Ask anyone which Korean drama is the most watched, and you'll likely hear "Squid Game." That's the easy answer, the global phenomenon answer. But it's also a bit of a trick question. The real answer depends entirely on how you measure "watched." Are we talking about the percentage of Korean households glued to their TV sets at 10 PM on a Wednesday? Or the total number of global Netflix accounts that hit play over a month? The crown belongs to different shows depending on the metric, and understanding that split is key to seeing the full picture of K-drama dominance.

I've spent years tracking these numbers, and the biggest mistake newcomers make is treating viewership as a single, universal score. It's not. A drama can be a modest hit at home in Seoul and a global tsunami on streaming platforms. Let's break down the data, look at the champions in different arenas, and figure out what "most watched" really means.

The Kings of Korean TV Ratings

In South Korea, the gold standard for measuring a show's success has long been the Nielsen Korea rating. This is a percentage of households with TVs watching a program during its scheduled broadcast slot. It's a live, appointment-viewing metric that reflects a show's grip on the domestic audience.

When we look at this purely domestic, traditional metric, the list of "most watched" dramas looks different from the global one. It's dominated by weekday primetime series that captured the nation's heart.

Notice something? Squid Game isn't on this list. Its TV ratings in Korea were good for Netflix-originals at the time, but they didn't crack the top tier of traditional broadcast hits. This is the first major split in the "most watched" narrative. A show can be a global streaming giant while having a different footprint at home.

The Global Streaming Titans

This is where the game changed completely. The rise of Netflix and other global streaming platforms created a new metric: total global viewership, measured in hours or accounts. It's on-demand, borderless, and massive in scale. Here, one show stands alone, not just in K-drama history, but in television history.

Squid Game (2021) isn't just a winner; it's an outlier. According to Netflix's own viewership reports (which they've since shifted to "hours viewed"), the series was sampled by a staggering 142 million member households in its first 28 days. Let that sink in. No scripted TV show in Netflix's history had done that at the time. Its cultural penetration was insane—everyone from your cousin to the President of the United States was talking about it.

But other dramas have posted colossal streaming numbers too, just on a different scale. All of Us Are Dead (a zombie thriller) and The Glory (a dark revenge story) both racked up hundreds of millions of viewing hours on Netflix's global Top 10. These numbers are so large they become abstract—they represent a level of international reach that the classic TV ratings system could never capture.

Here's the subtle error many make: they see a show like Extraordinary Attorney Woo having strong but not record-breaking Korean TV ratings and underestimate its success. On Netflix, it became a sleeper global hit, topping charts in dozens of countries. Its "watch" was distributed globally, not concentrated in one time slot in Korea.

The Netflix Effect: A Double-Edged Sword

Netflix's global distribution is a powerhouse, but it also makes direct comparisons to older shows impossible. How do you compare the 28% rating of The World of the Married in Korea to the 500 million hours The Glory was watched worldwide? You can't, directly. They're different species of success. One shows deep penetration in a single, mature market. The other shows broad, shallow penetration across the entire planet.

Cultural Impact & Legacy Phenomena

Viewership numbers are cold data. Cultural impact is the warm, messy aftermath. Some dramas achieve a "most watched" status in the collective memory and economic impact that numbers only partly explain.

Take Winter Sonata (2002). Its TV ratings in Korea were excellent, but its true "viewership" was across Asia, where it ignited the first Korean Wave (Hallyu). It wasn't measured in Netflix hours, but in DVD sales, tourism to filming locations (like Nami Island), and the superstar status of Bae Yong-joon. In terms of shaping an industry and creating a transnational fanbase, it was arguably "most watched" for its era.

Similarly, Descendants of the Sun (2016) had huge synchronized viewership across Asia because it was released simultaneously in Korea and China. Its impact was measured in social media trends, product placement sales (the lipstick sold out), and the careers it launched. Its numbers were huge, but its cultural footprint was even larger.

This is the third way to measure "watched"—through the ripple effects. Squid Game created Halloween costumes, TikTok challenges, and a real-world surge in interest in the children's games it featured. Crash Landing on You reportedly influenced inter-Korean diplomacy discussions and boosted Swiss tourism. These are intangible metrics of being "watched" and absorbed into the global consciousness.

So, How Do You Define "Most Watched"?

After sifting through all this, here's my take as someone who's watched these trends evolve.

If you want the single show with the highest verified number of human eyeballs on it in a short period, the answer is almost certainly Squid Game. The combination of its Netflix reach and unprecedented virality is unmatched.

If you ask for the show with the highest concentration of viewership within its home country during a traditional broadcast, you're looking at champions like The World of the Married (cable) or classics like You Who Came From the Stars (public broadcast).

And if you're talking about a show that defined an era and was "most watched" in shaping the global pathway for K-dramas, you have to give a nod to pioneers like Winter Sonata or Descendants of the Sun.

The landscape now is hybrid. A drama like Queen of Tears (2024) can achieve sky-high TV ratings in Korea and top the Netflix global charts simultaneously. This dual success is the new hallmark of a true "most watched" megahit.