5 New Asian TV Shows to Gain Cult Following After Squid Game

5. Alice in Borderland (2020–Now)

If you really loved Squid Game, you won’t find a more similar and equally nerve-wracking experience than the Japanese Alice in Borderland while you’re waiting for that long-promised Season 2. Better yet, you won’t have to wait with Alice as this show is dropping its S2 on December 22, 2022, which is a lot sooner.

Much like the previous South Korean sensation, Alice in Borderland is a survival-game TV show with brutality, graphic scenes, and immense tension. The show has a great roster of characters and is already popular in many countries outside of Japan, and it’s definitely worth a shot — especially, if you love the genre.

4. My Name (2021–Now)

Coming from South Korea, we have My Name. In this high-stakes story, we’ll follow a young woman who gets caught up in a large crime syndicate's schemes as she pursues the truth about her father’s murder. With help from her new drug lord boss, she infiltrates the local police force to solve the crime as the syndicate's mole.

Apart from an unexpected premise (we’re more used to watching the police infiltrate gangs, not the other way around, after all), My Name goes all-out on action scenes, dark mystery vibes, complicated investigation — and has great storytelling to back it all up. It’s now a show to watch and forget: you’ll be striving for Season 2.

3. Hellbound (2021–Now)

Learning the date of one’s death is terrifying if you’re easy to manipulate, but when those predictions are happening to every other person and they are executed right on cue by mysterious creatures, even a staunch skeptic will feel the dread. Better yet, if an investigation of these scary encounters leads you to an insane cult.

Are these predicted and artificially-executed deaths truly God's plan, or is there something more sinister going on? Who are the creatures that take the lives of the doomed? Embark on a journey with a desperate South Korean police officer whose wife was taken away — and whose daughter is entangled with the cultists.

2. The Silent Sea (2021)

Remember Mad Max ’s bizarre world where water and diesel are the new currency and gangs of insane raiders patrol the now-deserted lands? Well, forget all about that: The Silent Sea has its own idea of what would happen if our planet turned into a desert and water became the most scarce resource you can’t really stumble upon.

According to this South Korean series, the governments would try to find the answers on the moon (why not?), but things would get complicated as the new research team would find their predecessors’ bodies there looking as if they were drowned. In The Silent Sea, you feel the real dread…while thinking about the future.

1. Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area (2022–Now)

Believe it or not, we have another South Korean gem on our hands. This time, it’s a Korean version of the world-popular Spanish series Money Heist. Set in an alternative version of our world where South and North Korea got reunited which led to massive economic problems, the well-familiar plot becomes way more social.

The Professor and his crew are the people frustrated by the terrible social inequality that followed the unification and the failure of the new government’s plan to fix the economy, which is a nice change of backdrop after the original Money Heist’s plot. If you’re down for more red jumpsuits on your screen, Joint Economic Area is your pick.