A Korean series that reached a Netflix weekly top 10 in 1 of 93 countries, holding 36 chart places across 36 weeks between 2021-09-12 and 2023-03-05. Its best position anywhere was number 2.
It charted in exactly one country, Philippines, as 119 other Korean series did. Its longest presence was in Philippines, where it held 36 chart places. It first appeared on 2021-09-12 and was last seen on 2023-03-05, 18 months apart. When it left a chart it usually slid out from the bottom three — 6 of 6 departures.
| Market | Places | Best position | First week | Last week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Philippines | 36 | 2 | 2021-09-12 | 2023-03-05 |
Markets are in alphabetical order, not in order of size. A market name is a link only where that country has a page of its own; the rest are plain text rather than a link that goes nowhere.
What a place is. A place is one appearance in one country's weekly top 10. A title that sat at number 4 in Vietnam for three weeks holds three places there. Reach counts the countries a title appeared in at least once, out of 93.
Charted here is not the same as available here. A chart place does show the title was on Netflix in that country that week — that much follows. The reverse does not: a country missing from this list may still have carried the title without it reaching a top 10. We hold chart lists, not catalogue listings, and we do not guess the difference.
⚠ A different work carries this same name. Netflix publishes two separate charts — one for films, one for series — and this name appears on both. 1 chart place across 1 country on the film chart belongs to that other work and is not counted anywhere on this page. We kept the series chart because a broadcaster is credited with first airing this title, so the televised chart is the one that belongs to it. If that identification is wrong, every number here is the wrong work's — so we are telling you what we excluded and why, rather than quietly adding the two together.
We will not say, and neither can the chart. Netflix's country lists record that a title held a top-ten place in a country in a week. They do not record how many people watched it, what it cost, or what anyone expected of it — and those are the three things the words hit and flop are actually about.
What we can tell you is where it sits. Of the 546 Korean titles with a page here, 400 reached more markets than The Promise and 0 reached fewer. The typical Korean title that charted at all reached 2 markets, so this one stayed narrower.
That is a position, not a verdict. A title can hold a hundred chart places in small markets and a title can hold four in the largest ones; the file does not say which of those a person means by success. You have the shape — the judgement is yours.
| The Promise | Median Korean title that charted | |
|---|---|---|
| Markets reached | 1 | 2 |
| Weeks on a chart somewhere | 36 | 4 |
| Chart places held | 36 | 5 |
The median is taken across all 974 Korean titles that reached any country top 10, most of which charted in one or two markets. This is a comparison, not a ranking — we do not publish a league of titles, and a title well above the median is a title that travelled, not a title that is better.
It reached 1 market in all. The most that held it in the same week was 1 — the week of 2021-09-12.
Every market it ever reached held it at the same time, which is what a simultaneous opening looks like in this data.
How it left. Counting each country separately, it ended 6 runs on a chart. The middle one ended from position 9, and 6 of 6 ended from positions 8 to 10. Across all Korean titles that figure is 56.8%, and it would be 30% if leaving had nothing to do with position — how a title leaves has the whole table.
| Year | Places |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 16 |
| 2022 | 15 |
| 2023 | 5 |
⚠ 2021 and 2026 are part years — Netflix's weekly country lists start 2021-07-04 and our copy ends 2026-08-23, so those two rows cover fewer weeks than the others and cannot be compared with them.
Other Korean titles on this site that share a named person or a credited company with The Promise. The reason is given beside each one, because a shared name is the only claim being made — not that the two are alike.
The same weekly files, cut five other ways. Each of these answers a question this page cannot: not what happened to The Promise, but what happened around it.
| Company | Credited as |
|---|---|
| KBS | First broadcast (첫방송) |
| Neo Entertainment | Production (제작) |
From Wikidata, listed alphabetically. Company names link through to a sheet where we hold one; we publish a sheet only for companies whose catalogue we can see completely, so most names here are text. A credit is not a share of the work — it records that a company is attached, not how much of the budget or the decision it held. Companies inside one corporate group are listed separately because we did not confirm the ownership tree. The credit type is given in English with the original Korean label in brackets, because that label is what the filing says and translating it away would hide the source.
4 names recorded as Korean, alphabetically. Wikidata cast lists are incomplete and skew toward better-known names, so this is not a full cast list and a short one does not mean a small production.
Lee Yu-ri · Park Ha-na · Seo Jun-young · Song Jong-ho
1 of these 4 names has a page of its own here, showing every other charting title they appear in and how far each one travelled. The rest do not, because we hold fewer than two charting titles for them.
We are not going to rule on that, and neither can anyone else working from this data. Netflix publishes no budget, no revenue and no viewing hours by country, so a chart position cannot be turned into a verdict. Several Korean titles opened in cinemas first, and that run is not in this data at all.
What we can give you is the thing the word “flop” is really reaching for: somewhere to stand. Of the 974 Korean titles that entered any country’s Netflix weekly top 10 between 2021-07-04 and 2026-08-23, here is where The Promise sits.
| Measure | The Promise | Where that puts it |
|---|---|---|
| Countries that charted it | 1 | wider than 0 of 974 titles; 446 others reached exactly as many |
| Weeks on any chart | 36 | longer than 962 of 974 titles |
| Best position reached | 2 | higher than 543 of 974 titles |
“Number one on Netflix” is not the rare part. 304 of 974 titles — 31% — have been number one in some country in some week, and 65 of those 304 were number one in the only country that ever charted them. Read a rank next to the reach, not on its own. The full distribution, and what it can and cannot say.
We are not recommending anything. We have no idea what you like, and Netflix publishes nothing about who watched what. What we can tell you is which other Korean titles were on the same country’s top 10, in the same week as The Promise — the list you saw it on. That is a fact about a published chart, and it is the whole of what we are claiming.
The Promise shared a country’s weekly top 10 with 58 other Korean titles across 186 country-weeks in total. The table shows the 12 it sat beside most often, and only those with a page here.
A big number here mostly means the title lasted. A show that held a country’s top 10 for a year sits beside almost everything; a show that charted for one week in one country can sit beside at most nine other titles ever. It does not mean the same people watched both, and it does not mean the two are similar. How we counted this, across every title.
Every Korean title that has charted · Looking for one particular week? · How far a company's catalogue travels · How we count