Dramas like
Karma

The best-built satire in this wave and the least fun to sit through, deliberately. Eight people, eight floors, money that accrues by the second, and a slide into cruelty that never needs a masked guard to explain it. Ryu Jun Yeol narrates it like a man describing a small business. Difference: The 8 Show is one building and one continuous experiment, where this is three stories that only meet when they collide.

Hooks early Episode 2, once the time for money rule is understood and the floors start turning on each other.

One story told in handovers, with cruelty as the structure. Three actresses play one woman across twenty years of humiliation, violence and internet fame, and the writing is cruellest to the characters it understands best. Difference: Mask Girl spans two decades and gives you somebody to follow the whole way, which this refuses to do for anyone.

Slow start Episode 3, when the lead is recast and the show reveals it is a relay race across three actresses rather than one story.

The same appetite for a web of compromised people. A narcotics detective forcibly addicted to the drug he is investigating, with fourteen episodes of school friends who all owe each other something and a physical urgency most procedurals never find. Difference: Connection is a single line of investigation rather than a lattice, and it lets its lead off far more lightly.

Hooks early Episode 1. The forced addiction happens straight away and the countdown starts with it.

Interlocking investigation, eleven episodes, no wasted subplot. A profiler is the prime suspect in her own uncle's murder, and the show keeps rearranging which piece you are looking at. Difference: Nine Puzzles has a detective to root for and eleven hours to spend on her, so the coldness that defines this is replaced by a point of view.

Hooks early Episode 1. A profiler is the prime suspect in her own uncle's murder, and the puzzle cards start arriving immediately.

Ten episodes of dread built entirely out of proximity. A cheap Seoul boarding house turning an ordinary young man into something else, with shared bathrooms and thin walls doing the work a monster usually does. Im Si Wan carries it and Lee Dong Wook's dentist is the most unsettling thing in it. Difference: Strangers from Hell stays in one building and one head, where this keeps changing whose head you are in.

Hooks early Episode 2, once the other tenants start knocking on his door.

Two summers, two lodgings, eight episodes of dread. Kim Yoon Seok and Yoon Kye Sang are excellent and Go Min Si is genuinely frightening, and the structure cuts between two timelines in the same place. Difference: The Frog has almost nothing underneath the dread, where this has a mechanism, so its emptiness is more annoying rather than less.

Slow start Episode 3, if you are still there. The two timelines finally start speaking to each other.

The debt satire underneath is blunt and real. Games simple enough to explain in a sentence and cruel enough to hold nine hours, with Lee Jung Jae playing a weak man rather than a hero. Difference: Squid Game explains its rules up front and asks you to like somebody, and this withholds its rules until they close.

Hooks early Episode 1. The first game arrives before the hour is out, and the show never needs another pitch.