The strength of Korean storytelling on TV is no longer a secret. With Netflix reporting 80% of platform users watching Korean-language content, it’s official: K-dramas have broken into the American mainstream, a process helped along by the massive investments Netflix and other U.S.-based media companies like Disney, Paramount, and Amazon have made in the Korean entertainment industry as part of their corporate mandates to grow profits and subscription bases.
The influx of U.S.-based streamers into the K-drama scene has been met with some criticism from its ardent, women-dominated international fanbase. Critics have called out changes in the industry they perceive to be driven by international streamers—e.g. a slight shift away from the one-and-done season format and the increase in the depictions of violence, sex, and nudity in K-drama. Broadly, international streamers’ interest in Korean entertainment has expanded and diversified the global K-drama audience, broadening of the kinds of K-dramas that get made. While romantic melodrama remains a backbone of the Korean TV industry, the popularity of a show like Squid Game has whetted the appetite of international streamers for K-dramas that more men will watch too.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The rise of Korean domestic streamers has also played a part in the diversification of K-drama offerings, with platforms like Waave, Tving, and Watcha investing in series and subjects that might not fly on domestic broadcasters KBS, MBC, and SBS, or even on cable channels tvN and JTBC. Meanwhile, Chinese streamer iQiyi has continued to market itself internationally, using a similar strategy as Viki in an attempt to corner the growing number of global watchers who watch exclusively Asian dramas. In many ways, it has never been an easier time to be an international K-drama fan.
With all of these players on the expanding scene, one might have predicted that 2024 would be a banner year for Korean TV, but—at least from a viewing perspective—it has been a relatively humdrum 12 months. Many of the biggest productions, including the return of popular shows (e.g. Hellbound, Sweet Home) and projects featuring some of Hallyu’s biggest actors (e.g. Uncle Samsik, Queen of Tears), have fallen short of expectations. While some of the best K-dramas of 2024 did have outsized budgets and talent, 2024 in K-drama land was the year of the underdog, in which the best series were not often the flashiest shows.
Note: Series that have not yet finished their run were not considered for this year’s list. Therefore, while contract marriage melodrama When the Phone Rings has hijacked much of the Korean drama fan community’s attention in December, its 2025 series end date knocks it out of contention for this year’s list. The same is true for Kang Full’s Light Shop which will wrap up before the end of 2024, but won’t have finished by the time this piece has been published. Squid Game, the most broadly anticipated K-drama return of 2025, is coming at the very end of the month, on December 26.
10. Mr. Plankton (Netflix)
It’s common knowledge that not all K-drama romances have a happy ending, but Mr. Plankton broadcast the demise of its male lead from the very beginning, leaning into the power of dramatic irony to tell its bittersweet tale. The 10-episode Netflix series from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay scribe Jo Yong snuck in at the tail end of the year to push the boundaries of the romantic comedy format. When Hae Jo (Bloodhounds’ Woo Do-hwan) finds out he has a terminal illness, he kidnaps ex-girlfriend Jo Jae-mi (Strong Girl Namsoon’s Lee You-mi) on her wedding day to accompany him on his search for his biological father. The result is a messy adventure of hijinks and healing. Unlike some series on this list, Mr. Plankton doesn’t end with a miracle that sees a couple’s love defying even death, and it’s stronger for it.
9. Death’s Game (Amazon Prime)
Many of the best K-dramas began life as a webtoon. Death’s Game is an example of a manhwa adaptation that actually manages to capture the reading experience of the original webtoon—and maybe even improves on it. The result is a reincarnation action thriller about a man trying to outrun the end he thought he wanted. After seven years of struggling to find a job in the hypercompetitive Korea, Choi Yee-jae (Cafe Minamdang’s Seo In-guk) attempts suicide. This angers Death (Cinderella and the Four Knights’ Lee So-dam)—here, a literal character. She sentences Yee-jae to live 12 doomed lives, reincarnating into different people, living diverse lives. If he can survive in one of the increasingly high-stakes, action-driven lives, then he can keep living it—and, if he cannot, he will go to hell. The first half of Death’s Game was released in December 2023, with the conclusion coming in January 2024. Alchemy of Souls Season 2 lead Go Youn-jung also stars as Yee-jae’s ex-girlfriend, whose character has an expanded role in the K-drama—only one example of how writer-director Ha Byung-hoon made this tale about the preciousness of life, as learned by one man, into an action drama sum even greater than its original source material.
8. Marry My Husband (Amazon Prime)
Sometimes, as Marry My Husband demonstrates, revenge is a dish best served through time travel. We begin in 2023, where Kang Ji-won (What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim’s Park Min-young) has been fighting cancer only to discover that her husband and best friend have been having an affair. When they accidentally kill her, Ji-won wakes up in 2013, with the chance to transfer her life’s misfortunes onto others. Some of the most cathartic K-dramas include the least sympathetic characters, and Marry My Husband had some of the year’s best villains, allowing viewers to project frustration, anger, and hate onto fictional characters. This series may not be as thematically complex as some of the other K-dramas on this list, but, in this revenge drama’s case, that straightforward quality is its greatest strength.
7. Pyramid Game (Paramount+)
Not to be confused with the other popular game-centric K-drama, Pyramid Game follows Seong Soo-ji (Twenty-Five Twenty-One’s Kim Ji-yeon, aka Bona), an army brat who is just starting at the fancy Baekyeon Girls’ High School. As an eternal transfer student, Soo-ji is adept at fitting into new social environments, but she is unprepared for the Pyramid Game, an app-based “game” that codifies Class 2-5’s social hierarchy into winners and losers. Those who get the most monthly votes enjoy god-like powers of “popularity,” while those who get no votes are deemed fair game for violent bullying and humiliation. Soo-jin must decide if she wants to try to win the game, or destroy it completely.
6. The Judge From Hell (Hulu)
There were many male anti-heroes on Korean TV this year, but, when it comes to sheer entertainment value, Park Shin-hye (also in 2024’s Doctor Slump) beat them all with her delightfully devilish turn as Justita, a demon judge from literal hell banished from her supernatural job to our mortal plane after wrongly condemning mortal judge Kang Bit-na to eternal damnation. If Justita hopes to return to the underworld, she must kill ten human murderers who feel no remorse within a year—and she has to do it all in the body of Kang Bit-na. Justita’s job is made more difficult by Han Da-on (Kim Jae-young), a detective who believes in the power of the justice system, and who is harboring a major secret of his own. Not all K-dramas have to reinvent the wheel, and The Judge From Hell proved just how much fun a supernaturally silly, well-executed TV series can be, especially for American viewers who might miss shows from the heyday of networks like The CW.
5. The Atypical Family (Netflix)
While Hollywood’s superhero era limps along, the Korean TV industry has quietly and steadily been churning out some of the best superpowered stories of the past few years. In 2023, it was Disney+’s multigenerational Moving. This year, it’s Netflix’s much quieter family drama The Atypical Family. While Moving’s characters were often caught up in the machinations of world governments, The Atypical Family is a domestic drama through and through, keeping the focus on the Boks, a family whose members happen to be genetically superpowered but have lost their gifts due to chronic diseases, such as depression, insomnia, obesity. (In one major misstep, The Atypical Family put thin actress Claudia Kim in a fatsuit instead of casting a fat actress in the role of Bok Dong-hee.)
Jang Ki-young (My Roommate is a Gumiho) stars as Bok Gwi-ju, a father who has not been able to travel in time since his wife died. When Do Da-hae (The 8 Show’s Chun Woo-hee), a seemingly demure con artist with designs on the Bok’s riches, starts to flirt with him, a struggling Gwi-ju is too depressed to care. However, after Gwi-ju’s powers start to spark back to life, both Gqi-ju and Da-hae are forced to confront their blossoming, inconvenient feelings for one another. The result is one of the best romances in K-drama this year, all part of a larger, slowburn story about trauma, healing, and family.
4. A Shop For Killers (Hulu)
Some K-dramas—like a good assassin—get in, get the job done, and get out. A Shop For Killers, a quick, eight-episode action drama released in the first few months of 2024, is one such story. Co-created, co-written, and co-directed by Lee Kwon, this Kill Bill-like drama begins in the middle of its story, as we are introduced to protagonist Jeong Ji-an (Inspector Koo’s Kim Hye-jun) in the middle of an attempted assassination on her. Why Ji-an is in this position is answered in the series through a non-linear fashion, flashing back to Ji-an’s life to explore how her relationship with the mysterious uncle who raised her, Jeong Jin-man (Goblin’s Lee Dong-wook), and his untimely death, have made her a target. Expertly acted, stylishly shot, and perfectly paced, A Shop For Killers is a—forgive me—killer example of the diversity of K-drama genre offerings.
3. Love in the Big City (Viki)
As with most stories depicting a marginalized community or character still underrepresented in mainstream media, Love in the Big City (adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name) has been the subject of outsized judgment, on multiple fronts. When the trailer for the slice-of-life drama that follows a decade in the life of queer man Go Young (The King’s Affection Nam Yoon-su) was initially released, it was met with homophobic outcries from anti-LGBTQ groups within Korea, accusing the drama of “glorifying and promoting homosexuality” and leading the production company to replace the trailer with a censored version. Following the drama’s release, some in the English-speaking, international viewing community compared the TV adaptation unfavorably to the 2024 feature film adaptation of the same source material, which centered the friendship between Go Young and female friend Jae-hee (named Mi-ae, in the drama), or to traditional BL dramas that prioritize queer romance over other elements of the queer experience.
As a result, this series is often qualified by all of the things it is not (a traditional BL drama, a traditional K-drama, the source material, the feature film adaptation, every queer Korean person’s experience) rather than by all of the things that it is. With scripts written by novel author Park Sang-young and brought to screen by a team of four directors (Hur Jin-ho, Hong Ji-young, Son Tae-gyum, and Kim Se-in), Love in the Big City—the TV drama—is a deeply moving tale about one gay man learning how to live and love in a society and world that do not often want him near.
The drama’s anthology-like structure, with each director taking a pair of episodes, brings a distinct tone to each “chapter” in Go Young’s twenties, and allows for the kind of expansive worldbuilding that continues to be one of the TV drama’s chief advantages over other storytelling formats. Go Young, as portrayed by Nam, is beautifully flawed, and endlessly complex as he takes the journey from chaotic college kid to brave writer. While those are two of Go Young’s chief identities at different points in the K-drama, they are far from the only ones, and the drama never tries to pigeon-hole the character into being one thing. Love in the Big City is far too ambitious for that. This TV drama adaptation could have been bad and still represented a major victory for Korean television and its depiction of the queer experience. Instead, it’s one of the best K-dramas of 2024.
2. Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born (Disney+)
Every episode of Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born begins on a stage, as the Disney+ series delivers its intro. Curtains open to sepia-toned photos, as the voice of real-life first-generation gukgeuk actor Cho Yeongsuk tells us: “It is the 1950s, following the devastating Korean War. Female gukgeuk, or traditional theater, captures the heart of the public, and many girls dream of becoming princes.” We meet our fictional players, including the titular Yoon Jeongnyeon, a provincial pansori genius who dreams of life on the stage. Jeongnyeon is played by Kim Tae-ri, one of the brightest talents of her generation and known for Hallyu hits like The Handmaiden, Space Sweepers, and Twenty-Five Twenty-One, to name just a few. Kim trained for three years to learn the art of pansori, a traditional Korean genre of musical storytelling performed by a singer and a drummer. The 12-episode drama depicts the rise of Kim’s Jeongnyeon from an unpolished teen fishmonger to a star of the stage.
Under the masterful direction of The Red Sleeve Jung Ji-in, the series is deceptively ambitious in its thematic scope. It’s about one underdog’s ascent to performance fame, but it’s also about Korean cultural tradition in the face of the Western pressures of modernity. It’s about the power of fandom and storytelling, and the struggle to hold onto one’s artistry in the face of commercial interests. It’s about trauma, laid bare in interpersonal relationships and in collective experiences of art. It’s about theatrical play and the performance of gender. While the production faced valid criticism for erasing some of the explicitly queers storylines and characters from the webtoon source material, Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born remains an inherently queer, women-centric world that felt like nothing else on television in 2024.
1. Lovely Runner (Viki)
Stuck in development limbo for three years prior to its production, Lovely Runner was never supposed to become the year’s most beloved Korean drama. However, when the time-slip romance (adapted from a webtoon by True Beauty scribe Lee Si-eun) premiered on tvN domestically and Viki internationally in April, it steadily built on its weekly audience. By the time Lovely Runner’s series finale dropped in late May, millions of K-drama fans around the world had become invested in the story of Sol and Sun-jae, desperate to find out if their love could withstand the cruel vagaries of fate.
Reminiscent of that other great time-slip drama,Your Name, Lovely Runner begins with a main character who is missing much of the context for her own love story. Im Sol (Extraordinary You’s Kim Hye-yoon) doesn’t know that Ryu Sun-jae (20th Century Girl’s Byeon Woo-seok), the K-pop idol object of her affections, lived next door in high school. She doesn’t know that Sun-jae’s old watch, an exorbitantly priced item secured by super-stan Sol at a fan auction, has the power to throw her back in time. And she doesn’t know that she may be the only person who can save Sun-jae from an untimely demise. Kim and Byeon give career-skyrocketing performances as Sol and Sun-jae across different eras of their lives, making us believe they are teenagers, then college kids, and then 30-something adults—and always in love with one another.
The term “melodrama” includes the Greek root “melos,” meaning music. Most of the best melodrama filmmakers—including, presumably, Lovely Runner Yoon Jong-ho (Flower of Evil) and Kim Tae-yeop—understand how vital a tool soundtrack can be for heightening viewers’ emotional catharsis, helping us identify and empathize with what the characters are going through. This is the power of a good melodrama soundtrack, and the many people behind the Lovely Runner OST understood the assignment. Tracks “Spring Snow” (from popular Korean band 10cm) and “Sudden Shower” (a ballad performed by star Byeon, in character as K-pop idol Sun-jae) came to define the agony and joy of a love that transcends time. The latter track charted internationally and was performed live by Byeon at MAMA Awards 2024, one of K-pop’s biggest nights, highlighting just how popular Lovely Runner had become.
Lovely Runner was never supposed to be 2024’s best K-drama. It didn’t have the industry’s biggest budgets or its most high-profile stars. Instead, it had a good, well executed story—in the end, the thing that matters most.
Honorable mentions: Like Flowers in the Sand (Netflix), Doubt (Netflix), Doctor Slump (Netflix), No Gain No Love (Amazon Prime), The Trunk (Netflix), Love For Love’s Sake (iQiyi), Wonderful World (Disney+), Good Partner (Viki), Flex Cop X (Hulu), Family By Choice (Viki), Death’s Game (Amazon Prime), Queen of Tears (Netflix)
