“Waiting for Kyeong-do,” a 12-episode JTBC and Coupang Play drama that wrapped January 11, opened domestically to a 2.7 percent rating and closed with a self-record 4.7 percent — solid but unremarkable numbers by Korean broadcast standards. Internationally, on Amazon Prime Video, it became something else entirely: per FlixPatrol’s global OTT rankings, it hit No. 1 on the TV chart in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, and stayed in the Top 10 for 30 straight days in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, while also cracking the Top 10 in Brazil and Egypt.
The platform choice is itself part of the story. Korean content’s global breakouts almost always run through Netflix; this one built its audience through Prime Video, a service that’s technically one of the “big three” global streamers alongside Netflix and Disney+ but has historically had a much lower profile in Korea specifically. Production company SLL, which made the show, said reaching viewers domestically through JTBC and Coupang Play while going global through Prime Video proved its storytelling could travel “regardless of platform.”
The show leans hard into Y2K nostalgia: set in 2007, it recreates a Korean university campus (shot at Hannam University and Duksung Women’s University standing in for a fictional school) down to the wired earphones and Sung Si-kyung’s ballad “Two People” playing in early scenes — a combination that reads as straight nostalgia to Korean viewers in their 30s and 40s and as period-accurate Y2K aesthetic to Gen Z ones. Its title borrows from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and the plot uses that same premise of suspended arrival: a journalist investigating an affair scandal and the woman at its center reunite a decade after their college relationship, adapted from a web novel by director Lim Hyun-wook and writer Yoo Young-ah. Park Seo-joon stars in his first melodrama in roughly seven years and first JTBC drama since “Itaewon Class,” opposite Won Ji-an, with Lee El and Lee Ju-young in supporting roles.
Source: StarExplorer, February 3, 2026, citing FlixPatrol data.
