Park Eun-bin's Chilling Romance ends its run with a record-high 7.9% finale

tvN's Chilling Romance finished its run on August 23 with a nationwide rating of 7.9%, the highest the series recorded across its entire broadcast, according to Nielsen Korea. That number sits against a modest opening of around 3% and a mid-run range of 4 to 6%, making the finale something of a vindication for a show that took time to find its audience.

The trajectory is also a useful illustration of how global streaming platforms have changed what a "successful" cable drama looks like in 2026. Chilling Romance spent five consecutive weeks inside Netflix's non-English show top 10, peaking at third place, even while its domestic cable numbers remained well below the thresholds that would have once defined a hit.

How the finale wrapped up

The final episode resolved the central mystery that had threaded through the series: the truth behind a yacht incident twelve years prior. Cheon Yeo-ri (Park Eun-bin), a chaebol heiress who can see ghosts, had spent the show under a curse that caused anyone she touched to share her ability. In the finale, she falls into a coma after a traffic accident and is pulled back from the threshold of death with the help of her old friend Kang Ji-hwan (Kim Min-cheol) and the spirits she had helped throughout the series.

Once she returns, the curse is broken. Yeo-ri can no longer see ghosts, and her touch no longer transfers the ability to others. Her fiancé Ma Kang-wook (Yang Se-jong) returns a pendant that Ji-hwan had left for her, and the two settle into an ordinary life together, a resolution that the show frames as something both characters had to earn.

The antagonist, Kang Min-hwan (Ong Seong-wu), meets a grimmer end. His crimes, including murdering his own brother Ji-hwan out of resentment over being adopted, are fully exposed. The finale does offer him a moment of reckoning: he finally accepts the genuine affection his mother Song Hee-won (Kim Seo-ra) had always had for him, and acknowledges what he has done. The show stops short of redemption, but it allows for something close to remorse.

What the show was working against

Chilling Romance is adapted from a 2011 film of the same name starring Son Ye-jin and Lee Min-ki, which carried its own durable affection among Korean audiences. Adapting a well-liked film into a drama series is a specific kind of pressure: the production has to differentiate itself without alienating people who remember the original. By most accounts the drama took that challenge seriously, expanding the character arcs and giving the supernatural plot its own internal logic rather than retracing the film beat for beat.

Park Eun-bin and Yang Se-jong's performances drew consistent praise over the run, and the chemistry between them was widely cited as the reason casual viewers stayed. For Park Eun-bin in particular, who has built a reputation for technically demanding roles, the occult romance format was a noticeable change of register, and one she appeared to navigate without difficulty.