On May 8, at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards in Seoul, Netflix’s “Eun-jung and Sang-yeon” won the night’s top television honor — Best Drama — beating four other nominees from broadcast and cable, while its writer, Song Hye-jin, also took home the Best Screenplay trophy the same night (Elle Korea, Lee In-hye, May 9, 2026). On its own, that’s a single award. But it’s also the latest data point in a slower-moving argument about whether Korea’s oldest, most prestige-driven entertainment ceremony is starting to hand its biggest TV honors to streaming as a matter of course, or whether this was simply the best show in a particular year.
The field “Eun-jung and Sang-yeon” beat was not a weak one. According to Elle Korea’s full results list, the Best Drama category also included tvN’s “Unknown Seoul,” JTBC’s office dramedy about a department-chief navigating Seoul corporate life and homeownership, Disney+’s “Pine: Hicks” and tvN’s “The Tyrant’s Chef” (Elle Korea, May 9, 2026). “Eun-jung and Sang-yeon,” for context, isn’t even a new title by the time it won — it premiered on Netflix back in September 2025, starring Kim Go-eun and Park Ji-hyun as two women whose 30-year friendship curdles into rivalry and resentment once they end up competing inside the same film industry, directed by Jo Young-min. That the Baeksang voters reached back roughly eight months to crown it Best Drama, over freshly-airing 2026 competition, suggests the win was about the work itself, not recency.
What complicates the “streaming is taking over” reading is what happened in the acting categories the same night. Best Actor in a TV series went to Hyun Bin for Disney+’s “Made in Korea,” and Best Actress went to Park Bo-young for tvN’s “Unknown Seoul” — meaning the single most prestigious drama prize went to Netflix, but the two next-most-watched honors landed on Disney+ and tvN, not on “Eun-jung and Sang-yeon’s” own cast (Elle Korea, May 9, 2026). If this were a clean changing-of-the-guard moment for streaming, you’d expect the wins to cluster on one platform or one show. Instead they scattered across three different services.
So the honest read sits between the two extremes. Anyone arguing this is proof streaming has arrived at the top of Korean television’s prestige hierarchy can point to the fact that the single most valuable trophy of the night, Best Drama, is now something Netflix can credibly compete for and win against terrestrial and cable’s best work, on a story that wasn’t even part of the current broadcast cycle. Anyone more skeptical can point out that the same ceremony spread its acting honors across two other platforms entirely, which looks less like a streaming sweep and more like voters simply rewarding whichever performance and whichever script were strongest, regardless of where they aired. Both things can be true. What’s harder to dispute is that “which platform a show airs on” is no longer doing much work in predicting who wins Korea’s biggest drama prize — and that, by itself, is the more durable story here.
Sources: Lee In-hye, “대상의 주인공은 누구? 2026 백상예술대상 수상자 리스트,” Elle Korea, May 9, 2026.
