2019 - 2021
Kingdom (νΉλ€) is the Korean Netflix series that proved the zombie genre still had something to say. It premiered in January 2019 as Netflix's first Korean original, and the reaction was the kind of thing that rewires an industry. Two six-episode seasons plus a feature-length prequel special (Kingdom: Ashin of the North, 2021). Created and written by Kim Eun-hee, who adapted her own webcomic The Kingdom of the Gods for the screen. Kim Seong-hun directs the first season. Park In-je takes over for season two and the Ashin special.
The setting is late-Joseon Korea, around 1601, a few years after the ruinous Imjin War against Japan. The kingdom is broken and hungry. Peasants are starving in the southern provinces. The royal court in Hanyang is rotten with factional politics. And the king is dying, or already dead, depending on who you ask. Crown Prince Lee Chang suspects the Haewon Cho clan of poisoning his father and engineering a succession fix. While he is trying to prove it, a plague starts at a physician's hospital in Dongnae and rips north through the country. The dead get back up. They are fast. They are hungry. And the palace is closer than anyone in the capital realises.
I came to this expecting a competent horror show and got something closer to a prestige political drama with zombies as the loudest argument in it.
Ju Ji-hoon carries the series as Crown Prince Lee Chang. He starts the first episode as a sheltered royal and ends it as a man trying to run a country that is eating itself. Ju plays him mostly quiet, eyes doing the heavy lifting, and the stillness sells the weight. Bae Doona is the second pillar as Seo-bi, a provincial physician who keeps landing in places no physician should go. Seo-bi is the closest thing to an audience surrogate, and Bae plays her with practical, worn-down competence that stops the show drifting into pure melodrama.
Ryu Seung-ryong is gorgeous casting as Chief State Councillor Cho Hak-ju, the clan patriarch pulling every political string in the capital. He is measured, courteous, and genuinely terrifying. The best villain the show has. Kim Hye-jun plays his daughter Queen Consort Cho with a mix of ambition and fear that gets sharper as the season runs. Heo Joon-ho as the old general Ahn Hyeon and Kim Sung-kyu as Yeong-shin, the bandit with a matchlock rifle and an inexplicable amount of plague knowledge, round out a crew that actually feels like a crew rather than a roster of functions.
The season-two post-credits tag brings in Jun Ji-hyun as Ashin, which is the Korean equivalent of a surprise Cate Blanchett cameo, and the 2021 special peels her story open.
Kim Eun-hee has said in interviews that Kingdom is, first and last, a political show. She is right. The zombies are the delivery mechanism. The argument underneath is that the Joseon ruling class has been starving its own peasantry for generations, and when those peasants get close to literal starvation they will eat anything that moves, and the aristocracy has nobody to blame but itself when that appetite turns around and comes back up the road to Hanyang.
Kim Eun-hee
Creator / Writer
Kim Hye-jun
Queen Consort Cho
Ryu Seung-ryong
Chief State Councillor Cho Hak-ju
Ju Ji-hoon
Crown Prince Lee Chang
Bae Doona
Seo-bi
The plague is caused by a plant. The plant is used on purpose. The reasons it gets used are the oldest reasons in the book:
The show is not subtle about any of this, and it does not need to be. The argument is loud because the situation is loud. Hungry people eating corrupt people is the oldest political allegory in the world, and Kingdom commits to it completely.
Visually the show is a sageuk in the classical mode, which is to say period-accurate Joseon with the budget turned all the way up. Changdeokgung Palace, one of Seoul's five grand palaces, is used as the royal location. Costumes are full hanbok. The palette is earth tones, lacquered black, deep red, the grey of a winter sky. It is the rare horror show where you want to freeze frames for the composition rather than the gore.
And the zombies are genuinely good. Fast, swarming, uncanny in a way Western zombie TV rarely manages. The show writes one big rule around them. Cold slows them down. Heat wakes them up. The first season unfolds in summer. The second season is winter. Work out the implications.
A single bandit with a matchlock rifle trying to hold a village gate against a night of sprinters is the kind of set piece this show does better than almost anything on Netflix. Critics at Collider compared the battlefield sequences to Game of Thrones and argued the production values leave it behind. That is a big claim. Having watched both, it is not a stupid one.
Season one sits at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Season two got even better reviews. Together they gave Netflix the template for what Korean originals could be and paved the way for Squid Game two years later. In a genre that American TV has been running into the ground for over a decade, Kingdom landed like a reminder that the zombie story is actually quite flexible if you bother to think about what it is for.
My hunch is that this is the best zombie show ever made, and I say that having watched The Last of Us twice. The Last of Us is about a man and a girl. Kingdom is about a country. Those are different jobs. Kingdom does its job with a precision Western prestige TV rarely musters for genre material.
Kim Eun-hee believed in the politics before she believed in the zombies. That decision rewires the whole show. The production also believed in the period before it believed in the horror, which is why every sword fight happens inside an actually-real palace with actually-real hanbok and not a green-screen fever dream. The leads refuse to ham. The rules are clean and they get honoured. The show looks like a film and moves like a thriller. It bites like a plague drama too.
Kim had something to say about starvation. About clan rule. About the way an elite convinces itself the suffering outside its gates is a statistical problem rather than a moral one. She said it in six beautiful, brutal hours, then said it again in six more.
A zombie show that is really a political show that is really a show about hunger. Kingdom works because it knows exactly which of those three things is the one that matters.
Watch it with Squid Game if you want to see modern Korean TV arguing with its own elite in two different registers. Watch it with Chernobyl if you want institutional failure dressed up as genre. Watch it in winter.