South Korea's Netflix TV Number-One Spot Stayed Korean for 87 Straight Weeks
Not one show — 30 different Korean titles traded the number-one TV spot on South Korea's own Netflix chart 32 times, without a single non-Korean title breaking in, from April 2022 to December 2023.
The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading
For 87 straight weeks, no non-Korean television title held the number-one spot on Netflix’s own South Korea TV chart. Thirty different Korean shows traded the position instead.
What the numbers say
We read every weekly Netflix Top 10 table across 180 countries and found the longest run, in any single country and category, where a Korean title held number one continuously — meaning the spot never went to a non-Korean title, even as the specific Korean title at the top kept changing.
| Where | Category | Streak length | Titles that traded the spot | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Korea | TV | 87 weeks | 30 | 2022-04-17 to 2023-12-10 |
Thirty different shows moved through the number-one position 32 times across those 87 weeks — Our Blues, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Alchemy of Souls, Narco-Saints, Little Women, Under the Queen’s Umbrella, Reborn Rich, The Glory, Crash Course in Romance, Doctor Cha, and Black Knight among them. What stayed constant was the country of origin at number one, not the title.
Why this is a different measurement than a hit show
A single long-running hit and an 87-week streak of category dominance look similar in a press summary but come from different causes. A hit show holds its own audience over time; a streak like this one requires South Korean audiences to consistently choose the newest Korean release over whatever non-Korean television Netflix was also offering that week, title after title, for close to two years.
What this can and cannot say
This cannot say why the streak held — it could reflect South Korean viewers’ own preferences, Netflix’s local promotion choices, or the release calendar of competing non-Korean titles that week, and this count has no way to separate them. It also is not a claim about any one show’s popularity; some of the 30 titles that traded the top spot may have held it for a single week each. What it establishes is that the number-one position itself, not any one occupant of it, stayed Korean for 87 consecutive weeks — the longest such run in any of the 180 countries checked.
More single-cause and multi-day spikes are tracked on our what-moves-english-reading hub.
These are statistics, not you. This is not investment advice.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix Top 10 (public, weekly, per-country tables) — archive/raw/netflix-top10/countries-2026-08-29.tsv, South Korea, TV category, weekly number-one titles. · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/
What we checked
- 180 countries were checked for their longest run of consecutive weeks with a Korean title at number one in either the TV or Films category.
- South Korea's own TV chart holds the longest such run: 87 consecutive weeks, 2022-04-17 to 2023-12-10, with 30 different Korean titles trading the top spot 32 times.
- The run includes Our Blues, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Alchemy of Souls, Narco-Saints, Little Women, Under the Queen's Umbrella, Reborn Rich, The Glory, Crash Course in Romance, Doctor Cha, and Black Knight, among others.
What we left out, and why
- Any single title's own longevity. This counts a category-wide streak — the number-one spot staying Korean — not how long any one show held it.
- Total watch time or audience size. A weekly number-one ranking measures chart position, not how many people watched or for how long.
- Countries outside this 180-country panel, and any week before Netflix's public weekly tables begin (2021-07-04).
The data behind this
Written from the same data
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /what-moves-english-reading.
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