5 K-Dramas with brilliant beginnings and messiest endings: When The Phone Rings to Memories of the Alhambra

We’ve all been there, three episodes into a new K-drama and already texting friends that we’ve found our next all-time favourite, cancelling plans to squeeze in just one more episode, and defending the show to anyone who’ll listen because the chemistry is electric, the plot is clever and the soundtrack has been on repeat for days.

Then somewhere around episode six or eight, something shifts, as a villain refuses to stay down, a plot twist arrives out of nowhere, someone conveniently loses their memory, and before you know it you’re watching the finale with your arms crossed, wondering how a show you loved this much could let you down this badly. These five dramas gave us some of the best opening episodes in recent memory, and then, one by one, they fumbled the landing so spectacularly that we’re still not over it.

A cold political marriage, a wife who doesn’t speak, a husband who barely looks at her, and a kidnapper on the phone. For the first few episodes, Yoo Yeon-seok and Chae Soo-bin gave us one of the tensest setups in years. A couple three years into a marriage of convenience, a mysterious call, and a sneaking, delicious suspicion: what if the quiet wife was the one holding the strings all along?

Three years of icy silences and dismissive glares, and Hee-joo finally gets her payback. She would be calm, patient, and messing with his head. It was a woman-scorned psychological thriller just waiting to happen, and we were ready.

Instead, the show lost its nerve. Turns out Sa-eon was only cold because he was a man in love. The ice was love, the neglect was protection, and all that cruelty was a misunderstood romantic gesture. The revenge thriller turned into a soppy love story, and somewhere in the back half the plot wandered off altogether. Hee-joo ends up in an actual war zone looking for her missing husband.

Watch it up to the midpoint, then write your own ending, where she never hangs up.

It all started with a single kiss on Jeju, a woman who pretends to be a married mother so she can land a job at a baby-products company, and Jang Ki-yong as a sulky team leader who can’t stop thinking about the stranger he kissed. For its first stretch, critics and fans alike were thrilled to finally have the kind of old-school fluffy rom-com everyone had been missing, with sparky chemistry, no grim murder subplot hiding in the background, and a male lead so charming that the ratings kept climbing every week.

Somewhere past the halfway mark, though, the writers seem to have opened the K-drama trope cupboard and decided to use everything in it at once, so that the gentle office romance we signed up for slowly filled with loan sharks, kidnappings, fires, an unnecessary love triangle, and secrets exploding left and right, building up to the moment in episode 13 when the CEO slaps Da-rim in front of everyone. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get more chaotic, the final episode gives Ji-hyeok an accident and a convenient case of amnesia with barely two hours of story left, as if the show couldn’t bear to end without one last obstacle. It then rushes through the reunion and the proposal and races so fast through a time jump that we skip the wedding entirely and land on two little kids rolling their eyes every time their parents kiss.

If you want to remember Dynamite Kiss the way it deserves to be remembered, watch up to around episode 6, when it was still the warm, silly comfort show it promised to be, and let the rest of the explosions go off without you.

Hyun Bin and Park Shin-hye is a dream casting, but boy, did that go wrong.

Hyun Bin plays Yoo Jin-woo, a tech investor who travels to Granada chasing an augmented reality game so groundbreaking that he’s ready to bet his whole fortune on it, and for the first few episodes the show felt like nothing else on Korean TV, mixing sunlit Spanish streets, that haunting classical guitar theme, and the eerie thrill of watching a game world bleed into real life in ways that are clever, stylish, and properly unsettling.

The trouble is that once the game starts glitching, the script seems to catch the same bug, and the show gets stuck replaying the same scene over and over, with our hero swinging his sword at the same undead knight in yet another dark alley until every fight starts to blur together and the tension drains away.

Meanwhile, Park Shin-hye, who should have been an equal partner in the mystery, is mostly left to wait around and worry, and the ending raises more questions than it answers, as if the writers had planned a sequel or simply ran out of time to decide what any of it meant.

To keep the magic intact, enjoy the first few levels while the game still feels like a dazzling new world, and log out well before the boss fight starts repeating itself.

Goodness, this was a long, painful watch.

Kim Soo-hyun and Kim Ji-won play a husband and wife whose marriage has gone so cold that he’s secretly drafting divorce papers, until he finds out his chaebol-heiress wife is seriously ill and...celebrates (haha so funny), and then decides to stick around.

For the first stretch, despite some glaring problems, you thought you could enjoy the big-budget K-drama, with a country-boy husband trapped in a family of snobby billionaires, sharp comedy that suddenly turns heartbreaking, and a slow-burn reunion of an estranged couple that had everyone crying into their snacks.

Then Yoon Eun-sung walked in, and the show decided its best idea was to let one obsessed villain survive anything, scheme endlessly, and pop up in every episode for one more round of kidnapping, threatening and lurking. The family loses the company, the plot twists start piling up, and once Hae-in loses her memory after surgery the whole romance hits rewind, while Eun-sung keeps surviving everything the script throws at him long after any reasonable viewer had stopped believing it.

By the time the finale wraps up with a flash-forward that skips decades ahead to say goodbye at a graveside, it feels like we watched two different shows stuck together, a warm marriage comedy and a never-ending stalker thriller.

Stick with it while the Baeks and the Hongs are still bickering over dinner and Hyun-woo is falling for his wife all over again, and leave before Eun-sung starts acting like the main character.

This was a brilliantly written show, don't get us wrong: Yet that ending, just was too painful to bear *reaches for tissues*.

Kim Tae-ri plays Na Hee-do, a teenage fencer with endless energy and big dreams, and Nam Joo-hyuk plays Baek Yi-jin, a once-rich boy who lost everything in the 1998 financial crisis. For most of its run, the show was a warm, nostalgic coming-of-age story full of rooftop chats, a tunnel, a gang of lovable friends, and a slow-building romance between two people trying to grow up together while their country is falling apart.

The trouble is that the show framed the whole story as Hee-do’s daughter reading her mother’s old diaries, which meant everyone spent sixteen episodes waiting to find out who her dad turned out to be. Instead of an answer, the final stretch sends Yi-jin off to New York as a reporter, piles on time zones, missed calls and work pressure, and then has them break up in a quiet, sad conversation that felt like it came out of nowhere after everything the two had been through. The final episode doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of meeting the husband, leaving fans who’d been in love with the couple for months staring at the credits and wondering why the show had spent so much time making them fall for a romance it never meant to finish.

Watch it for the friendship, the fencing and the tunnel, and you can comfortably stop a few episodes from the end, since it was the journey that made us love them and not where they ended up.