Methodology & sources

Sources and licences

• Drama facts (titles, original-script titles, country, network, air dates, episode and season counts, genres, cast, writers, directors, source works, filming locations): Wikidata, released under CC0. Fetched 2026-11-01; refreshed daily.
• Photos of actors, broadcaster buildings and filming locations: Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence (CC BY, CC BY-SA or public domain), credited where it appears. Every photo was chosen by eye from a contact sheet and pinned by file name, so a namesake's photo can't slip in.
• Cross-check only: the English Wikipedia infobox for each drama (episode count, first and last air dates, network). We compare values; we copy no Wikipedia text.
• Title cards, genre colours and charts are KillerDrama's own designs. We use no posters, stills or key art: those are copyrighted.

Not covered: where to watch (streaming availability is proprietary data and varies by country), ratings and viewership (no open, commercially usable source), and plot synopses (we won't paraphrase official synopses or Wikipedia, and we leave a synopsis out rather than guess). The one-paragraph summary on each drama page is assembled only from the facts in its box.

Which dramas are in

We start from Wikidata items for television series, miniseries and web series whose country of origin is South Korea, China, Japan, Thailand or Taiwan, ranked by sitelinks: the number of Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia) language editions with an article on the drama. It is an open, rough measure of international reach, not of quality or ratings. Then we drop:

• anything that isn't scripted live-action drama: animation, reality, variety, talk and music shows (by type and genre), and tokusatsu (Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, Ultraman), which would otherwise crowd out the J-dramas;
• co-productions led from outside Asia (Shōgun 1980, The Swarm);
• items with too little data for a useful page: no English title, no first-air date, or neither cast nor a drama genre;
• 7 items removed by hand after review:
  • Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! is a comedy variety show, tagged only as comedy (Q2318517)
  • Pokémon Concierge is a stop-motion animated series (Q123465873)
  • The Return of Ultraman is tokusatsu (excluded like the rest of the Ultra and Kamen Rider series), not tagged as such (Q592745)
  • Devil May Cry (2025) is an animated series, typed only as a television series (Q122898407)
  • Idol Producer is a reality survival show (Q47465929)
  • The Boyfriend (2024) is a Netflix dating reality show (Q126600256)
  • Drag Race Thailand is a reality competition (Q47459620)

From what's left we keep the 300 best-known Korean, 80 Chinese, 80 Japanese, 40 Thai and 35 Taiwanese dramas, plus any drama that already had a page here and is still eligible (so pages don't come and go as rankings wobble): 543 in all (614 candidates were filtered out). Actors, writers and directors get a page when they have three or more dramas in this set; networks when they have three or more.

Wikidata traps we handle

• Labels: we ask for English, then the multilingual ("mul") label, so items without an English label still get a name.
• Original-script titles: some Korean items store a title in hanja under the Korean language tag (Mr. Queen: 哲仁王后 instead of 철인왕후). We only accept an original title written in the expected script (Hangul for Korean, kana or kanji for Japanese, Hanzi for Chinese, Thai script for Thai) and prefer the Hangul label over a hanja title.
• Company or channel: dramas point at "Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation" or "MBC TV", "Seoul Broadcasting System" or "SBS TV". We merge those into one network.
• Episode counts are sometimes per season, sometimes per broadcast part (SBS and MBC split hour-long episodes in two for some years), and once a typing error (16123 for 16). Counts above 2,500 are never shown.
• Genres: dozens of overlapping items (film genres, TV genres, "Korean drama") are mapped to 18 site genres; generic "drama" items count as evidence of drama but get no chip.

Validation against Wikipedia

For each of the 541 dramas whose English Wikipedia article has an infobox, we compared Wikidata's values with the infobox (2026-11-01). Dates are compared at the coarser of the two precisions; networks after merging company and channel names.

Where the sources differ and no one has reviewed the case yet, the drama page shows Wikidata's value with a note giving Wikipedia's. Most differences are explainable: multi-season shows counted per season or in total, split broadcast parts, a later season's end date, a network system named instead of the station.

Hand review: 17 dramas

We checked these against the infobox and the article's own broadcast section (and Chinese Wikipedia for Meteor Garden), picking the hard cases the comparison flagged plus clean controls. Corrections are applied on the site and marked on each page.

Outcome: of 17, two were clean controls, twelve were Wikidata errors or gaps we corrected (wrong year, wrong dates, a typo, a missing or wrong network, season-1-only counts), two were both-right differences of counting (split broadcast parts; a special counted as a season), and in one Wikipedia's infobox was the one that was wrong.

"Dramas like this"

Scores add up shared writers (5 each), directors (4), cast (3 each, up to three), genres (2 each, up to three), plus small nudges for the same country, era, kind of source work and network. The full rules are on the Dramas like… page. Each recommendation shows its reasons.

Corrections

The fastest fix for a wrong fact is in Wikidata itself: the site refreshes from it every day, and the fix then reaches everyone who uses Wikidata.