise about himself on the broadcaster’s homepage. He sounds like a hoot.

The show departs a bit from the family-centric setup of so many sitcoms, and instead depicts the the workplace bond, describing “relationships and understanding between people with no blood relations, who become a real family.” It’ll have a strong “humanism” bent, which means there’ll be lots of touching moments of connection interspersed between the laughs. The PD, Jeon Jin-soo, has worked on a number of sitcoms, including High Kick 3, All My Love, and Three Men, Three Women.

Standby will air daily and premieres in April 2012.