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Every longtime fan of Korean dramas has a few favourite years of releases. The dramas in those years are rarely disappointing. Every show we pick up exceeds expectations. The characters sparkle, the dialogues speak to our souls, the plots seep into our dreams.
The last time I had a year like that was in 2021, when Happiness came out and ruined all other zombie apocalypses for me. If your allegory about classism during a global pandemic doesn’t have best friends in a contract marriage, fighting together to protect survivors while realising they love each other as the whole complex quickly falls to an invisible disease, don’t expect me to even look at it. That year also gave us Navillera, Beyond Evil, Yumi’s Cells, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, and a dozen more from which I still haven’t recovered.
Reader, 2023 was not such a year. From the very beginning, you could feel the industry’s exhaustion.
Well before the success of Squid Game (another 2021 release), a new Korean wave starting with Crash Landing On You (2019) brought fresh global interest and investment to the industry. Following the success of Crash Landing on You, Netflix signed a three-year deal in 2019 with Studio Dragon, in addition to licensing content from other production houses. According to CNBC, Netflix has spent over $700 million between 2015 and 2020 on Korean content. In May of this year, they announced another $2.5 billion to be invested over the next four years. The impact of this sudden inflow of cash was a massive shift in production practices. Many more dramas with higher budgets were greenlit quickly.
Initially this meant that some really excellent stories, which may never have otherwise seen the light of day, suddenly found themselves with a budget and proper production support. This is how an epic fantasy drama like Alchemy of Souls was considered a viable project instead of an impractical pipe dream. They had the money and it was the time to be ambitious.
But the industry grew and changed too quickly in too short a span of time. By 2022, local production companies were already trying to claw back their independence from international streaming giants. Korea Times reported that companies like CJ ENM — one of its subsidiaries is Studio Dragon — “have been moving big to break the years-long Netflix dominance through strategic partnerships and mergers”. Another report in the New York Times covered how AStory, the production company behind the Emmy Award nominated Extraordinary Attorney Woo, rejected Netflix’s offer to finance the entire second season, with their chief executive, Lee Sang-baek saying that despite the series becoming a mega hit globally, “our company couldn't do anything with that.”
The battles being fought in boardrooms started to leave their scars on our screens. Broadcast companies which had previously stayed away from the international streaming race found themselves forced to participate because the economics of the industry had changed irreversibly.
That’s how, this year, drama watchers suddenly found themselves back in the days when second halves of dramas could be relied on to nose dive off a cliff. High concept stories with poor execution were supposed to be a relic of the mid 2010s, yet that’s the nostalgic throwback that 2023 decided to gift us.
This churn in the drama industry was inevitable and necessary for local productions to retain a sense of self and create sustainable growth. Unfortunately, for now, it seems the upshot is that viewers find themselves in a period when writers fall back on old tropes and producers are once again reluctant to greenlight less tested storylines.
A substantial number of dramas released in 2023 were also adapted from popular webtoons. For production companies seeking scripts that are already market tested, the webtoon to dramaland pipeline has brought steady success in recent years. It’s an even better bet than adapting a popular foreign property, which sometimes doesn’t translate well into the Korean market.
This trend of adaptation is growing stronger and is something that worries me. More than half of the dramas I loved this year had original scripts. If instability and market stresses continue to plague the K-drama industry, we may see fewer scriptwriters getting a chance to showcase their original ideas next year. Let’s hope the churning ends soon, so I can find myself once again enjoying a favourite year of drama releases.
Fortunately, for all its drawbacks, I can’t write off 2023 in K-dramaland completely. As always, dramaland held back a few promising dramas for the very end of the year. Looking ahead, I have some hopes for Sam-dalri, Death’s Game, and Gyeongseong Creature. Of the large volume of dramas dumped on us this year, as of December, I’d picked up 51 and completed 22. While I have plenty of grouse against the dramas that I had to rage-drop half way through, I was also surprised by the dramas that managed to stick the landing.
Most of them were not stories I expected to win my heart. Some of them started awkwardly, some were built on concepts I’d seen fail before, while others relied heavily on trope subversions that could easily go wrong. But in the end, these were the shows which seeped into my conversations, which I pushed at my friends, and which I thought about at random hours of the day. So let me tell you about the 10 dramas I will remember 2023 by.
This is not the best drama of the year, yet this will likely stay in a quiet, warm corner of my heart for the longest time. Call It Love is a story of empathy undoing an angry young woman’s attempt at revenge. Lee Sung-kyung plays the blunt yet soft-hearted Shim Woo-joo, whose family has suffered because of a cheating father and the greed of the woman for whom he left them.
After her father dies, leaving everything to his second wife, Woo-joo and her siblings are forced to move out of their childhood home. Driven by rage and loss, Woo-joo decides to enact revenge on the woman’s son, Han Dong-jin, played skillfully by Kim Young-kwang. However, Dong-jin’s life hasn’t been easy, and as Woo-joo joins his company and slowly gets to know the man, her determination to seek revenge weakens day by day. Instead, she often finds herself helping Dong-jin.
Kim Young-kwang delivers his career’s best performance as the soft-spoken Han Dong-jin. At first, he seems like the exact opposite of the prickly Woo-joo. He quietly takes abuse and tries to let it roll off him, while Woo-joo punches back with all her might. But there is a recognition of a kindred spirit from their very first, distrustful interactions with each other. The drama sets out pretending to be a revenge saga, but ends up being a healing, sweet love story between two people who really need each other.
In a year when I’m complaining about the avalanche of mediocre offerings, K-dramaland also produced one of the best epic historical dramas of the last decade. Based during the brutal invasion of Korea by the Qing dynasty in the 17th century, the story follows a young noblewoman as she’s displaced from her home and forced to flee. Overnight, she has to shed the immaturity of her privileged childhood and lean into resilience and courage she never knew she had.
This drama is very loosely inspired by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and just like the opening scene of the novel, we first meet Yoo Gil-chae (Ahn Eun-jin), a young, clever girl, confident she can win the affections of any man, resentful of conversations about possibilities of war because it takes attention away from her. The scene follows the same beats, with an unwelcome man barging into their gathering and speaking uncomfortable truths to the noble families reluctant to believe that war could really break out. This is how Gil-chae meets Lee Jang-hyun (Namgoong Min), an opportunist and a warrior, the man who will save her, and whom she will save over and over again.
Ahn Eun-jin is a revelation as the wilful but determined Gil-chae. She’s spent far too long languishing in second lead roles and it was tremendously satisfying to watch her etch this character into our hearts. Namgoong Min was also perfectly cast as Jang-hyun. After a long career of mostly avoiding romantic roles, he proved what his fans have known all along - the man was made to play a romantic hero. He just needed the role to be epic enough.
Thumbing its nose at my pessimism, K-dramaland also gave us the best superhero series on television anywhere this year. Moving is what you get when the world stops believing that super-powered beings in brightly coloured suits could actually save the day, but when we haven’t quite stopped hoping that they exist.
This drama excels in every technical category you can think of, yet what is most memorable about Moving are the relationships between its characters — of a mother and son, a father and daughter, between old friends and lovers, classmates and rivals. While a large part of the story focuses on teen-aged Bong-seok (Lee Jung-ha) and Hee-soo (Go Youn-jung) as they struggle to understand and grow into their own powers, the real heroes of the story are the parents who work to protect them while hiding their own pasts from the world.
The drama takes its time to slowly reveal the secrets each of them hides and builds a steady, unstoppable momentum towards the final act. This show achieves, in scale and heart, what the makers of the 2006 American Sci-fi series, Heroes had probably dreamed of. While every actor is perfectly cast in the drama, Han Hyo-joo and Jo In-sung leave an indelible mark as Mi-hyun and Doo-shik, two people who chose each other despite knowing the heavy cost.
While Moving was the most expensive K-drama of all time, The Kidnapping Day was a mid budget offering that came out of nowhere and swept everyone away. We have definitely seen this trope play out before — a kidnapper ends up forming a deep bond with the kidnappee. What makes this drama heartwarming instead of deeply worrying is the clear upper hand the child has in the situation throughout her kidnapping.
The drama starts with a premise so outlandish that it could easily have come out of the Home Alone franchise, yet by the end of the first episode, we are wholly rooting for the kidnapper to succeed, just so the child gets a warm, caring father figure for a while.
Kim Myung-joon (Yoon Kye-sang) is a man desperate to pay for his daughter’s surgery and Choi Ro-hee (Yuna) is an 11-year old genius who’s just lost her memories in an accident. Showing absolutely no talent for the profession, kidnapper Myung-joon soon finds himself pretending to be Ro-hee’s dad and protecting her from other people who want to hurt her.
The Kidnapping Day became one of the highest rated cable shows of the year. It’s also an example of the kind of mid-budget dramas we will hopefully get to see more of as South Korean networks like ENA and production companies like AStory take back control over their properties from streaming giants like Netflix.
What I love most about this drama is that it doesn’t care to establish its science fiction credentials. They wanted to tell a story of time travel bridging the generational gap between parents and children, so they sent the teen-aged protagonist back to the Nineties by walking through a music shop. Forget the science, bring in the feels.
Ha Eun-gyeol (Ryeon) is the only hearing member of his family, which means he grew up privy to adult concern and acts far more mature than his age. While his parents feel reassured by their son’s good grades and steadiness, Eun-gyeol is slowly suffocating as he buries inside him his dreams of what he really wants to do.
After an unexpected clash with his father, he runs away and finds himself transported to 1995.
It’s here that Eun-gyeol discovers how little he knew his parents. Even as he begins to understand them, the young man decides to focus on changing the future so his father never gets in the accident that makes him lose his hearing. This mission ends up clashing with the plans of another time traveller, who is determined to change Eun-gyeol’s father’s fate, but in a very different sense.
The drama weaves excellent music and charming teen-age romances into its message about protecting the fleeting immaturity of youth. Ryeoun and Choi Hyun-wook give particularly stand out performances as the son and his headstrong teen-aged dad.
This was one of the earliest dramas of the year that stood out for its great cast and writing. While the story did get some push back from its viewers when it leaned more into its serial killer mystery in the second half, it also showcases one of the more wholesome romances of 2023.
Jung Kyung-ho is back as the leading man of a romance after a few years, yet this is clearly a genre that needs him. He plays Choi Chi-yeol, the star maths teacher in a private academy who pretty much has a whole economy running around him. He’s a rich, successful workaholic, who also has intense insomnia and can barely keep food down.
Enter Nam Haeng-seon (Jeon Do-yeon), the mother of one of his students, who runs her own popular side-dish shop and will strike any bargain necessary to get her child the education she needs. When Chi-yeol discovers that the only food that suits his stomach are the side-dishes from Nam Haeng-seon’s shop, he strikes a deal to tutor her daughter, so long as she keeps him fed.
There are tropes galore in this drama, from enemies-to-lovers to childhood connections, but it's all done with such a light touch that it never gets gratingly predictable. What endeared Crash Course to me most was the kindness and maturity in the leads’ romantic relationship. The show never forgets that these are people in their 40s who’ve built separate lives and identities before they fell in love.
As an additional bonus, you get a sweet supporting cast of high schoolers, trying to make better choices than some of the adults in their lives.
This drama created so much buzz for all the wrong reasons when it first started airing, yet it ended up one of my favourite romances of the year.
Let’s just say, the first episodes were not what fans of 2PM and Girls’ Generation were expecting when jTBC announced that Lee Jun-ho and Im Yoon-ah had been cast in a romance together. The early synopsis released almost a year before the show started airing built up the story as an epic succession struggle for one of the richest corporations in South Korea.
The drama we got was a lot less ambitious in its scope. It told the story of a reluctant chaebol heir who returns to manage the family hotel and solve the mystery of the mother who abandoned him as a child. At the hotel he meets one of its most hard working employees and slowly falls in love with her.
King the Land was a surprise in every way possible. While there were a lot of viewers disappointed by the show’s heavy reliance on old tropes and classism for its conflicts, it slowly became clear that the drama had a clear grasp on the story it wanted to tell. It was a bit of a bait and switch, really.
You sink into King the Land, thinking you are watching an old-fashioned Cinderella meets a boss/secretary romance, and suddenly you are in the middle of pondering questions about class, scrutinising abusive work environments, and weighing the merits of owning the means of production.
Oh, and in just one scene Lee Jun-ho devastates years of arguments against consent and makes asking permission for a kiss sexy.
This was definitely a year of time travel dramas making a splash. After Again My Life and Reborn Rich last year gave us heroes who got a second chance to build a better version of their life, this year gave us Perfect Marriage Revenge, where the heroine goes back a year in time to make some drastic changes to her life and hopefully avert a terrible fate.
Much like King the Land, this drama initially seems to belong at least a decade back in time. Our heroine, Han Yi-joo (Jung Yoo-min), is a downtrodden orphan whose adoptive family abuses her and whose husband married her for money. When she’s forced to take the fall for a crime committed by her adoptive mother, a car chase ensues and she ends up in a crash. Her death transports her back in time, to a few weeks before her marriage. Realising her opportunity, she decides to stop being meek, dump her horrible fiancé, and seduce the man her family wants her sister to marry.
There are plenty of ways in which this drama could have gone horribly off the rails, but the expectedly wholesome romance and the male lead’s quirky, loving family take most of the sting out of those old tropes.
I’ve never had a very high opinion of Sung Hoon’s acting ability, but no one can deny that Seo Do-guk was written to be played by him. While Jung Yoo-min plays the woman who no longer wants to be a doormat, Sung Hoon brings to life the perfect husband who has her back at every beat. Their chemistry is explosive from the very first episode, and you barely get to take a breath before it accelerates.
The drama isn’t without some problems, but overall it’s a very satisfying revenge melo with time travel adding a dash of spice.
This is the drama you want to watch when you’re in the mood for something effortlessly sweet and easy on the eyes.
Han Hae-na (Park Gyu-young) is a Korean language teacher in a high school and cursed with turning into a dog every night if she ever kisses a man. By the end of the first episode, Hae-na gets extremely drunk, and she kisses a man. To break the curse and avoid permanently turning into an adorable puppy after 100 days, she must convince the man to kiss her in her dog form.
The trouble is that the man she kissed — a slightly grumpy maths teacher called Jin Seo-won (Cha Eun-woo) — is terrified of dogs.
The charm of this drama comes from the creators taking this incredibly silly premise and treating it with all the sincerity and seriousness they could muster. There is so much affection woven through every scene and dialogue that when inexplicable things happen, like Hae-na turning back into a human fully clothed instead of naked, we don’t really get hung up on the things that demand serious suspension of disbelief.
And while the two teachers slowly fall in love, we also get a mysterious character in Lee Bo-gyeom (Lee Hyun-woo) who is sweetly supportive of our leads in one scene and looking at them with the dead eyes of a distant god in the next.
At the time of writing out this list, A Good Day is just past the halfway point in its airing schedule. There is always a possibility that the show might mess up the second half, but I’m choosing to trust that the writer and director will remain faithful to the original webtoon, as it has so far.
The final addition to this list is a fantasy that’s half way through its airing schedule. Written by the screenwriter of Mr Queen, Choi Ah-il, this drama successfully blends magic, mythos, and the messy politics of a rich family.
I’m very wary of declaring my love for a show that hasn’t laid all its cards out on the table yet, but even though Writer Choi may break my heart again, I have to add this to the list for how much fun every episode has been to watch so far.
Do Do-hee (Kim Yoo-jung) is the adopted granddaughter of Joo Cheon-sook (Kim Hae-sook), the head of a vast conglomerate and mother to some truly terrible children. Do-hee grew up knowing that she’s hated by the family as much as she’s loved by Madam Joo, so she carved her own way and built a successful Food & Beverage company. But then someone tries to kill her. At her moment of need, the saviour who turns up is a demon used to making deals for every favour – except this time, Jung Gu-won (Song Kang) finds that he’s the one trapped in a deal he can’t break.
Everything from the pacing of the show to random whimsical moments like a Tango set in the middle of a knife fight add to the draw of My Demon. Kim Yoo-jung and Song Kang brighten every scene they’re together. Every word spoken, every glance stolen, every reaction to every touch is loaded with meaning and intention.
When the build up to the romance isn’t keeping me glued to the screen, it’s Kim Yoo-jung’s effortless performance as an exceptionally intelligent woman, who’s achingly aware of how alone she is in her world. A note has to be made of her scenes with Kim Hae-sook. The complicated bond between Madam Joo and her granddaughter alone makes this drama special. If this drama fails us in the next half, I’ll still love it dearly for giving us a Kim Yoo-jung performance for the books.
If you’ve been following K-dramas closely this year, you may have noticed that I didn’t mention a few wildly popular ones on my list. I’ll include them as honourable mentions here:
The Glory concluded its second part in 2023 garnering even higher ratings than the first. While I enjoyed the revenge saga quite a bit, the story didn’t really stay with me for long. Moon Dong-eun (Song Hye-kyo) remained colourless in a way that made her fade quickly from my memory.
Love To Hate You is an entertaining romance that starts out as a battle of the sexes between a man — played by Teo Yoo, also seen in Past Lives (2023) — who thinks all grown women are greedy liars and a woman (Kim Ok-bin) who doesn’t trust men to stay faithful. The false equivalency between distrusting men and misandry somewhat diminished my enjoyment of the romance.
A Time Called You was adapted from the excellent Taiwanese Someday Or One Day. With the exception of Jeon Yeo-been’s performance, this drama is a lesser and less affecting copy of the original. I would strongly recommend watching the Taiwanese version instead.