A romantic dramedy about a 39-year-old housewife who finds love with a top actor after a painful divorce, it was a modest hit on the small screen, with its final episode recording a 19.5% viewership rating.
[3] Hong Sun-hee (Choi Jin-sil) is a 39-year-old housewife facing extreme financial difficulties due to her husband Ahn Yoo-shik's (Kim Byung-se) mounting debt.
Now a single divorced mother with a thirteen-year-old daughter, Sun-hee runs into top actor Song Jae-bin (Jung Joon-ho) at a commercial shoot, and he turns out to be none other than her first boyfriend, Jang Dong-chul.
But Jae-bin's feelings change when Sun-hee moves into his home as a housekeeper and nanny to his nephew Hoon, son of his older brother and manager Dong-hwa (Jung Woong-in) and estranged from the boy's mother, Lee Na-yoon (Byun Jung-soo).
He tries to show her in little ways: by having a hairstylist straighten out her unflattering perm into a stylish bob cut, buying her some nice clothes, and even paying for her laser eye surgery so that she'll be able to take off her thick, horn-rimmed glasses.
[4] "Ajumma" is the Korean word for a middle-aged, married women (usually housewives), and they were previously portrayed on the small and big screen as unfashionable, aggressive or hot-tempered, and self-sacrificing.
Screenwriter Moon Hee-jung said the heroine she wrote was positive – Sun-hee is hardworking, brave and intelligent – because "the spiritedness of modern ajumma does not just include rebelling against their mothers-in-law.
"[6] Lead actress Choi Jin-sil had once the been the darling of Korean popular culture during the late 1980s through the 1990s, but a controversial marriage and divorce forced her into a five-year hiatus from acting, until she made a successful comeback with My Rosy Life in 2005.
[8][9] Despite some criticism of Sun-hee's unrealistic transformation from a dowdy housewife, the ratings reflected that the story of an ajumma having a second chance at romance found resonance among viewers, especially middle-aged women.