Entertainment
5 K-Dramas That Everyone Forgot About
The conveyor belt that is the K-drama world is packed with shows that just keep on coming. With Netflix Korea getting more traction and a higher budget, as well as other streamers investing their money into great original Korean programming, there will soon be a time where everywhere we look, we will have an array of K-dramas to watch (in a good way).
However, that type of constant influx of new titles can become overwhelming, as some good shows can then stay buried unless we pay attention to them. There are many great shows hiding under piles of brand-new titles with big names, waiting to be discovered. Here are K-dramas that everyone forgot about that are worth your time.
‘Prison Playbook’ (2017–2018)
Prison Playbook has recently re-entered the mainstream conversation, but it’s been largely forgotten over the past few years. Created by the writer behind Reply 1988, the show has a meditative and warm energy nurtured by the ensemble in their best form. Less interested in prison-drama darkness than in the small, absurd, genuinely funny rhythms of people making do in an impossible situation, Prison Playbook is a comedy as often as it’s a drama, and it shifts between genres without ever losing its footing. Park Hae-soo, years before Squid Game made him a global name, leads the ensemble as the protagonist while Jung Kyung-ho anchors the supporting cast as Park’s childhood friend and long-term prisoner. The two leads have a kind of effortless chemistry that can’t really be manufactured, and their rapport makes the show all the more compelling.
Prison Playbook follows Kim Je-hyeok (Park), a professional baseball pitcher who is days away from his Major League signing, when he’s arrested for assault after defending his sister from an assailant and sentenced to serve a one-year prison sentence. Prison Playbook follows Je-hyeok’s adjustment to life inside, the weird and wonderful array of inmates and guards who become his unlikely community, and the slow, patient understanding of prison life, survival, and that all of it is less about toughness and more about figuring out who to trust. The show aired in 2017, and it predates the global K-drama boom by several years, which is why it lacks more international recognition; this show’s been waiting for new audiences to find it ever since it aired, and now’s the perfect time to rediscover it.
‘Through the Darkness’ (2022)
It’s safe to say that the raging success of Mindhunter reached all corners of the world, including South Korea. However, a show about special agents, profilers, and chasing serial killers isn’t a novelty in the K-drama world; Korean filmmakers and showrunners love their killer hunts, maybe even more than Hollywood does. Through the Darkness was based on the memoirs of a prolific South Korean profiler, Kwon Il-yong, the first to carry the title in the country and who wrote about his chases for serial killers across Korea during the 1990s. The comparison to Mindhunter here can and probably will come immediately, but that’s flattering. Both shows are far more interested in the psychological toll of crawling inside a killer’s head than in procedural mechanics.
Set in 1990s Seoul, Through the Darkness follows Song Ha-young (Kim Nam-gil), a perceptive detective recruited to join Korea’s very first Criminal Behavioral Analysis team, formed specifically to track a serial killer dubbed “Red Cap” who has been terrorizing the city. Criminal profiling doesn’t yet exist as a recognized discipline in Korean law enforcement, which means Ha-young has to build the entire playbook from scratch while simultaneously convincing a skeptical police hierarchy that the whole enterprise is worth funding. Kim delivers an outstanding performance, as he portrays a man who sacrifices his own psychological state in order to interrogate criminals. Through the Darkness is absolutely a forgotten gem, and if you like serial killer chases, intriguing real-life drama, and some thrilling pursuits, this show should be your priority viewing.
‘Navillera’ (2021)
Navillera is the kind of “it’s never too late” story that will make you laugh, cry, and question your own opinions and prejudices. This twelve-episode story has no filler and no wasted scenes, with Park In-hwan, who was around 76 years old when he made the show, delivering one of the most compelling and compassion-inducing roles of his career. Active since the 1960s, Park is one of Korea’s most prolific actors, and a role like the one in Navillera is nothing new for him—but it might have been novel for his physical prowess. Park stars alongside Song Kang, who apparently trained seriously for his role and is one of the biggest K-drama names of the 2020s. Navillera was released under the radar and is only being rediscovered now.
Navillera follows Shim Deok-chul (Park), a 70-year-old retired postman with one dream he’s spent a lifetime putting off: learning ballet. His family is horrified by this resolution, while his body absolutely has its own opinions on the matter. However, he signs up anyway and meets Lee Chae-rok (Song), a 23-year-old dancer with real talent, struggling financially and on the verge of quitting the thing he loves most. The two form an unlikely mentorship that ends up going both ways; the old man finds his dream, and the young one rediscovers his reason to fight for his. The show also has a dementia subplot, which arrives mid-series and is handled with a care and honesty that most dramas couldn’t pull off without tipping into melodrama. With bigger names and titles, Navillera wasn’t the most popular show of its time, but it aged really well and is one of the most emotional and beautiful shows you’ll ever get to see.
‘Black Dog: Being a Teacher’ (2019–2020)
Another highly beloved K-drama trope is high school drama, though that’s not purely reserved for Korean shows and audiences. The entire world is obsessed with the drama between a bunch of 16-year-olds and their teachers, classmates, and parents, and there’s no sign that shows with this theme are about to die out. Black Dog: Being a Teacher is from 2019, and it’s a fairly forgotten series with a high school theme. If you have most recently watched Teach You a Lesson, Netflix’s most popular K-drama of the summer, Black Dog is its distant, forgotten cousin that tackles similar themes and packs just as a powerful punch as its successor. Seo Hyun-jin and Ra Mi-ran star as a newcomer teacher and a veteran who takes him in and mentors him, and their relationship is filled with (platonic) chemistry that works well on-screen.
Black Dog follows Go Ha-neul (Seo), who arrives at Eungyo High School as a new temporary teacher. Ha-neul is naive about how deeply the politics of the Korean education system run and immediately starts learning that surviving in a private high school staffroom requires as much strategy as anything happening in the classrooms. The show, written by a former teacher, is a sharp, unsentimental look at Korea’s hyper-competitive academic culture told entirely from the staff’s perspective rather than the students’. What separates Black Dog from the dozen other school-set K-dramas is how little interest it has in glamorizing teaching or the institutions around it. The staffroom is political, exhausting, and often unjust, and Ha-neul’s idealism gets ground down and rebuilt across the entire show, showing the true strength of perseverance. Black Dog aired in 2019 and garnered moderate ratings without much buzz despite being one of that year’s best dramas.
‘Song of the Bandits’ (2023)
The Good, the Bad, the Weird isn’t the only South Korean Western—Netflix’s own Song of the Bandits is another Western told from the Korean perspective, and just like the Song Kang-ho-led film, the show is set during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. Song of the Bandits is another series on this list that stars Kim Nam-gil, who transforms into a gun-slinging revolutionary effortlessly and with great style. This show came out in 2023, but it’s been largely ignored at launch despite being one of Netflix Korea’s more ambitious originals that year; a Korean period Western was probably much harder to sell than the platform’s algorithms were prepared for, but it’s still not too late to rediscover this gem and make it a part of your K-drama watchlist.
Set in 1920s Manchuria during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, Song of the Bandits follows a group of former soldiers and displaced Korean exiles. Some of them are idealists, some are criminals, but most of them land somewhere in between; this group of Korean freedom fighters band together to fight back against the forces occupying their homeland. One of them, Lee Yoon (Kim), is a stoic, morally gray ex-soldier and gunslinger trying to survive while the world he knows collapses around him, reluctantly becoming a leader for people with nowhere else to turn to. The action sequences are genuinely impressive, the ensemble is stacked with character actors doing strong work, and the show possesses a compelling political depth about the colonial period Korea lived in that gives even its most genre-conventional moments real-life weight.
Song of the Bandits
- Release Date
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2023 – 2023-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Directors
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Hwang Jun-hyeok
- Writers
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Han Jung-hoon
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Yoo Jae-myung
Choi Choong-su
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Lee Hyun-wook
Lee Kwang-il
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