‘The Glory’ Is Netflix’s New Sleeper Korean Megahit You Need To Watch

While it’s not getting nearly the same headlines as Squid Game, Netflix absolutely has a new Korean superhit on its hands with The Glory, a revenge thriller that recently wrapped up its 16 episode first season run after airing in two parts.

I’ve been watching it over the last few days, and while I’ve just finally seen it drop out of the Netflix top 10 list in the US entirely (Wednesday is back in it?), looking at the numbers, it has performed extraordinarily well globally.

The last numbers Netflix published just over a week ago show The Glory with 123.5 million hours viewed that week. And it was 124.4 million hours the week before that. It’s dwarfing English shows over the same period like You season 4 (64 million hours) and Shadow and Bone season 2 (50.4 million hours).

The Korean revenge drama follows a young woman, Dong-Eun, who was bullied and badly scarred in high school by a group of friends. That friend group grew up to be rich and quasi-famous, while Dong-Eun spent 18 years crafting an elaborate revenge plot that involves blackmail, humiliation and of course, murder.

It’s a stellar series, though I will say 16, 50 minute episodes for one season does stretch things a bit. While revenge stories, and even Korean revenge stories, are not particularly new, I especially like the way this one was handled with the entire cast knowing Dong-Eun is out to destroy them, but being utterly unable to stop her. I especially think the performance from main villain Yeon-Jin (played by Lim Ji-Yeon) is incredible, though everyone here does a fantastic job.

While Netflix has made plenty of mistakes over the years, one absolutely genius decision by them was to invest this heavily into Korean content. While Squid Game remains the pinnacle of that success, plenty of shows like Kingdom and All of Us Are Dead have been great as well, and The Glory may genuinely be their best Korean series besides Squid Game, and it could be on its way to becoming the second most-popular, if it isn’t already.

Without saying too much about the ending, it does seem like there’s enough set-up and loose ends for a second season of The Glory, but we haven’t heard anything about that yet. The numbers are still rolling in, but with a quarter million viewing hours already and the besting of its US rivals, my guess is that if it wants a second season, it will get one.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.