Parts of the world have fallen hard for Korean TV series – but the love story was decidedly one-sided in April. Meanwhile, in the U.S. and the U.K. – markets that top distributors’ wish lists – audiences are ice-cold on Korean blockbusters. 

Across four weeks to 26 April, Korean content occupied 72% of Netflix’s top 10 TV titles in Korea. U.S. shows barely-barely registered, and only if you squinted at the list and cast your eyes down. European content didn’t appear at all. Not a lot from Asia either.

While Korean dramas consistently rank in Netflix’s global non-English TV charts, Netflix’s audiences in Korea remain uniquely uninterested in non-Korean content. 

The April exceptions were Japanese anime and two U.S. series – "BEEF", with its strong Korean theme, and U.S. crime drama, "The Cleaning Lady", a thriller about a brilliant Cambodian-Filipino surgeon (played by French actress Elodie Yung) working as an undocumented cleaner in Las Vegas while trying to save her critically ill son. 

Japanese anime series – "Jujutsu Kaisen", "One-Punch Man", "Daemons of the Shadow Realm" and "Witch Hat Atelier" – maintained positions on Korean charts across multiple weeks, very occasionally reaching the top five. Even so, they remained marginal – accounting for roughly 20-30% of the top 10 across the four weeks we looked at.

China contributed one title – iQiyi period drama "Pursuit of Jade" – for one week in April.  

The month opened with 80% of the top 10 titles in Korea filled by Korean shows, topped by boxing drama "Bloodhounds" season 2, with legal fantasy "Phantom Lawyer" at #2 followed by travel reality show, "Ready or Not: Texas".  

This dropped to 70% in week 2, with "Bloodhounds" S2 retaining its top spot; and 60% in week three, with "Bloodhounds" holding firm at #1. Week four (20-26 April) was back up to 70% Korean, with "Bloodhounds" pushed into second place by slice-of-life black comedy limited series "We Are All Trying Here".  

Korean streaming audiences are clearly not sampling the world. They’re not exploring what’s trending globally. The appetite for domestic content is so dominant it crowds out virtually everything else.

Korean producers meanwhile, struggling with soaring domestic production costs and bewitched by something they (and others) call “international stories” or “content for an international market”, are making a beeline for the U.S., and are attempting to crack Europe.  

How’s that going? 

In April, not so well.

Drilling down into country-specific rankings shows a starkly different story from the popular global streaming narrative driven by the "Squid Game" halo. 

Unless you consider "BEEF" to be Korean (which Netflix doesn’t), U.S. audiences didn’t watch a single Korean TV title in April for enough hours to make the top 10.    

Turning to the U.K., which had no Korean titles on its Netflix top 10 for the first week of April (30 March to 5 April). For the following week (6-12 April), nothing again. What about the next week (13-19 April)? Zero. And the week of 20 April? Zero too.  

The feeling is clearly mutual.