K-Drama History Part 13: The Directors — Lee Eung-bok, Kim Won-seok, Ahn Gil-ho, and the PDs Who Shaped Modern K-Drama
▲ The Glory — directed by Ahn Gil-ho, written by Kim Eun-sook. One of the clearest examples of a director and a writer pulling in perfect sync. (Official Netflix trailer)
Last time, we handed the crown to the writers. Korea calls them 작가님 — writer-nim — and honestly, they earned it. But here is the thing nobody warns you about when you fall down the K-drama rabbit hole: the person who decides how the snow falls in Goblin, how the silences land in The Glory, how those pink stairwells in Squid Game make your stomach drop — that is someone else entirely.
Meet the directors. In Korea, they have spent years as the quiet half of the credits. Time you knew their names.
In Korea, the Writer Gets the Glory. The Director Gets a Line in the Credits.
Quick culture check. In the West, we grew up talking about directors. Spielberg. Nolan. Bong Joon-ho. The director is the author. So when Western fans arrive at K-drama, they reach for the same word.
Korea does it the other way around. A drama is pitched, sold, and remembered by its writer. Fans on Korean forums argue over which 작가 is cooking next season. The director — the PD, short for producer-director, or 연출 in the credits — historically stood one step back. Same job a film director does, but without the spotlight.
That is changing fast. Netflix put “Directed by” on a card the whole planet could read. A generation of PDs jumped from broadcast networks to studios like Studio Dragon, where budgets got bigger and the frame got more cinematic. And global fans, trained by film-critic language, started asking a very un-Korean question: who directed this? So let us answer it.
Wait — What Even Is a “PD”?
Short detour, because it matters. In Korean TV, the person you would call a director is usually credited as a PD — a producer-director hybrid. Most of the big names started inside a broadcaster (KBS, MBC, SBS), passing a brutal annual PD recruitment exam, then spent years as assistant directors before earning a show of their own.
Then came the studio era. Around the mid-2010s, star PDs began leaving the networks for production studios — Studio Dragon most famously — chasing bigger budgets and creative freedom. That migration is the quiet backstory to almost every glossy K-drama you have binged since 2016. The look got more expensive because the directors finally had room to spend.
Lee Eung-bok — The Man Who Makes K-Drama Look Like a Movie
If one director defines the modern blockbuster K-drama, it is Lee Eung-bok. He came up through KBS as a 28th-recruit PD, then moved to Studio Dragon — and the hits are almost unfair: Descendants of the Sun (2016), Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (you know it as Goblin, 2016–17), Mr. Sunshine (2018), and Netflix’s Sweet Home (2020).
His signature? Scale. Slow snowfall. Candlelit interiors. Period war sequences shot like feature films. When Goblin steps out and the buckwheat flowers bloom, that is Lee Eung-bok deciding you should gasp. He also happens to be Kim Eun-sook’s most frequent partner — the writer-director duo behind some of the most-watched romances on Earth. Which brings up the real secret of K-drama: it is rarely one genius. It is a pairing.
Kim Won-seok — The World-Builder
If Lee Eung-bok makes it grand, Kim Won-seok makes it real. His resume is a murderers’ row of prestige TV: Misaeng: Incomplete Life (2014), the time-bending crime drama Signal (2016), and the aching, beautiful My Mister (2018).
He won Best Director at the Baeksang Arts Awards for Misaeng and again picked up top director honors for My Mister. His gift is texture — the grey office towers of Misaeng, the tired streets of My Mister, worlds so lived-in you can smell the instant coffee. He later left Studio Dragon for Baram Pictures, but the fingerprint stays the same: restraint over spectacle, and characters that feel like people you have actually met.
Ahn Gil-ho — The Master of Dread
Some directors make you cry. Ahn Gil-ho makes you hold your breath. He directed Stranger (also called Forest of Secrets, 2017) — which the New York Times named one of the best shows of that year and which took the Baeksang Grand Prize — plus Memories of the Alhambra, Watcher, and the revenge phenomenon The Glory (2022–23).
Cold precision is his whole language. Long, controlled silences. Faces held a beat too long. In The Glory, reuniting with writer Kim Eun-sook, he turned a bullying-revenge story into something that felt almost surgical — every frame a scalpel. If you have ever paused a K-drama just to breathe, there is a good chance Ahn Gil-ho did that to you on purpose.
Kim Hee-won — The Director Fans Started Requesting by Name
Here is the rare one: a director global fans actually learned to name — and a woman in a field long dominated by men. Kim Hee-won made her directing debut with Fated to Love You (2014), then delivered a run that made her a brand: Vincenzo (2021), Little Women (2022), and co-directing the mega-hit Queen of Tears (2024) with Jang Young-woo.
Vincenzo earned her a Best Director nomination at the Baeksang Arts Awards, and you can see why — she swings from operatic comedy to genuine menace without dropping a beat. Little Women is basically a painting that happens to move. Somewhere around 2022, K-drama fans on Reddit and X started doing something new: recognizing her style before they even checked who directed it. For a K-drama PD, that is arrival.
Three More Names Worth Memorizing
Shin Won-ho — the warmth machine. The Reply series (1997, 1994, 1988), Prison Playbook, Hospital Playlist. Nobody stages friendship, family, and first love quite like him. Usually paired with writer Lee Woo-jung — another duo, see the pattern?
Hwang Dong-hyuk — the film director who wrote and directed Squid Game single-handedly, and in doing so became the clearest example of a Korean director turning into a global auteur name. When a director writes and directs, Korea calls that rare. The world calls it Oscar season.
Ahn Pan-seok — the veteran’s veteran. Secret Love Affair, A Wife’s Credentials, Something in the Rain. A master of framing and light who tailors his whole visual style to each show. Ask a Korean drama nerd about “good 연출” and his name comes up within a minute.
The Netflix Effect: When Directors Got Their Names on the Poster
For decades, a Korean drama director was a professional, not a personality. Then streaming flattened the whole world onto one interface. Suddenly a viewer in São Paulo, Manila, or Ohio saw the exact same “A Netflix Series” card as a viewer in Seoul — and the platform’s design language treats each title like a film, complete with a director credit front and center.
Add the halo of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite sweep and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game, and “Korean director” became a genre of prestige on its own. Directors started giving interviews to Western outlets. Their names started trending. The job did not change — the spotlight did. And once a director can open a show on reputation alone, the whole industry starts treating them like authors, not staff.
A Fan’s Field Guide: How to Spot a Director
Want to actually see this stuff on your next binge? Three quick tells. First, light: is the show warm and candle-glowy (Lee Eung-bok) or cold and clinical (Ahn Gil-ho)? Second, silence: does the camera linger on a face after the line ends? That pause is a directing choice, not an accident. Third, space: notice how full or empty the frame is — a lonely wide shot hits different from a crowded close-up, and a good PD chooses on purpose.
Do this once and you cannot un-see it. You will start clocking the “연출” the way Korean fans do — and arguing about it just as loudly.
Korean viewers still lead with the writer — but director appreciation is climbing. On communities like TheQoo and Nate Pann, “연출이 좋다” (the directing is good) is real praise, and fans dissect pacing, camera work, and lighting shot by shot. The PD is finally getting talked about.
International fans arrived already fluent in “director as author” — a film-critic reflex, supercharged by Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar run and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game. So they applied movie language to TV and started hunting down director credits the way Korea hunts down writers.
Same shows, two vocabularies. Korea says “whose script is this?” The world says “who shot this?” The funny part: they are slowly meeting in the middle. And the real answer to both questions is usually a duo — a writer and a director who trust each other enough to build a world together.
Why It Matters
As K-drama graduates into global prestige TV, its directors are collecting film-level respect — festival invites, auteur profiles, name-above-the-title billing. But knowing the PDs also changes how you watch. Once you can feel Lee Eung-bok’s snow, Kim Won-seok’s quiet, or Ahn Gil-ho’s dread, you stop watching plots and start watching choices. That is the upgrade.
The Writer-Director Duos That Actually Run K-Drama
Once you accept that K-drama is a two-person art, the whole landscape reorganizes itself around partnerships. These are not one-offs — they are creative marriages that keep producing hits precisely because the pair have learned each other’s instincts.
Kim Eun-sook × Lee Eung-bok gave us Descendants of the Sun, Goblin, and Mr. Sunshine — lush, sweeping, unapologetically romantic. Then Kim Eun-sook × Ahn Gil-ho flipped the mood entirely for The Glory, proving a great writer sounds completely different in different hands. Park Jae-beom × Kim Hee-won built the tone-juggling madness of Vincenzo. And Lee Woo-jung × Shin Won-ho turned nostalgia into a national pastime with the Reply series and Hospital Playlist.
So next time you love a show, do not just ask who wrote it. Ask who they made it with. That answer tells you more about why it works than any plot summary ever could.
FAQ
Who is more important in a K-drama, the writer or the director?
In Korea, tradition says the writer. In practice, the best shows come from a tight writer-director pairing — Kim Eun-sook with Lee Eung-bok or Ahn Gil-ho, Park Jae-beom with Kim Hee-won. Neither wins alone.
Who directed Goblin, The Glory, and Squid Game?
Goblin — Lee Eung-bok. The Glory — Ahn Gil-ho. Squid Game — Hwang Dong-hyuk, who also wrote it.
Are there famous female K-drama directors?
Yes — Kim Hee-won is the standout, with Vincenzo, Little Women, and Queen of Tears, and she is one of the few directors global fans recognize by style.
Lee Eung-bok — Descendants of the Sun, Goblin, Mr. Sunshine, Sweet Home
Kim Won-seok — Misaeng, Signal, My Mister
Ahn Gil-ho — Stranger, Memories of the Alhambra, The Glory
Kim Hee-won — Vincenzo, Little Women, Queen of Tears
Shin Won-ho — Reply series, Hospital Playlist
Hwang Dong-hyuk — Squid Game (wrote + directed)
I spent years crediting writers for everything — because that is how I grew up watching, reading the Korean coverage. Then I rewatched Goblin on mute one night, just the images, and it hit me: half of what I loved was never on the page. It was a PD making a thousand quiet decisions. Learn these names. Your next rewatch gets twice as deep. And your favorite show? It was always two people, not one.
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