Four times, every one of a country’s 10 TV places was Korean

Netflix publishes a top 10 for films and a top 10 for series, separately, for every country, every week. We went through all of it — 501,040 rows — and pulled out the country-weeks in which at least one Korean title appeared. There are 20,581 of them.

In eight, the Korean titles took every single place. Four of those eight were South Korea’s own chart, which is not surprising. The other four were not.

Vietnam, twice, in August 2021

Places six to ten in those weeks: Crash Landing on You, Hospital Playlist again, Reply 1988, Descendants of the Sun and Lawless Lawyer in the first week; Vincenzo, Crash Landing on You, Hospital Playlist again, Descendants of the Sun and The Fiery Priest in the second.

Both lists carry Hospital Playlist twice, as two seasons. So these are ten places held by nine series — worth saying, because “all ten” and “ten different shows” are not the same claim and we would rather make the smaller one.

What stands out is how little moved between the two weeks. The same nine series, reshuffled. Vietnam’s Korean shelf that fortnight was not a wave arriving; it was a shelf that had already filled and was sitting still.

Indonesia and Malaysia, the same week, July 2022

Two countries, the same week, ten places each, and — read the two columns against each other — the same ten titles in both. Not eight of ten, not nine. The same ten, in a different order, with the same two at the top.

We are not going to tell you why. Netflix publishes nothing about how its lists are produced in each country, and a chart that looks identical in two neighbouring markets could come from shared licensing dates, shared audiences, or how the ranking is computed. All three would look like this. We can tell you it happened, once, and that it has not happened again in the four years since.

What it is not

It is not a statement that Indonesians and Malaysians watched only Korean series that week. A top 10 is a ranking of what was watched most, not a census of what was watched. Something finishing eleventh is invisible here, and the gap between first and eleventh is not published.

It is also not a trend. Four occasions in 20,581 country-weeks is 0.02%. The ordinary case is the opposite: 11,561 of those country-weeks held exactly one Korean title, and just 8 held ten. If you take one number from this piece, take that one — the full sweep is the rarity, and the single title is the norm.

The distribution across the whole file:

Our page on how Korean chart places clump makes the same point from the other side: the 7.9% share we publish most often is not a place a week, it is nothing for long stretches and then several at once. These four weeks are what the far end of “several at once” actually looks like.

What changed on 3 September 2026

Our list of Korean titles had been frozen at 8 August. We rebuilt it, it went from 397 titles to 420, and one title we had been counting as Korean (Dangerous Liaisons, the 2022 French film) is not. 8 figures in this piece moved with it. None of them changed what the piece found. The ones a reader is most likely to have quoted:

Every table above is now generated from the counted file rather than typed out, and a check reads each figure back out of that file on every build. We print what moved rather than swapping it quietly: one wrong number makes the correct ones beside it worth doubting.