General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

HMLYCP (혜미리예채파)

HMLYCP (혜미리예채파, also romanized HyeMiLeeYeChaePa) is a South Korean reality variety show that aired on the ENA channel from March 12 to May 28, 2023, in which six young female entertainers live together in a remote mountainside house and complete quests to earn cash for furnishing it. The title is an acronym formed from the first syllable of each cast member's name: Hyeri, Miyeon, Leejung, Yena, Chaewon, and Patricia.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Broadcast	ENA, Sundays at 7:50 pm, March 12 to May 28, 2023; 12 episodes²^•³
Cast	Hyeri (Girl's Day), Miyeon ((G)I-dle), Leejung (choreographer), Choi Yena (soloist, formerly of Iz*One), Kim Chaewon (Le Sserafim), and YouTuber Patricia¹
Format	Quests for cash to furnish an empty house in a secluded mountain village⁴
Production	TEO; directed by Lee Tae-gyeong, his first show after moving from tvN to the independent production house¹
Ratings	First episode 0.3% (Nielsen Korea), but number one OTT content among the 15-29 target on the Korea Research KOI ranking⁵^•⁶
Age rating	15 and older (Korean rating)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Episodes 1–6: settling into poverty

The series opens in a bare rural house in Gangwon-do, where the six members arrive to no furniture, no food, and a single kiosk on the wall. Their settlement grant is 2,000 cash, and Kim Chae-won, momentarily setting aside her worry, cheers that it feels like "Squid Game."²⁰ The first shopping trip is a comedy of triage: ramen, a two-burner induction stove, and basic cookware eat up nearly everything, and from then on every comfort must be bought with cash won from the games.

The cast divides the labor fast. Hyeri, the eldest, runs the house. Mi-yeon of (G)I-dle wins the quizzes. Leejung, the dancer who shot to fame on street dance competition shows, talks her way into anything. Choi Ye-na, formerly of IZ*ONE, plays sharp and competitive. Kim Chae-won is the lone introvert, and Patricia, the youngest, is chaos in a sweet package.²⁰

The Signature Sound Quiz is where the show finds its voice, and where Patricia becomes a legend. In the premiere, a 20,000-cash prize is on the line as the members must identify K-pop songs from their opening seconds, naming the title or the choreography.²⁰ The format is borrowed wholesale from director Lee Tae-kyung's own "Amazing Saturday," and critics noticed, but the cast makes it their own: Hyeri nails 2PM's "Again & Again," Leejung haggles furiously over the Mongolian word "dukma," and Patricia, with the most innocent face on television, shouts out words like "shut up" and worse during a consonant quiz, sending the room into hysterics every time her angelic delivery collides with the vocabulary.²⁰ The gap between her image and her mouth becomes the season's most reliable laugh.

Cash won in games buys food, heating, and small luxuries; cash lost means cold dinners. The members take on individual quests, and the stakes turn genuinely desperate: Leejung threatens that if she fails to earn cash she will sleep outside, and Choi Ye-na, Kim Chae-won, and Patricia storm out of the house vowing not to come back unless they succeed.²¹ The drama is never life or death, but it is dinner or no dinner, and the cast plays it accordingly.

Episodes 7–12: the debts come due

The games get meaner as the season goes on. In episode 10, a sponge-gun zombie game decides who has to wash dishes: Patricia loses rock-paper-scissors and becomes the blindfolded zombie, hunting for her next dish-washing partner while the others evade her.²² Choi Ye-na's play is the moment everyone shares: to divert the zombie's attention, she sends KakaoTalk messages so the notification sounds lure the blindfolded hunter across the room, a move so unexpected the producers flag it as genius. When the game ends, the members' group chat holds 281 messages, all of them weapons.²²

Hyeri, meanwhile, builds her own hall of fame of lovable failures. She cooks for the members, plays an out-of-touch corporate boss persona ("부장님 재질"), and hosts a mafia game from a board-game machine she personally prepared. Her defining bit is the water-bottle standing challenge: obsessed with claiming the title of first person to succeed, she bets the house's shared cash on herself, and fails anyway, leaving the team poorer and the audience delighted.¹³

Leejung's season runs from a "retirement" declaration to a catastrophic minus-220,000 cash moment that makes her the house's greatest debtor, through her odd-couple chemistry with Kim Chae-won, to tears in the finale. Director Lee Tae-kyung later singles her out as the source of the show's biggest laughs.²³ Kim Chae-won, the only self-described I-type introvert, develops a competitive alter ego the members dub "ssam-achi" (a mashup of pickled-radish side dish and delinquent), a far cry from her polished Le Sserafim leader image.²⁴

The finale on May 28, 2023 closes the season with a K-pop three-event quest. In the sound-piece quiz, Hyeri is pre-shown correctly guessing trot legend Tae Jin-ah's "Jin-jin-ja-ra," collapsing the room in laughter, and Kim Chae-won enters as the final runner with a teased 50% success rate under the on-screen caption "Fail, Kim Chae-won."²⁵ Having failed so many missions before, she succeeds her final individual quest, redeeming a season of near-misses.²⁴ Then the twist lands: a message announces that all cash earned in the personal quests will be carried over into the season 2 settlement grant, and Leejung and Hyeri burst into tears at the news that their hard-won money, and their debts, will follow them into the next season.²⁵ Hyeri closes by calling the show a "winter vacation" that gave her rest and vitality amid the Gangwon-do scenery, admitting she had never even heard the word "o-do-i-chon" before signing on.¹³

Characters

Hyeri (Hyeri), the eldest and the planner, two years and four months removed from regular variety work. She cooks, manages the cash, plays the oblivious boss, and loses big bets with total confidence.
Mi-yeon (Mi-yeon of (G)I-dle), the house's game genius, quick on quizzes and quick to pounce on a weakness.
Leejung (Leejung), the dancer and de facto leader by sheer force of personality. The show's biggest laughs, from her "retirement" to her minus-220,000 debt to her finale tears, all start with her.²³
Choi Ye-na (Choi Ye-na), the sharp-tongued competitor who wins games with brains nobody sees coming, KakaoTalk lures included.
Kim Chae-won (Kim Chae-won of Le Sserafim), the lone introvert, secretly the most competitive member in the house, and the finale's dramatic redeemer.²⁴
Patricia (Patricia), the youngest, cast on the strength of her pre-interview love of K-pop and exceeding every expectation, carrying the music missions and the show's purest comedy.²³

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Season 2 talk began before the finale even aired, driven by young viewers on YouTube clips and online communities.²¹ Director Lee Tae-kyung confirmed after the final episode that the production team and cast are all waiting for a second season, promising, if timing allows, something "even more fun and more desperate."²³ The finale's reveal that personal-quest cash carries into a season 2 settlement grant was written as a direct hook for it.²⁵

Format

The six members arrive at a house in a secluded mountain village where the walls and floors are bare and nothing is provided. They earn "cash" by succeeding at quests and missions, then spend it at an on-site kiosk to buy food, household goods, appliances, and furnishings for the house.²^•⁷ Director Lee Tae-gyeong described the concept as a "busy housekeeping" variety program in which the members earn cash through missions and quests to fill an empty house, planned so that viewers could end their weekend laughing.⁸

The quests drew on the cast's backgrounds. Because all members except Patricia came from the music industry and shared a love of dancing, the production built games around their strengths, including dance-challenge quests and K-pop quiz missions such as a "K-pop 3-type quiz" finale.⁹^•¹⁰ The show was the first Korean variety program to use an interactive kiosk, which members used to purchase items with their earned cash.²

Cast

The six members were chosen as a combination of currently prominent figures who had rarely appeared in variety shows, according to the production.¹¹

Hyeri (Lee Hye-ri), singer-actor from Girl's Day, the oldest member and the show's variety comeback after 2 years and 4 months away from regular variety following Amazing Saturday in November 2020.¹² She cooked for the members and led the group as the eldest of the six "sisters."¹³
Miyeon (Cho Mi-yeon) of (G)I-dle.¹
Leejung (Lee Lee-jung), the choreographer who rose to prominence through Street Woman Fighter.¹⁴
Yena (Choi Ye-na), a soloist and former Iz*One member.¹
Chaewon (Kim Chae-won) of Le Sserafim, making her first appearance as a regular cast member of a TV variety show outside her group.¹ She was the only "I" (introvert) personality type among the six on the MBTI framework, a contrast the show played on.¹
Patricia (Patricia Yiombi), a YouTuber who appears with her brother Jonathan; he later joined episodes 7 and 8 as a guest.⁴

The cast was noted for its youth: at broadcast time the oldest member, Hyeri, had just turned 28, and the average member age was about 24, lowering the typical average age of Korean real-variety casts.²

Production

The show was produced by TEO, the studio founded by producer Kim Tae-ho, and was the first program Lee Tae-gyeong delivered after moving there from his previous career directing tvN hits Amazing Saturday and Life Bar.¹^•¹² Lee had re-teamed with Hyeri after the two had made Amazing Saturday a signature tvN program together.¹² The title came about in a weekly production meeting when TEO representative Lee Seung-jun looked at the cast photos on the meeting-room blackboard and suggested "just HyeMiLeeYeChaePa"; Lee Tae-gyeong recalled that the name sounded trendy, though Hyeri teased him that it resembled the 2010s unit TaeTiSeo.¹⁵ The logo was built from each member's own handwritten first letter.²

Filming took place in Chuncheon, in Gangwon Province, where the members lived in an otherwise empty house.¹²

Reception

The broadcast ratings started low. The first episode recorded 0.3% according to Nielsen Korea, a figure the press called low even accounting for ENA's smaller channel profile, and the show was compared unfavorably in ratings to tvN's PyongPyong Earth Arcade, which opened at 2.2% and peaked at 3.8%.⁵^•¹⁶ The two shows were frequently compared because both featured young female casts playing games for rewards, and their audiences overlapped, though HMLYCP was described as more relaxed and cutesy in tone.¹⁶

Its performance on streaming platforms told a different story. The program reached number one among OTT content for the 15-29 target on the Korea Research KOI ranking and placed in the upper ranks of overall OTT buzz.⁶^•¹³ A later retrospective noted that although the ratings alone made it look like a failure, the show's high buzz and OTT rankings won it a large following among young audiences.¹⁷

The finale on May 28, 2023 closed the members' "5 days 2 villages" (오도이촌) stay and mentioned a season 2, with cash earned in individual quests described as counting toward a "season 2 settlement fund"; the members reacted with surprise, and Kim Chae-won expressed determination to return.¹⁸ At the time, however, no concrete plan for a second season existed.² Requests for a season 2 continued after the show ended, and in July 2025 five of the members, Hyeri, Miyeon, Leejung, Yena, and Kim Chae-won, reunited, keeping the topic alive.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Celebrity, family, lifestyle, and court reality series › Lifestyle, dating, and docusoaps › Wealth, real estate, and lifestyle series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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