K-Drama History Part 9: The Award Season Breakthrough — How Squid Game Made Korean TV an Emmy Powerhouse
π· Photo: Netflix / Squid Game · 2021–2025
Let's be honest — for the longest time, "prestige TV award" basically meant English-language, Western-made, and nothing else. Then a Korean survival drama about people in tracksuits playing children's games showed up on Netflix and broke that entire assumption in about a year. This is Part 9 of our K-Drama History series, and it's about the moment K-drama stopped being "foreign content with subtitles" to Western award bodies and started being a legitimate Emmy contender.
Setting the Stage: Parasite Broke the Film Wall First
To really get why the Squid Game Emmys hit so hard, you have to rewind two years earlier to Parasite. Bong Joon-ho's film won Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars — the first non-English-language film to ever do it — and it cracked something open in how Western award bodies looked at Korean storytelling. But Parasite was film. Television academies are a completely different, much slower-moving institution, and TV categories had never seriously considered a Korean series for anything beyond niche international slots. Squid Game had to prove the same argument all over again, from scratch, in a totally different voting body.
September 2021: A Show Nobody Expected to Matter This Much
Squid Game dropped on Netflix on September 17, 2021, and within 28 days it had racked up 1.65 billion viewing hours and reached 111 million accounts — the fastest a Netflix series had ever hit 100 million viewers. That alone would've been a huge story. Nobody was thinking about the Emmys yet. Korean shows just didn't get nominated in major categories. That was the unspoken rule.
The 74th Emmys: Six Wins, and a Wall Came Down
Then September 2022 happened. Squid Game walked into the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards with 14 nominations — the most any non-English series had ever received — and walked out with six wins. Hwang Dong-hyuk won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, becoming the first Asian person ever to win that award. Lee Jung-jae won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, the first Asian actor to win in that category, period. Squid Game became the first non-English-language series to win at the Emmys, full stop. Not "win in a foreign-language category." Win. Outright.
Lee You-mi picked up a Creative Arts Emmy for Guest Actress, making her the first South Korean actress to win in that category and the first actor to win it for a fully non-English performance. The show also became the first non-English series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series itself — the biggest category at the ceremony.
It Didn't Stop There: SAG, Golden Globes, Critics' Choice
The Emmys were just the opening move. Squid Game picked up four SAG Award nominations, becoming the first non-English series ever nominated for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series — and then won it, making it the first non-English-language show to win at the SAG Awards at all. Lee Jung-jae became the first male actor of Asian and Korean descent to win an individual SAG Award for television, and Jung Ho-yeon became the second. At the Golden Globes, O Yeong-su's supporting actor win made him the first Korean-born actor to take home a Golden Globe. By the time Season 2 wrapped its awards run in late 2025, the franchise had racked up 85 total nominations and 54 wins across every major Western ceremony.
π· Photo: Korean content on the global awards stage · 2026
Why the Nominations Themselves Made History (Even Before Any Wins)
Here's a detail that gets lost once you focus only on the trophies: the show's producers, Hwang Dong-hyuk and Kim Ji-yeon, became the smallest producing team ever nominated for a drama series since "Murder, She Wrote" in 1987. Every single Korean actor nominated — Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Jung Ho-yeon, Oh Young-soo, Lee You-mi — was the first native Korean actor ever nominated in their specific category. The nominations alone rewrote categories that had existed for decades without a single Korean-language performance in them.
The Ripple Effect: Other K-Dramas Riding the Same Wave
Squid Game wasn't operating alone for long. "The Glory" made waves at international press circuits and got Song Hye-kyo serious awards-season buzz outside Korea. "Kingdom" and "Sweet Home" had already primed Western horror audiences for Korean genre television before Squid Game hit. After the 2022 Emmys, shows like "Hellbound," "All of Us Are Dead," and later "The Uncanny Counter" all got significantly bigger international marketing pushes than they would've gotten pre-Squid Game. Awards momentum isn't just about the one show that wins — it's about every show that gets greenlit or promoted differently because that win happened.
Netflix's own internal strategy shifted too. Korean content spending went from "cheap international library filler" to a dedicated, heavily marketed vertical with its own award-season campaigns, FYC events, and trade press push — the same treatment previously reserved almost exclusively for English-language prestige dramas.
π°π· THE KOREAN SIDE
On Korean entertainment forums, the reaction to the Emmy sweep wasn't really about the awards themselves — it was about validation for an industry that felt permanently boxed into the "foreign film" categories. A widely shared Nate Pann comment at the time read roughly, "We've been making shows this good for years, the West just wasn't watching before Netflix put it in front of them." There's also a strong thread of pride specifically around Hwang Dong-hyuk directing AND writing based on his own decade-old economic struggles — Korean audiences saw the win as personal as much as industry-wide.
π THE GLOBAL SIDE
Global audiences, meanwhile, treated the Emmy wins as permission to take K-drama seriously as a category, not just a Netflix curiosity. Reddit threads on r/kdrama exploded with recommendations lists framed almost apologetically — "if you only know Squid Game, here's what else you've been missing." International press coverage leaned hard into the "historic first" angle: first non-English drama series nominee, first Korean director to win, first Asian lead actor to win. The framing was firsts, firsts, firsts.
π THE GAP
The gap here is basically insider pride versus outsider discovery. Korean audiences had already decided K-drama was world-class; the Emmys just forced the rest of the world to catch up on paper. Global audiences experienced it as a genuine discovery moment — like they were watching a door open in real time. Neither reaction is wrong, they're just running on completely different timelines of when they actually started paying attention.
Why This Matters
Once Squid Game proved a Korean series could win Best Drama-tier categories at the Emmys, every major streamer changed how it marketed Korean content. Netflix stopped treating K-drama as a niche international library tab and started campaigning shows for major awards seasons on purpose. It also gave Korean directors and actors leverage they didn't have before — award recognition translates directly into bigger budgets, more creative control, and Hollywood crossover offers. Season 2 got zero Emmy nominations in 2025, which honestly says as much as the wins did: the bar Squid Game itself set became the new baseline everyone gets measured against, including Squid Game.
FAQ
Did Squid Game win the actual Outstanding Drama Series Emmy?
No — it was nominated (a first for a non-English series) but the wins came in directing, lead actor, and several Creative Arts categories, not the top Drama Series prize itself.
How many total awards has Squid Game won as of now?
As of late 2025, the franchise had accumulated roughly 85 nominations and 54 wins across Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG, and Critics' Choice ceremonies combined.
Why did Season 2 get no Emmy nominations?
Critical reception for Seasons 2 and 3 was generally positive but considered weaker than the original, and competition in the drama categories was fierce that year — it still won at the Critics' Choice and Gold Derby TV Awards.
• Squid Game S1 Emmy haul: 14 nominations, 6 wins (2022)
• Hwang Dong-hyuk: first Asian person to win Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series
• Lee Jung-jae: first Asian actor to win Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
• Franchise total (through 2025): 85 nominations, 54 wins across major ceremonies
π¬ Jamie's Take:
"I remember watching the Emmy broadcast live and audibly gasping when Lee Jung-jae's name got called. It wasn't just a K-drama win, it felt like watching an entire industry get let into a room it had been standing outside of for decades. Everything from The Glory to Squid Game Season 2 to whatever's dropping on Netflix this month exists inside the door that moment kicked open."
What's Airing Right Now
Speaking of that open door — Netflix's Korean slate this month is proof the momentum never stopped. "The East Palace," a historical fantasy-horror starring Nam Joo-hyuk, hits Netflix July 17, and Park Eun-bin's new occult rom-com "Spooky in Love" starts its simulcast run July 18. SBS's "Agent Kim Reactivated" is also wrapping up its Netflix run this month. None of these exist in a vacuum from what Squid Game did to the industry's international leverage.
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