Lee Jae-wook’s Netflix series ‘Dead-End Job’ has climbed to No. 1 on the streamer’s global Top 10 non-English shows chart, completing a rapid rise from its October 30 premiere — all while its leading man serves in the military. According to Netflix’s Tudum Top 10 site, the series recorded 8.7 million views for the week of November 2 to 8, topping the non-English TV chart worldwide.
The show ranked No. 1 in 22 countries, including South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Chile, and entered the Top 10 in 76 countries, among them Germany, France, Italy, Japan, India and Australia. Netflix counted 44.4 million hours watched during the tracking week, with views calculated by dividing total viewing hours by the series’ runtime.
The climb was swift. In its first tracking week — covering just three days after its October 30 release — the series debuted at No. 4 with 5 million views, according to AJP. It then rose to the top spot in its second week, adding 8.7 million views and 44.4 million hours watched, a jump that suggests word of mouth, rather than a splashy launch, carried the show.
New behind-the-scenes photos released on November 12 by Log Studio offer a glimpse of Lee’s work on the series. The images show the actor studying footage on a monitor between takes and catching his breath over a drink, still focused on the production even off camera. The photos arrived the same week the series topped the chart, giving fans a fresh look at the production behind the numbers. MyDaily described the photos as evidence of Lee’s immersion in the role — a detail that has resonated with fans following the show’s chart run from afar, since the actor is currently serving his mandatory military duty.
‘Dead-End Job’ is a livelihood horror series built around a strange temp agency that advertises only lucrative gigs paying 50 times the hourly wage. Lee plays Hyeok-jun, a young man buried in debt who takes one of the agency’s jobs and is thrown into a nightmarish workplace. The series, directed by Kim Da-min and written by Kyung Min-seon and Lee Shin-ji, uses ghost stories and black comedy to satirize South Korea’s grind culture, with co-stars Go Min-si, Kim Min-ha and Lee Hee-joon rounding out the cast.
The premise taps into an anxiety familiar to young Korean viewers: the gig economy’s promise of easy money, pushed to a supernatural extreme. That grounding may explain why the show has travelled so well — its horror is built on the everyday dread of precarious work, a theme that needs little translation. The series is also a fully original work, not adapted from a web novel or webtoon, according to Chosun Biz, and it holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, MovieWeb notes — a rare combination of critical and popular success for a first-season genre show.
All eight episodes were released at once on October 30, a format that let viewers binge the full story in a single sitting and helped the show build momentum through its second week rather than fading after a premiere-day spike. The series is executive produced by Han Jun-hee, known for ‘D.P.’ and ‘Weak Hero Class 2,’ whose name attached to the project signalled prestige genre storytelling from the start.
With the series now sitting atop the global chart and its star still in uniform, ‘Dead-End Job’ has given Lee a global No. 1 at a moment when he cannot promote it in person. The show’s military-hiatus success story — a hit that grew while its lead actor was away — is the kind of result that tends to outlast the chart week that produced it.
