Gong Yoo, Kim Go Eun, Lee Dong Wook, and Yoo In Na showed up in Gangneung last weekend. Not for a fan event, not for a movie shoot — for one night and two days of travel variety filming, April 24 to 25, the cleanest reunion of the original Guardian: The Lonely and Great God cast since the show's run nearly a decade ago. tvN confirmed the schedule on April 29, after local outlet coverage forced a public update.
The choice of format — a travel variety show, not a drama special — is the part most coverage is missing.
What tvN actually built
This is the previously announced 10th-anniversary special, but it's structured as a low-stakes outing rather than a continuation of the story. Producing director Hwang Da Won is running it, with prior credits on Handsome Trot and City Girls on the Climb, both lifestyle-variety formats that lean on chemistry rather than narrative arcs.
The Gangneung shoot is a tight one-night, two-days schedule, which usually compresses into a single one-off special. tvN has not yet confirmed whether this airs as one episode or a multi-episode arc.
Why this Goblin reunion is variety, not drama
The original Goblin run was tvN at peak fantasy-romance ambition — A-list cast, big-budget production, deep Korean folklore source material. Following it up nearly a decade later with the original cast and a new plot is an enormous bet, and the comparison risk to the original is brutal. Reunion drama specials get pitched at this scale and rarely make it to camera precisely because they can't outrun the source.
A travel variety show solves the problem. The four actors get the nostalgia content their fans want without anyone having to write a sequel that might not land. It's also cheaper, faster, and built for the YouTube-clip economy — which is where most international Goblin fans actually live now.
For the audience, this is the closest you'll get to seeing Eun Tak and the Goblin in the same scene again without the project having to carry a drama's expectations.
When you can watch
Update: the special aired later than the first-half window tvN originally gave. tvN aired the first episode of Goblin 10th Anniversary Trip on a Saturday in early July, with the four actors revisiting Jumunjin Breakwater in Gangneung, one of the drama's most famous filming spots. Per Nielsen Korea it averaged 3.3% nationwide, peaking at 4.2%, and topped its time slot across cable and general programming channels. The original Guardian: The Lonely and Great God remains streaming internationally on Viki.
Mina's Take
The signal here isn't that the cast got back together. The signal is that tvN went with travel variety instead of a special drama episode. That's a deliberately small frame. Nostalgia drama sequels don't get made at this scale because they can't outrun the original; travel variety can. Watch the broadcast format closely — if tvN announces more than two episodes for this special before the air date, it means the two days of filming yielded enough chemistry footage that Hwang Da Won fought for more runway. That's a tell about how much the network trusts this specific cast pairing to hold a longer arc, and the start of a reunion-variety pattern across other 2010s tvN hits.
What to watch next
- Episode count — one-off versus multi-episode, which signals how much usable footage came out of two days
- Any teaser footage that revisits original Goblin music or imagery — the cheapest nostalgia lever tvN has on the shelf
Correction, September 21, 2026: an earlier version said the four actors had not shared a frame since the original run; three of them met the year before the special, which is where the idea came from. It also said the premiere topped cable and terrestrial channels in its slot — Nielsen's comparison was cable and general programming channels — and a watch-list item about the air date was removed after the special aired in July.
Sources
- Guardian 10th anniversary special — filming details — Soompi
- Goblin cast reunites for nostalgic 10th anniversary trip — The Korea Times
