SEOUL - South Korean actor Park Seo-joon hasn’t done a proper romantic television drama in five years.

Ever since he sparked a cultural moment as the dogged underdog Park Sae-ro-yi in Itaewon Class (2020), he’s kept busy with bigger-budget fare — a cameo in Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero movie The Marvels (2023), Netflix’s period horror Gyeongseong Creature (2023 to 2024) and apocalyptic film Concrete Utopia (2023).

But sitting before a room full of reporters at a hotel in Seoul’s Guro-gu on Dec 4, the 37-year-old seemed ready to scale back down.

“I’ve been working steadily, just on different platforms,” Park said at the press conference for Surely Tomorrow, his new series premiering on Prime Video on Dec 6. “But I think I’ve come back with a more mature way of expressing things.”

The drama follows entertainment reporter Gyeong-do as he gets tangled up with an old college flame Ji-woo under messy circumstances: He’s covering a cheating scandal, and she happens to be the wife of the man at its centre.

Their history stretches back 18 years — a romance at age 20, a second try at 26, and now this awkward third chapter in their late thirties.

The premise involving an entertainment reporter as the lead naturally drew plenty of questions from the assembled press.

South Korean director Lim Hyun-wook, himself a former reporter before moving into variety shows and dramas — most recently 2023’s smash hit King The Land — said the profession was baked into the set-up from the start.

“The whole story kicks off because Gyeong-do’s job puts him in this situation,” he explained. “Without him being a reporter, none of it could have happened.”

Park drew from his own experience working the press circuit. “Early in my career, I must’ve hit 50 to 70 newsrooms in a single week doing interviews,” he said. “I still remember the vibe, the different atmospheres of ...