Agent Kim topped 25 countries and never charted in America
Two Korean dramas were reported this week as topping Netflix's non-English chart. Counted country by country, Agent Kim Reactivated reached number one in 25 of the 81 countries that carried it, and never appeared on a US or UK chart.
The table this is written from: /by-country
Two Korean dramas were reported this week in the same words. Teach You a Lesson “tops Netflix’s non-English chart for a second week.” Agent Kim Reactivated “tops Netflix non-English chart for a third week.” Both sentences describe one worldwide list. What nobody reports is the part a viewer actually sees: their own country’s chart.
We hold those. Ninety-three country tables, weekly, back to 2021. Counting country by country, “topped the chart” turns out to mean anything from 31% to 82%.
Number one is not one number
| Title | Countries that carried it | Reached No.1 | Share | Carried but never No.1 | Weeks in our tables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KPop Demon Hunters | 93 | 76 | 81.7% | 17 | 62 |
| Teach You a Lesson | 91 | 46 | 50.5% | 45 | 12 |
| Our Sticky Love | 68 | 27 | 39.7% | 41 | 3 |
| Agent Kim Reactivated | 81 | 25 | 30.9% | 56 | 9 |
Agent Kim Reactivated was on 81 country charts and reached the top of 25 of them. In 56 countries it was carried and never got there. The headline number and this one are not the same measurement, and the gap is not small.
Neither drama reached number one in America
This is the part the single number hides completely.
| United States | United Kingdom | Japan | Brazil | India | France | Germany | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teach You a Lesson | 9th | 9th | 1st | 1st | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
| Agent Kim Reactivated | never charted | never charted | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 5th |
Agent Kim Reactivated does not appear in the US or UK tables at all — not at rank ten, not once, in any week we hold. Its 25 number-ones are elsewhere. Teach You a Lesson did reach American and British charts and stalled at ninth in both, while topping Japan, Brazil and India.
Both were “number one.” Neither was number one where the largest English-language audiences are. That is a different story from the one the wire copy tells, and it is in the same tables the wire copy is drawn from.
Home is not a signal
All four titles reached number one in Korea. Every one of them. So a Korean drama topping the Korean chart tells you nothing about whether it will top anyone else’s — the four then spread from 31% to 82% abroad.
| Title | Peak rank in Korea | Weeks in Korea |
|---|---|---|
| KPop Demon Hunters | 1 | 32 |
| Teach You a Lesson | 1 | 9 |
| Our Sticky Love | 1 | 3 |
| Agent Kim Reactivated | 1 | 8 |
What this does not say
It does not say Agent Kim Reactivated was watched less than Teach You a Lesson. Rank measures a position against whatever else is available in that country that week, not an audience. A title can sit at ninth in a huge market and be seen by more people than a number one in a small one, and nothing here separates those.
It also does not say the wire copy is wrong. “Tops the non-English chart” is a claim about a worldwide list we do not hold, and it may be perfectly accurate. Our point is narrower: that sentence is compatible with never charting in America, and readers cannot tell from it.
Our tables end 2026-08-23. Anything after that is unmeasured, and we will not write it down as a zero. Two titles in this week’s news — Perfect Crown and Mousetrap — are absent from our tables entirely, so we say nothing about them.
The tables behind this are at kculturewire.com/by-country, kculturewire.com/hard-markets and kculturewire.com/netflix-which-country.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix — Weekly Top 10 country tables, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23; 539 rows for Teach You a Lesson, 483 for Agent Kim Reactivated, 164 for Our Sticky Love, 3,043 for KPop Demon Hunters · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10
What we checked
- Titles were not chosen by us. They are the Korean titles repeated most often in our own community and news collection for this date, 664 items, and the frequency is archived with it
- Each country's peak rank is taken as the minimum rank across all its weeks, so a single week at number one counts and a long run at rank four does not
- Title matching is anchored to the start of the title after an earlier pass on the words alone pulled in a different film; every matched title string is printed with its row count so a wrong match is visible
- Countries carrying a title but never reaching number one are counted separately from countries that never carried it, because the second group is unmeasured and not a zero
What we left out, and why
- The global non-English chart. Press lines like 'tops the chart for a third week' describe one worldwide list that we do not hold. This counts 93 separate country lists, and the two numbers are not convertible
- How many people watched. Rank is a position against local competition, not an audience size
- Anything after 2026-08-23, the last week in the tables we hold
- Perfect Crown and Mousetrap, which appeared in the news but are absent from our tables. Absent is unmeasured, not zero
- Why a country did or did not put a title first. Catalogue size, local release timing and how many titles compete for ten slots all bear on it and none are measured here
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 10 cards
The figures in this article, as images. Free to repost with the address on them.
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 /by-country and /hard-markets and /netflix-which-country.
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