East of Eden Will Be Extended by 4 Episodes

Tuesday January 20, 2009 Korea

MBC announced today that East of Eden will be extended by 4 episodes.

According to a person in charge, the original plan between MBC and Chorokbaem Media was to extend East of Eden by 8 episodes to cover up for the follow-up drama My Love For You abrupt cancellation. But because some of the cast members from East of Eden have other commitments, they decided to halve it to 4 episodes instead. The drama will thus end with 54 episodes. It’s believed that because the pace of the drama is progressing slower than expected, there isn’t any need to write any additional storylines.

But amidst the drama extension, there are worrying signs ahead for MBC with KBS Boys Before Flowers coming really close on the ratings front.

Boys Before Flowers set another new rating high on the 19th with 24.8% and the possibility that they could well knock East of Eden off the summit is very real despite the latter dominating for the past few months. East of Eden might still have won yesterday with 25.1% but the margin is now only 0.3%.

Since debuting, the ratings of Boys Before Flowers has been increasing with each new episode. And in only its 3rd week of broadcast, it has managed to whittled down the 10% lead held by East of Eden to only 0.3% yesterday. It will be interesting to see the final ratings after their respective episodes on the 20th. The battle between MBC and KBS has impacted SBS Terroir greatly as it registered only a dismal 6.5%, and effectively out of the equation.