As December marks the season of year-end award shows, the anticipation for the 2025 Korean Drama Awards hosted by the major networks—SBS, MBC, and KBS—is heating up. However, while one network is facing the delightful challenge of too many hit contenders, the others are dealing with a crisis of underwhelming performance.
SBS: A Bounty of Hits, A Dilemma of Choice
SBS has clearly emerged as the leader this year, producing a string of popular dramas that performed strongly both domestically and internationally. With multiple titles landing in Netflix’s Top 10 charts across various countries, SBS has successfully adapted to the binge-watching era driven by OTT platforms.
Its famed Friday-Saturday drama slot alone has birthed genre-spanning successes like the crime thrillers Taxi Driver 3, Queen Mantis, Buried Hearts, romantic comedies like Love Scout and Would You Marry Me?, sports comedy The Winning Try, and the fusion sageuk The Haunted Palace. Many of these shows consistently earned double-digit viewership ratings.
Even SBS’s Wednesday-Thursday dramas, long overshadowed in recent years, saw a resurgence with Dynamite Kiss. With so many potential candidates, selecting a single Daesang (Grand Prize) winner is proving to be more of a delightful headache for SBS.
“We have too many deserving candidates,” a network source joked—pointing to a potential joint win among leading actors as the most likely outcome.
MBC: A Year of Stumbles
On the other hand, MBC is grappling with a creative slump. Despite the success of period dramas like The Red Sleeve (2021) and My Dearest (2023), this year has seen a return to the struggles that plagued MBC in the late 2010s.
With the exception of Undercover High School led by Seo Kang-joon, most of MBC’s dramas have failed to make a mark in ratings or online buzz. Titles such as Mary Kills People and To the Moon struggled to attract attention despite high-profile casts.
Though Moon River shows some recovery, its impact has been diluted by SBS’s monster hit Taxi Driver 3, making it difficult to match past success.
KBS: An Awards Show Too Embarrassing to Host?
KBS finds itself in an even more dire situation. Since the critically acclaimed When the Camellia Blooms (2019), KBS dramas have largely faded from public memory. Although Korea-Khitan War made a splash in 2023, it was more of a brief spark than a sustained comeback.
This year, even with titles aimed at middle-aged audiences like For Eagle Brothers and Our Golden Days, KBS dramas failed to break through. Notably, Walking on Thin Ice and Twelve, both starring top-tier actors, flopped disastrously—reportedly racking up losses over 10 billion KRW and sparking internal accountability controversies.
KBS has even restructured its programming strategy, shifting away from weekday dramas. Yet, regaining viewer trust remains a monumental task. Critics are now questioning whether KBS should even hold its drama awards ceremony at all.
As it stands, potential nominees for KBS’s Daesang are likely to come from its weekend family drama lineup—actors who had steady but unspectacular performances throughout the year.
Sources: naver