Having won the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, and been nominated for three awards including Best Director and Best Screenplay, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite has drawn well-deserved attention to the films and TV coming out of South Korea.
Even if you haven't seen Parasite, and we suggest you do, there are plenty of other Korean shows that you can watch on your favorite streaming service. So you know which are the best ones to choose from, here are our picks of the best Korean shows on Netflix right now.
My Holo Love
A combination of interesting sci-fi premise and off-beat romantic drama, My Holo Love follows Han So-Yeon, a young woman with a disorder known as Prosopagnosia. This disorder, also known as face blindness, impairs people's ability to recognize familiar faces.
Because of her inability to recognize people, Han So-Yeon has become somewhat of a recluse. Her life changes when she takes part in a tech demo that allows her to see a virtual holographic boyfriend though a pair of glasses.
Quickly falling for this fake boyfriend, Han So-Yeon finds that the program is based on the creator, essentially meaning the person she has fallen in love with is real, but she can't recognize him!
Kingdom
Kingdom was actually the first Netflix original to come out of South Korea and set the bar pretty high. The show couples a coup/political conspiracy storyline with heroes battling a mysterious undead plague.
Combining a Walking Dead style thrill-ride with a lot of background political intrigue, Kingdom has drawn a lot of praise for its tight claustrophobic action scenes, great makeup and effects and for adding something genuinely interesting to a genre that was quickly becoming stagnant.
There are two seasons already up for you to binge and a third in the works for early 2021.
Black
If you love crime thrillers like The Wire and shows like Supernatural and wished there was some kind of crossover between the two, then Black is definitely the show for you.
A fantasy-thriller about a grim reaper possessing the body of a murdered policeman to hunt down a rogue grim reaper and eventually falling in love with a mortal woman who can see him is exactly the kind of show we need right now.
Black also introduces us to a whole slew of entertaining and new ideas on the afterlife, like the idea of grim reapers being able to inhabit the bodies of the recently deceased and live as them and that throwing your toenail clippings out of the window is a bad idea because mice might eat them and steal your soul.
Stranger
Stranger is a tense criminal drama that shot to fame before Parasite put the spotlight on South Korea. In fact, it made the New York Times list of Best TV Shows of 2017.
The show itself is about an odd couple consisting of a bullheaded detective and an emotionally repressed prosecutor looking into the rampant corruption that surrounds the trial of an alleged serial murderer.
If that sounds a bit hackneyed, don't worry, the fantastic performances of the leads Cho Seung-woo and Bae Doona, coupled with a tight and twisting plot, raise this well above any stereotypes it might have fallen into.
Hello My Twenties
If you are looking for an enjoyable sit-com to fill the gap left by Friends then Hello My Twenties is well worth looking into.
The show follows the lives and loves of five young women, in a combination of Derry Girls and Sex and the City, and they do fall into the expected categories of the serious one, the timid one, the drunk one, the pretty one, and the promiscuous one that will be entirely familiar to anyone who's seen any show aimed at college-age girls or certain brands of anime.
Hello My Twenties is far from revolutionary, but it is fun, well written and well-acted. It's comfort food for the soul.
