Nam Joo-hyuk's Return Drama Donggung Stays at Netflix's No. 2 for Two Weeks Running

Donggung recorded 8.1 million views in its second week on Netflix, holding second place in the non-English shows global chart. The figure, which Netflix calculates by dividing total watch time by a title's runtime, put the Korean occult period drama ahead of every non-English series on the platform except one, a position it has now occupied for two consecutive weeks.

The show ranks first in six countries, including Thailand and Malaysia, and has appeared in the top 10 across 69 countries in total. For a genre series with a niche premise, that kind of geographic spread is notable: K-occult has been a reliable domestic draw in Korea for years, but consistent multi-region traction at this scale is a more recent development.

Donggung is set in a Joseon-era royal palace and follows two characters tasked by the king with uncovering a curse embedded in the eastern palace quarters. One of them, Gucheon, can move between the world of the living and the world of ghosts; the other, Saenggang, is a court lady carrying secrets of her own. The series blends high-difficulty action sequences with a mythology built around its own ghost-world cosmology.

It marks the post-military-service comeback for Nam Joo-hyuk, whose return to screens after his mandatory enlistment was one of the more closely watched casting announcements of the year. For Noh Yoon-seo, it is her first period drama, a genre that tends to be technically demanding for actors given its formal staging and archaic speech registers.

Several other Korean titles also held positions in the non-English top 10 this week. Kim Boo-jang, the SBS action drama starring So Ji-sub, came in third. Based on a Naver webtoon of the same name, the series follows an ordinary father who becomes the most dangerous man in the world to recover his kidnapped daughter.

At fifth place, tvN's Chilling Romance (starring Park Eun-bin and Yang Se-jong) continued its run. The drama is a remake of the 2011 film of the same name and centers on a chaebol heiress who can see ghosts falling into the orbit of a prosecutor who is terrified of them.

JTBC's Apartment, starring Ji Sung, placed eighth. The series follows a former gang member trying to get his hands on illicit money flowing through an apartment complex, who ends up uncovering corruption alongside its residents. Cham Gyoyuk, a drama examining dysfunction in South Korea's education system, took seventh.

The week's rankings suggest that Korean content continues to perform across a wider range of genres on Netflix than it did even two years ago, with period fantasy, action, romance, and social drama all holding positions simultaneously rather than one title dominating at the expense of others.