K-DRAMA NEWS - October 2026
By Sharon Stern
The pace in dramaland has picked up for the fall. There are a couple of dramas that will start this month that haven’t announced US streaming services yet, so, as usual, we will pick those up next month when we know where you can watch them. There are quite a few choices on a lot of different streaming platforms. There are also a couple of international collaboration series launching this month, though one of them doesn’t have a US streaming service announced. And, in the spirit of Halloween, I suppose, there is a gruesome and intense psychological thrillers/horror series.
Mommy to Mi Mi – 엄마가 미쳤어요
Starring: Jung Min-ah, Dong Ha, Kang Kyung-hun, Yang Hee-kyung, Kim Hee-jung
Genre: Family, slice-of-life
This is a daily (daytime) drama that will be on-going for 120 episodes. If you’ve never seen a Korean daytime drama, you might want to give this a try to dip into the genre, which is different than the 10-16 episode evening dramas.
This on-going drama follows the intertwined lives of two families. Cho Mi-mi raised her three children after her husband had an affair by running a small samgyetang restaurant. She has always put her children first, but finally decides to focus on herself while facing her own mortality, when, because of varying issues, all three end up back at home as adults.
In contrast, Jeon Jin-hui married into wealth and has always focused on herself, to the extent where she has abandoned her own daughter.
The daughters of Cho Mi-mi and Jeon Jin-hui end up working at the same fashion company, entangling the lives of both families. The distinction this drama is making from many daytime dramas is its focus on a workplace.
Between Steps – 연애박사
Disney+
Starring: Choo Young-woo, Kim So-hyun
Genre: Rom-com
Park Min-jae (Choo Young-woo) was a competitive swimmer, but lost his leg due to illness and has had to reinvent his dreamed-of life. He now is a PhD candidate in Seoul National University’s robotics lab. Im Yu-jin (Kim So-hyun) is close to graduating from Seoul National University with a degree in clothing and textiles. She wants to enter graduate school, but is caught up in an incident that keeps her from entering and she is left not knowing what to do next. She becomes interested in robotics and enters the master’s program in robotics instead, where she meets Park Min-jae.
Directed by Ahn Pan-seok whose credits include Something in the Rain, One Spring Night and The Midnight Romance in Hagwon, he is known for slowly developed relationships, though, man, we hope the OST is better than some of his past dramas. This drama appears to be more upbeat than some of the past ones, but he is very good at slow-burn storytelling.
*Director Ahn passed away on August 12, 2026 after finalizing edits for the drama. His drama series have left significant footprint on Korean Drama industry. We were so saddened to hear of his untimely passing. Drama fans will miss his voice in the industry.
Merry Berry Love – 메리 베리 러브 –メリーベリーラブ
Disney+
Starring: Ji Chang-wook, Imada Mio
Genre: Rom-com
This is a Korean-Japanese collaboration with Korean directors, produced by Japan’s Nippon TV and Korea’s CJ ENM – the first ever collaboration between these two studios.
Lee Yu-bin (Ji Chang-wook) is a successful and perfectionist spatial designer (someone who designs interior and exterior spaces for the flow and use), until one monumental disaster leaves him escaping to the remote Japanese island of Charo, where strawberry farming is a large industry, to try to find a new start. He meets Shirahama Karin (Imada Mio), who is a strawberry farmer that has an illness she doesn’t want to talk about with anyone. Though their backgrounds are completely different, though they come from different countries, what starts as a clash of cultures becomes a cross-border love story that heals them both.
Doctor X: Mafia in White – 닥터X: 하얀 마피아의 시대
Netflix
Starring: Kim Ji-won, Lee Jung-eun , Son Hyun-joo , Kim Woo-seok
Genre: Mystery, medical, dark
This is a Korean re-make of a Japanese series.
Kye Su-jeong (Kim Ji-won) is a brilliant surgeon is placed at Guseo University Hospital to fill a surgical vacancy by the hospital’s staffing agency. She is so good at what she does that she challenges the established hierarchy of the egotistical doctors and their hospital, which she uses to her advantage. She is quickly known as the “mad dog of the operating room.” She takes on the cases everyone else refused and exposes corruption in a very prestigious hospital. Son Hyun-joo (Lee Hyun-joo) is the hospital’s director and becomes Kye Su-jeong’s closes ally. Kim Woo-seok plays Park Tae-kyung, a hospital intern that gets caught between the establishment and the new wave of energy.
Take Charge of My Heart – 나를 충전해줘
Netflix
Starring: Kim Young-kwang, Chae Soo-bin
Genre: Fantasy (kind of), rom-com
This series based on the Naver webtoon called Charge Me Up.
The plot of this rom-com is pretty trope-heavy and silly but it is supposed to be pretty funny and could be a cute, don’t-need-to-think escape kind of drama.
A chaebol heir, Baek Ho Rang (Kim Young-kwang), is surviving with an artificial heart. Problem is, the heart battery is dying and he needs to hang on until he can have surgery. He is a good businessman and the heir apparent for the conglomerate his family runs, but faces strong power struggles.
Na Bo Bae (Chae Soo-bin) is a screenwriter with an upcoming deadline that she has to meet before her contract ends. When she was a child, she was struck by lightning, leaving excessive electricity running through her body – so much so that if she shakes someone’s hand, she’ll give them a shock.
When these two meet, Baek Ho Rang is the first person not shocked to shake Na Bo Bae’s hand. On the contrary, Bo Bae’s excess electricity helps charge Ho Rang’s artificial heart battery a little. Ho Rang turns this into an opportunity and a business proposal. He offers a three-month contract to keep Bo Bae physically close, so that he can hug her when he needs a battery boost. Bo Bae has never been in a relationship, but sees the situation as an opportunity to help her get material to meet her screenwriting deadline. Of course, of course, over the three-months they are together, they develop true feelings for each other!
100 Days of Deception – 100일의 거짓말
Starring: Kim You-jung, Park Jin-young, Kim Hyun-joo, Lee Moo-saeng, Jin Seon-kyu
Genre: Period, spy, romance
This drama is set in 1932, during Japanese occupation and in Gyeongseong, which was Japan’s name for Seoul.
Gyeonseong’s best pickpocket and con artist, Lee Ga-kyeong (Kim You-jung), makes a deal with the independence fighters. She has a talent they need and they want her to go undercover to the Japanese Government-General of Joseon for 100 days. Her disguise is to be an interpreter, pretending to be a fake spy, but she ends up becoming a real informant, caught in a dangerous mess that tests her loyalties and convictions. She becomes entanbled with Kim Tae-woong, alias Hideo Sato (Jinyoung), an elite interpreter and adopted son of the colonial Inspector General Sato Shinichi (Jin Seon-kyu). Ga-kyeong is trained to deceive exactly this kind of person…but ends up finding herself falling for him.
This drama celebrates tvN’s 20th anniversary and the company has invested deeply in it. It is being highly anticipated as a strong period drama.
Make Me Tingle – 내가 떨릴 수 있게
Starring: Nam Ji-hyun, Kim Jae-young
Genre: Rom-com
Premieres October 15 | Gong Yeon-su (Nam Ji-hyun) is the eldest daughter from a very conservative family who has “saved herself for marriage.” She works for a marketing company and believes in love, though she has never experienced it for herself. She is set up on a blind date by her elders with Dokgo Dal (Kim Jae-young) who is the CEO of a sex toy company. It goes as well as you could expect it would…or not so well.
Yeon-su ends up taking a marketing job for Dal’s company and that goes as well as you could expect…or even worse. They clash over everything. Of course, until they don’t, right?
Love in Disguise – 나의 유죄인간
Starring: Yim Si-wan, Seol In-ah, Kim Jung-hyun, Yeonwoo, Hong Eun-hee
Genre: Workplace, rom-com
Premieres October 19 | A chaebol heir, Im Si-wan (Yoon Yi-jun) becomes the prime suspect in the mysterious murder of his previous secretary. When a new “male” secretary, Seol In-ah (Kang Jae-hee), arrives to take the position, he has no idea that she’s hiding a major secret. To uncover the truth, In-ah, a former special forces officer turned police officer renowned as a “human weapon” for her exceptional strength and combat skills, disguises herself as a man and goes undercover as Si-wan’s personal secretary and bodyguard. While doing her job and investigating him while protecting him, lots of tense and funny chemistry happens.
I have to say that the costuming and makeup of Kang Jae-hee is more convincing than a lot of gender-switch portrayals…until she opens her mouth. It’s a very old and established trope and can give us some laughs, but it would help if what is so obvious, well, wasn’t. This is a very strong comedic cast, so we will willingly suspend our disbelief and enjoy it.
Final Table – 파이널 테이블
Starring: Ahn Hyo-seop, Chang Ryul, Jung Yoo-jin, Jang Young-nam, Cha Ji-yeon, Hong Hwa-yeon
Genre: Food, slice-of-life, drama, mocumentary or mocu-competition
Premieres October 24 | A global cooking survival show called The Table: K-Chef 2026 is organized to find the top Korean chef, showing off Korean chefs from around the world. Kang Han (Ahn Hyo-seop), also known as Chris K, is a chef who was trained overseas. He is the head chef of a family restaurant named Familia, coming into the position after his father suddenly dies. His closest rival is Cha Woo Jin (Chang Ryul), Executive Chef of the restaurant Exception. At the center of the competition is Seon Jeong Won (Jung Yoo-jin), the show’s executive producer. Simultaneously, a fierce corporate rivalry plays out within a top food industry conglomerate where half-sisters Moon Hae-seon (Jang Young-nam) and Baek Hyun-joo (Cha Ji-yeon) vie for power.
Summer Vacation – 여름방학
Starring: Cho Yi-hyun, Jung Jin-young, Ryu Hae-jun, Hong Ye-ji
Genre: Rom-dram, youth, fantasy
Premieres October 26 | This drama was shot in 2022, but just being released now.
Kim Ha-yeon (Cho Yi-hyun) goes with her father on his business trip to the village of Upo-ri during her summer break. There she meets Jo Yu-gyeom (Jinyoung), the heir of a chaebol family who has always had to follow strict family rules. All we know is that something mysterious happens when they meet.
The Perfect Lie – 라이어
Starring: Seo Hyun-jin,Yoo Yeon-seok
Genre: Psychological thriller, mystery
Premieres October 30 | This psychological thriller revolves around a simple question: What happens when two people remember the same event in completely different ways?
A dance teacher at an arts middle school, Kang Ji-seon (Seo Hyun-jin), and a cardiac surgeon, Min Jun-jo (Yoo Yeon-seok), who is raising his son alone after the death of his wife, have a seemingly perfect encounter, but start telling completely different and opposing versions of the encounter. Their stories and they clash dramatically as they search for the truth, but it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from lies.
Dead-End Job – 꿀알바
Starring: Lee Jae-wook, Go Min-si, Kim Min-ha, Lee Hee-joon
Genre: Horror, mystery, fantasy
Premieres October 30 | Byeon Hyeok-jun (Lee Jae-wook) is over his head in debt when he finds an ad from Spider Staffing Agency for a job offer 50 times the minimum hourly rate. There is one rule to the new job – he can’t tell anyone what happens on the job. Each assignment sends him to a workplace from hell with terrifying and bizarre things going on. Mr S. (Lee Hee-joon) is the boss at Spider Staffing. Yeon-joo (Go Min-si) is an inspector looking into the Spider Staffing Agency to try to find the truth behind unsettling events there. He is joined by Byeon Ji Yun (Kim Min-ha), Hyeok-jun’s sister, as she is pulled into trying to find out what has happened to her brother.
It seems to me like this is trying to feed off of the vibe of Squid Game. Horror/suspense for horror/suspense’s sake without knowing why for a really long time. The first four episodes screened at the 31st Busan International Film Festival.
