While Netflix is certainly no stranger to canceling shows, it has an especially cruel fate for fans of certain shows: from time to time, it'll "ghost cancel" shows, without letting fans know that no new seasons are in development. And after several years, fans of one of Netflix's big hits are starting to worry that their favorite show has suffered the same fate.
This show is Kingdom, which today celebrates the fifth anniversary of its premiere. Season 1 landed on the streamer on January 25, 2019, marking the first Netflix Original produced in South Korea. A second season arrived a year later in March 2020, and just over a year after that, a feature-length special Ashin of the North arrived. Since then... silence.
Kingdom is set in 1500s Joseon (now Korea), and it depicts the outbreak and containment of a zombie virus that ravages part of the nation. We follow Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ju Ji-hoon) as he rushes to action to investigate and stop the plague, along with his bodyguard Mu-yeong (Kim Sang-ho), a physician who survived the initial outbreak named Seo-bi (Bae Doona), a tiger hunter who has ties to the plague's past called Yeong-shin (Kim Sung-kyu) and a cowardly magistrate who loses his land, but slowly learns to fend for himself more called Cho Beom-pal (Jeon Seok-ho).
At the same time, we follow the machinations of people in Joseon's court as they try to watch their back instead of saving the country, with the king mysteriously absent and Queen Consort Cho (Kim Hye-jun) spending more time trying to stop other people taking the throne from her, than ensuring the zombies don't take it instead!
Despite having zombies in it, the show is best compared to Game of Thrones: it has lots of horror-action but balances it off with court intrigue plots, and in-fighting amongst humans who should be allies in the face of the world's end. In fact, with only 13 45-minute episodes compared to GoT's 73 hour-long ones, it's a much more enjoyable show for people who want fast-paced television. The main difference is that while all of GoT's characters are morally gray, Kingdom makes an exception for its main character, so we've got a real hero to root for as the drama unfolds.
And what drama it is: despite a slightly slow start, Kingdom hits the gas mid-way through the first season and keeps its foot on the pedal throughout. Every episode of season 2 contains more exciting action, bigger setpieces, more dramatic reveals and backstabs, than an entire finale in most other legacy TV series.
The final episode of Kingdom showed the kingdom putting an end to the zombie virus, but it still set up a third season. In the epilogue Lee Chang, Seo-bi and Yeong-shin travel north toward China, to discover the source of the zombie virus, and there meet the mysterious character Ashin. The special Ashin of the North serves as a prequel setting up this character in greater detail, and between the epilogue and the special, Ashin is set up as a poweful villain for future seasons of Kingdom...
No more Kingdom
... seasons that have yet to materialize, several years down the line.
It's a topic that Netflix itself has kept tight-lipped about, neither confirming future series nor that the show has been canceled. It's stuck in limbo, though some of the show's talent has spoken up on the topic.
Kingdom's creator and writer Kim Eun-hee said in a Hollywood Reporter interview that "I would love to see it develop even up to season 10" if viewers were interested, and Ashin of the North director Kim Seong-hun told Philstar that some of the creative decisions in the special were done "in order to leap to Season 3". That was, I must reiterate, several years ago.
Audiences turned out in droves to watch Kingdom too. After the first season, Netflix mentioned in a newsroom post that the series "has again become one of the Top 10 titles in almost every Asian country"
The streamer's public Top 10 ranking doesn't go back far enough to see just how popular the main series was, though Ashin of the North made the cut. That special debuted as the streamers' second most popular non-English-language movie on the week of its release, with over 16 million hours viewed in its first week, and it was on the Top 10 list for over a month.
The virus that got in the way
There are many theories as to why Netflix has hit the brakes on Kingdom season 3, and the most convincing comes from Eun-hee in the aforementioned Hollywood Reporter article.
You see, Kingdom season 2 brought back the zombie virus show on March 13, 2020. If you cast your mind back to that month, the World Health Organization officially declared a state of pandemic for Covid 19 only two days prior to the show's return.
Understandably, a story about a virus threatening humanity may now hit a little close to home, though Eun-hee stated "I tried to put more focus on the story of the people that respond to it rather than the plague itself". Either way, it's understandable that Netflix wouldn't want to leap into production during or immediately after such a worldwide event.
With the Covid-19 delay on production, it's possible that talent's schedules haven't been able to line up for production. Eun-hee quickly moved on to new TV shows and a movie while stars like Ju Ji-hoon have also been busy with new credits. That's doubly true for Bae Doona who, since Kingdom's hiatus, has been in movies like the lovely Korean indie hit Broker and the massive Netflix movie duology Rebel Moon parts 1 and 2.
Fans need more!
Despite the almost utter lack of news on the state of Kingdom season 3, fans remain desperate for any tidbit of information on whether Netflix will bring back the show.
I'm one of those fans: I consider Kingdom the best drama show I've ever seen, not just on Netflix but overall. It's the only series for which I'll regularly search for news of updates or new seasons — though next time I search, I imagine the only new coverage will be this article!
I'm not alone either. X (formerly Twitter) hosts a drip feed of posts of fans pleading for the return of the popular program, especially from accounts appealing to the series' actors for more information.
Netflix churns out big-budget and genre Korean shows and movies at an eye-watering pace, especially after the success of Squid Game showed the appetite for content from the country. In the last few months alone we've had Badland Hunters, Gyeongseong Creature, Black Knight, Song of the Bandits, Sweet Home season 2, the list goes on.
So once again I ask, where's Kingdom season 3 in all of this? There's clearly an appetite for it, both from the creative team and the fans, and with Covid-19 (mostly) in the rear-view mirror, there are few reasons to wait. None of those other shows have quite hit that Kingdom itch in combining large-scale plots with exciting action and drama, and for that matter it doesn't seem like many shows even try to!
Hopefully, fans of the show will soon get news of the return of this beloved thriller. Admittedly, I've been telling myself that line for several years now, but you never know!
