Industry professionals have named IU’s “Perfect Crown” the worst K-drama of 2026, giving the MBC drama 45 votes in JoyNews24’s annual survey of people working inside the Korean entertainment industry.
The result was reported by Koreaboo, which said 142 industry professionals took part in this year’s vote. A second report of the same survey said the polling ran from October 15 to 21 and covered staff at entertainment companies and television stations, film and television content producers, and entertainment reporters.
“Perfect Crown” did not just win the unwanted title, it won it by a wide margin. Its 45 votes were five times the nine votes received by each of the joint runners-up, Son Ye-jin’s “The Scandal” and “Our Sticky Love”, which tied for second place.
The next tier of the ranking was also tightly packed. “Doctor Shin” and “Four Hands, Two Sonatas” each received eight votes, while “A Love Other Than Yours” followed with six. Four dramas tied on four votes each: “A Bona Fide Killer”, “Dream To You”, “Love In Sync” and “Boyfriend on Demand”.
Koreaboo noted that “Perfect Crown” had been surrounded by controversy among fans, and said that context helped explain why it pulled so far ahead of the rest of the field. The outlet did not give a separate reason for each of the other dramas on the list, and this article does not invent one for them.
The ranking still surprised many readers, Koreaboo reported, because several of the dramas named had been major hits with Korean and international viewers. That tension between industry judgment and audience popularity is exactly why the survey draws attention every year, even though it measures insider opinion rather than ratings or streaming numbers.
One Reddit discussion captured that reaction directly. A user questioned the placement of “Four Hands, Two Sonatas”, saying they had heard positive reviews of the drama and had been planning to watch it. The comment underlines a recurring pattern in these votes: a drama can find an audience and still be judged harshly by the professionals who make, schedule and cover television.
The casts involved show how high-profile the list is. “Four Hands, Two Sonatas” stars Song Kang, Lee Jun Young and Jang Gyu Ri, while “A Love Other Than Yours” pairs Seo Kang Joon with Ahn Eun Jin. “Boyfriend on Demand” stars Jisoo and Seo In Guk, “Dream To You” stars Hwang In Youp and Lee Hyeri, “A Bona Fide Killer” stars Gong Hyo Jin, Jung Jun Won and Lee Sang Yi, and “Love In Sync” stars Kim Myung Soo and Kang Min Ah.
This is not a new exercise for JoyNews24. The outlet has run the same kind of year-end industry poll for several years, and its past winners show that even big-budget, star-led projects are not safe from it. In the 2025 survey, Ma Dong-seok’s “Twelve” topped the worst-drama list with 28 votes, while the 2024 poll put “Queen Woo” first with 39 votes, ahead of “The Escape of the Seven: Resurrection” on 37.
Those earlier results also help explain the limits of the exercise. The vote counts for the dramas named in 2026 add up to 101, well short of the 142 professionals surveyed, and neither Koreaboo nor the second report explained the gap. Some respondents may have voted for dramas outside the published ranking, abstained, or split their votes in ways the reports did not detail, so the published list should be read as a ranking of the most-voted titles, not as a complete breakdown of every ballot.
No official statement was available from the productions named in the survey. For now, the 2026 list stands as an industry verdict rather than an audience one, and it is likely to keep fuelling debate among viewers who enjoyed the very dramas the professionals ranked lowest.
