You’ll Never Guess Which K-Drama Was More Popular Than Crash Landing On You In The First Half Of 2020

Let’s admit it: You’ve binged watched at least one Korean drama this COVID-19 season. Or at least heard of this year's hits like Itaewon Class, The King: Eternal Monarch, The World of the Married, and of course Crash Landing on You.

But did you know that none of the aforementioned titles was the most-watched drama of the year so far?

On July 23, South Korean rating agency Nielsen Korea released the pretty surprising results of a viewership survey conducted on dramas (with between 10 to 50 episodes) aired between January 1 to June 30 this year.

These include dramas from Korea’s major free-to-air stations such as SBS, KBS and MBC, as well as cable channels like tvN and JTBC.

According to reports, Nielsen Korea picked a sample population across 13 regions in Korea and came up with an average number of viewers per episode per drama.

Surprisingly, it was SBS’s Dr. Romantic 2 that topped the survey with 3.4mil views per episode. The hospital-set drama, which stars Han Suk-kyu, Ahn Hyo Seop and Lee Sung-kyung, was followed by the steamy, adultery-laced The World of the Married and the dreamy Crash Landing On You with 3.35mil and 3.33mil views respectively.

According to the survey, dramas produced by the SBS beat the rest of the channels in terms of viewership as it had a total of seven dramas out of the 15 on the list.

Here are the top 15 K-dramas for the first half of 2020 and its average views per episode: