Most medical dramas chase the big hospital: the marble lobby, the politics of a thousand-bed institution, the surgeon who wants the corner office. Dr. Romantic (λλ§λ₯ν° κΉμ¬λΆ) goes the other way. Its hero has already had the corner office, walked out, and reinvented himself under a fake name at a crumbling clinic in the middle of nowhere. Seven years and three seasons later, that clinic, Doldam Hospital, is one of the most recognizable settings in Korean television, and the cranky surgeon at its center is the rare lead who stayed put while a whole rotation of younger doctors passed through his operating room.
The premise
The man everyone calls Kim Sa-bu (“Teacher Kim”) is a triple-board-certified surgeon working under an assumed name, Bu Yong-ju, at Doldam Hospital, a small, understaffed facility far from the prestige of Seoul medicine. He could be operating anywhere. Instead he runs a rural emergency room and uses it as a teaching ground, taking in talented but damaged young doctors and pushing them, often brutally, toward his idea of what a “real doctor” is. The cases are genuinely the engine here: a trauma surgeon’s instinct for a bleeding patient set against hospital accountants, ambitious administrators, and the constant threat that the money will run out and Doldam will close. It is a medical drama with a strong melodramatic streak, but the surgery is treated seriously enough to carry the emotion.
The three seasons
Across three completed seasons, the constant is Han Suk-kyu as Kim Sa-bu, with the same lead director (Yoo In-sik) and writer (Kang Eun-kyung) steering all three. What changes is the cast of juniors who walk into his ER.
Season 1 (2016β17, 20 episodes) sets the template and is the longest run. The young leads are Yoo Yeon-seok as Kang Dong-ju, a competitive surgeon nursing a chip on his shoulder, and Seo Hyun-jin as Yoon Seo-jung, a doctor working through her own trauma. This is the season that builds Doldam from scratch and explains how a surgeon of Kim Sa-bu’s caliber ended up hiding there.
Season 2 (2020, 16 episodes) resets almost entirely. Han Suk-kyu returns, but the junior leads are new: Ahn Hyo-seop as Seo Woo-jin, a gifted surgeon buried in debt and cynicism, and Lee Sung-kyung as Cha Eun-jae, a skilled doctor who freezes in the operating room, joined by Kim Joo-hun as Bae Moon-jung. If Season 1 was about why Doldam exists, Season 2 is about whether it can keep running with a fresh set of broken-in recruits.
Season 3 (2023, 16 episodes) keeps the Season 2 core trio intact and pushes toward a larger goal: building a proper trauma center at Doldam. It opens with a crisis aboard a North Korean vessel that has drifted into South Korean waters, which pulls the Doldam team out of their usual ER and raises the stakes around what the hospital is for.
The practical takeaway: start with Season 1, even though its junior cast is completely different from what follows. Skipping it means missing the origin of everything Seasons 2 and 3 build on.
Where to watch
Dr. Romantic originally aired on SBS in South Korea. International streaming varies by region and by season, which is the honest answer rather than a tidy one. It has been carried on Rakuten Viki and Disney+ (Star) in many regions, and has also appeared on Netflix, Hulu, Kocowa, and Viu in selected markets; Season 3 leaned toward Disney+ in several territories. Because rights shift over time and differ per season, check what is actually licensed in your country, for instance via JustWatch, before committing to a platform.
The cast
The whole franchise rests on Han Suk-kyu, a veteran film actor who plays Kim Sa-bu as gruff, theatrical, and quietly sentimental, the kind of mentor who insults you and saves your career in the same scene. He is the reason the show survives a near-total cast turnover. In Season 1, Yoo Yeon-seok and Seo Hyun-jin carry the younger half of the story. From Season 2 onward, Ahn Hyo-seop and Lee Sung-kyung take over as the new generation of Doldam doctors, with Kim Joo-hun rounding out the core team. The deliberate hand-off, rather than dragging the same juniors across all three seasons, is part of why the franchise stayed fresh instead of repeating itself.
Filming locations
The most famous location is Doldam Hospital itself. The exterior is the former Lake Sanjeong Family Hotel, which closed in 2012, near Sanjeong Lake (μ°μ νΈμ) in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province. The same building stood in for the hospital across all three seasons, and it is exterior only, not a working clinic. Visitors can walk the grounds and photograph the facade, but cannot go inside. The surrounding Sanjeong Lake scenery turns up in the show as well. Interiors were shot on sets at SBS Ilsan Production Studios in Goyang. Worth flagging plainly: there is no verified free-license photo of the actual hospital building circulating online, so the lake nearby is the closest location-appropriate image rather than the structure itself.
Worth your time?
If you want a hospital drama that is genuinely about teaching, about what gets lost when medicine becomes a business, Dr. Romantic earns the three-season commitment, and Han Suk-kyu’s performance is the spine that holds it together. The trade-off is structure: each season largely restarts its younger cast, so you are signing on for a mentor and a place more than a single set of characters. For viewers who only have room for one run, Season 1 is the strongest and most self-contained entry point. The later seasons reward you if Doldam has gotten under your skin, which, for a lot of people, it does.
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