10 Best K-Dramas to Watch on Netflix Right Now (July 2026)
Not sure what to watch on streaming? Omelete can help.
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Netflix's investment in k-dramas is nothing new. Before all of its Western competitors, the streaming giant recognized the audience potential of South Korean series and began producing its own content, acquiring distribution rights for titles from major broadcasters in the Asian country, and so on.
The result is a catalog that, these days, is packed with new classics of South Korean television. Below, Omelete has selected our 10 favorite k-dramas available on the platform. Check them out!
List updated on July 3.
All of Us Are Dead
The characters in All of Us Are Dead are constantly searching for a purpose, a reason to survive, something beyond a basic instinct for self-preservation to push them forward amid failed escape attempts and growing exhaustion. The series, very cleverly, gives them plenty of room to find those reasons in one another: romances bloom in the middle of the chaos, in that lighthearted rhythm typical of teenage crushes; previously established friendships are tested and strengthened, or transformed; but above all, characters slowly emerge from their shells and learn to see themselves, and others, as more than their economic classes, genders, body types, or social positions in the school hierarchy.
Can Love Be Translated?
The idea, of course, is to talk about miscommunication—but, beyond that, about mismatches of time and space. Can Love Be Translated? understands how language can divide, but also recognizes that it is merely a marker of the geographic place where a person is... and, when it comes to the use of language, of their emotional place as well. Ho-jin and Mu-hee’s misadventure in Japan is a perfect elaboration of this thesis, and a spot-on introduction to the protagonists’ personalities.
Hellbound
The second season is more fully realized than the first in every way. Energized by a new sense of narrative purpose, Yeon Sang-ho also brings his best to the direction, doing more with the streamer’s limited budget and weaving brutal action scenes into the narrative to help build the heroes of this story, even in a setting where heroism is so unlikely. In other words: in Hellbound, heroes are those who, more than simply “seeing through” institutional lies, ignore them because they understand deeper truths within themselves. In a universe of spiritual anguish, being at peace with one’s own conscience is a rare luxury—and an act of courage.
My Name
The eight episodes of My Name, all directed by Kim Jin-min (of Extracurricular, another k-drama on the streaming platform), do not hold back on brutality. The action scenes are frequent and spectacular, brilliantly showcasing Asia’s supremacy in the choreography and execution of direct physical confrontations - most of the adrenaline-filled moments consist of hand-to-hand combat. Even so, the series does not forget to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings.
Our Unwritten Seoul
Mi-ji and Mi-rae, Park Bo-young's characters in Our Unwritten Seoul, suffer in different ways—although it would be reckless to diagnose them, the series suggests that the former is dealing with something like depression, while the latter is facing something like burnout—but the point is that both are suffering, and no one around them sees it. It’s not that Mi-ji and Mi-rae lack well-meaning, affectionate people in their lives, but the nature of the battles they fight within themselves is internal, invisible in the face of the need to keep going that dominates everyday life. It quickly becomes clear that these hidden struggles and shortcomings are what Our Unwritten Seoul wants to talk about.
Squid Game
It’s time to reach the endgame, and the “endgame” is where Squid Game becomes relentlessly ugly—human beings proving again and again that they are capable of barbarity not only to survive, but to increase the prize waiting for them at the end of the road. There’s something morbid about the series’ fascination with the degradation of humanity in a context where the (few) rules of decency we have left are removed from the equation, but the internal conflict that truly makes Squid Game such a transfixing story is another one entirely. At its best, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s writing is always balancing between the suffocating notion that the rules imposed by the rich and powerful turn us into monsters, and the liberating notion that we still have the choice not to be.
Dear Hyeri
“If you start with a bluff, but your bluff succeeds, then you’re no longer cheating: you’re running a business”. That is essentially the premise of Dear Hyeri, embodied in a line from the title character, played by Shin Hye-sun (Welcome to Samdal-ri), a mysterious woman who, after supposedly leading the South Korean expansion of a luxury handbag brand—and winning over much of Seoul’s high society in the process—turns up dead in the city’s sewers. It is the inciting incident for a K-drama that sets out to expose the absolute artificiality surrounding the institutions, relationships, and status symbols of the elite.
Notes from the Last Row
Built around these two characters is the solid foundation on which Notes from the Last Row rests. On one hand, Kang’s murky intentions add a purely propulsive kind of intrigue to the plot, compelling the viewer to hit play on the next episode just to find out how this gossip ends. Screenwriter Jang Myung-woo, working from a Spanish stage play by Juan Mayorga, creates situations in which the young man’s infiltration into his “friend’s” life takes on increasingly darker undertones, fully embraced by director Kim Kyu-tae (The Trunk), who revels in voyeuristic clichés left over from the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s.
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty
What truly stands out, though, are the production values that Studio Dragon and the director pour into Bon Appétit, Your Majesty. Whether it’s leaning into its flights of fantasy, delivering the dynamism a particular action scene calls for, or evoking textures, colors, and aromas in its culinary sequences, the series shines as much for the quality of its effects, cinematography, and editing as for the wisdom with which it uses them. There’s a specific soap-opera-like charm that every romantic K-drama, no matter how prestigiously produced, needs to find, and Jang Tae-yoo knows exactly how to capture it.
When Life Gives You Tangerines…
IU and Park Bo-gum make it easy to root for them as a couple in When Life Gives You Tangerines..., even though (or perhaps precisely because) they don’t fit a very familiar mold for romantic leads. After all, the series is a somewhat reluctant love story - Ae-sim and Gwan-sik are less a star-crossed couple and more a pair of rebels who come together because they share similar dreams, the drive to pursue them, and the need to radically break away from their surroundings in order to do so. The most moving part of the script is seeing how tragedy and helplessness bring the two closer together, and how the devotion they show each other is more a survival strategy than anything else.
