Lumping every broad genre show that hails from the same country together is equal parts ignorant and dismissive, but it can’t be overlooked that the overwhelming success of Squid Game on a global scale has seen a huge surge in popularity for Korean content on Netflix.
After Squid Game became the platform’s most-watched original series ever, four of the ten top episodic titles on the streaming service around the world all originated from Korea at one stage. In a fortunate stroke of coincidence, Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s supernatural horror Hellbound arrived right around the time Squid Game began dropping in viewership, so it immediately filled a superficially similar void.
The latest to stake a claim is The Silent Sea, a sci-fi mystery thriller written by Park Eun-kyo and directed by Choi Hang-yong. An elite team travel to the moon to try and track down a mysterious sample from a research station that’s long been abandoned, which may hold the key to solving a food and water crisis that’s brought Earth to the brink.
The Silent Sea premiered on Netflix this past Friday, and as per FlixPatrol, it’s already nabbed fourth place on the Top 10 television rankings. That puts it behind Emily in Paris, The Witcher and Money Heist, three of Netflix’s biggest shows, so a brand new title immediately charting so high is an impressive achievement.