The 15 best K-dramas of 2022, from Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Alchemy of Souls to Little Women
- Korean cable channels upped their game in response to streaming services’ big-budget productions this year, resulting in a crop of memorable shows for viewers
- Ranked from good to great, our top 15 of the year include Takashi Miike’s Connect, the heartwarming Extraordinary Attorney Woo and a fresh take on Little Women
As we wrap up another year, we once again have a large number of sterling Korean dramas from which to choose a top 15.
Netflix and Korean cable channels remained the big dogs on the block, but new streaming services, both South Korean and international, heated up the competition in the market and inspired K-dramas to stretch out in new directions.
Big-budget streaming series were once again very prominent, but traditional cable shows also levelled up in a big way this year, with familiar K-dramas tropes being repackaged to produce sophisticated and addictive new stories that gripped fans around the world.
Here is our pick of the best Korean dramas of 2022, ranked from good to great.
15. Through the Darkness
Kim Nam-gil headlines Through the Darkness, a chronicle of South Korea’s very first criminal profiler and based on a non-fiction novel. The show takes a page from David Fincher’s series Mindhunter and the memoir it was based on, which pops up on screen here.
14. Link: Eat, Love, Kill
Yeo Jin-goo and Moon Ga-young shared some of the best on-screen chemistry this year in Link: Eat, Love, Kill, a bright romantic comedy with some surprisingly macabre flourishes.
13. Connect
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike makes his K-drama debut with the grisly and propulsive genre series Connect.
12. Reborn Rich
11. Juvenile Justice
10. Weak Hero Class 1
In it, a motley crew of teenage students find themselves joining forces against a gang of bullies in school. Their battles soon take on epic proportions as they find themselves going head to head with outside gangs.
9. Alchemy of Souls
This colourful romantic fantasy epic from the minds of the Hong Sisters, known for previous hits such as Hotel del Luna, features a cast of young stars romancing one another and battling each other with magic in the fictional land of Daeho.
Jung So-min plays a “soul shifter” who infiltrates an academy of mages to get her revenge, only to fall for a handsome young mage played by Lee Jae-wook.
8. Shadow Detective
Lee Sung-min exudes a gruff gravitas in the moody detective series Shadow Detective. He plays an ageing police officer fighting off dementia while a vengeful killer targets local bigwigs in their foggy seaside town and torments him with phone calls.
7. Our Blues
The starriest drama of the year was also one of its most easy-going and relaxing.
Set in the colourful seaside town of Seogwipo on Jeju Island, Our Blues features Lee Byung-hun, Kim Woo-bin, Han Ji-min and many others as hardy island fishmongers, fishers and merchants going about their lives.
6. Pachinko
Based on the international bestseller of the same name by Min Jin Lee, the series traces the trials and tribulations of a Korean woman forced to move to Japan during the colonial era in the early 20th century, and the alienation her family continues to feel through subsequent generations.
5. Anna: Director’s Cut
Bae Suzy reveals new layers as a thespian in this rich and involving character study from director Lee Joo-young. Anna is a compelling and sophisticated dive into the life of a problematic woman that explores how circumstance, opportunity and psychology shape her during an elaborate, decades-long con.
4. Extraordinary Attorney Woo
Undoubtedly the global K-drama sensation of the year, Extraordinary Attorney Woo introduced us to the inimitable Woo Young-woo, a lawyer on the autism spectrum, and the delightful actress Park Eun-bin who played her.
Rookie lawyer Woo melted all our hearts in this charming show, which balanced engaging episodic cases, a touching series-long family drama and a compelling romance.
3. Twenty-Five Twenty-One
Kim Tae-ri lights up the screen as the astonishingly bubbly teenage fencer Na Hee-do alongside Nam Joo-hyuk’s adorable rookie reporter Baek Yi-jin in the smash hit Twenty-Five Twenty-One.
Its climactic miscalculations aside, involving an ill-fated trip to Manhattan in the early 2000s, the show was the zestiest and most febrile youth drama of the year and featured its most endearing romantic duo.
2. My Liberation Notes
Social inequality is the driving force of almost every drama but, thanks to My Mister writer Park Hae-young’s rich and layered characters, the sterling slice-of-life drama My Liberation Notes broke from formula and struck an unusually deep chord whose reverberations will not soon be forgotten.
1. Little Women
