Netflix’s 83% RT Crime Thriller Edged Out ‘Breaking Bad’ With Just 6 Episodes
Amanda M. Castro is a Network TV writer at Collider and a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, where she is an Associate Editor, and The U.S. Sun, where she previously served as a Senior Consumer Reporter.
She specializes in network television coverage, delivering sharp, thoughtful analysis of long-running procedural hits and ambitious new dramas across broadcast TV. At Collider, Amanda explores character arcs, storytelling trends, and the cultural impact of network series that keep audiences tuning in week after week.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Amanda is bilingual and holds a degree in Communication, Film, and Media Studies from the University of New Haven.
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Netflix has never been shy about promoting its next global hit, but Karma didn’t need much of a push. The six-episode Korean crime thriller quietly racked up 16.1 million views through June 2026, landed an 83% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and drew 12.7 million views in the first half of 2025, exceeding Breaking Bad Season 1’s 11.4 million — no small feat for a grim, morally punishing series with no obvious heroes.
Based on the Kakao webtoon by Choi Hee-seon and written and directed by Lee Il-hyung, Karma is the kind of show that rewards patience, punishes assumptions, and leaves viewers sitting with the weight of every bad decision long after the credits roll.
What Is Netflix’s 'Karma' About?
Karma opens in chaos: a severely burned man is pulled from a warehouse fire and rushed to a hospital in the fictional town of Guhoe. He survives, barely, and claims to be Park Jae-yeong — a name that visibly rattles the doctor treating him, Lee Ju-yeon (Shin Min-a). From there, the series rewinds 15 days and begins to unravel how six seemingly unrelated people became locked into a single chain of cause and effect.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
At the center is Jae-yeong (Lee Hee-joon), a factory worker buried in debt and facing a loan shark who doesn’t deal in empty threats. Desperate and cornered, he makes a choice that sets everything else in motion: arranging the death of his own father for a life insurance payout. The plan doesn’t go cleanly — nothing in Karma ever does — and the fallout spreads outward, pulling in a hitman with his own reasons for violence, a con artist couple, a panicked doctor hiding a fatal mistake, and a witness who quickly proves more dangerous than anyone realizes.
During the show, the story bounces back and forth through time and perspectives, slowly revealing how the characters' choices influence one another in the end. The stories initially progress on parallel tracks, but then converge into a single, convoluted narrative, with all the characters in the positions of victim and perpetrator.
Why 'Karma' Is Worth Watching
The appeal of Karma isn’t just its twists — though there are plenty — but the way it structures them. Lee Il-hyung tells a story that builds dramatically, letting viewers speculate before revealing the ugly truth. Viewers see the story from various angles; the motivations are placed in a new context, and events that seemed not to have an impact can be devastating.
The tone of the show lies between a crime drama and a moral play. Violence is not glorified or romanticized; it is random, horrific, and senseless. The basic theme of the show is that shortcuts affect other things, and you often do not know where they will be felt.
The actors bring this to life: Park Hae-soo was devastating as Kim Beom-jun. Lee Kwang-soo, better known for comedy roles, portrayed the character who tied a noose around himself to protect himself. As Shin Min-a has done in many of her performances, she has grounded the story's emotionality, providing it with a sense of moral gravitas without placing the values of redemption at its center.
What separates Karma from many binge-friendly thrillers is its refusal to rush resolution. Not every storyline is designed to be satisfying in the traditional sense, and not every character arc gets equal weight — a choice that has divided viewers. But that imbalance also reinforces the show’s worldview: life doesn’t distribute meaning fairly, and neither does consequence.
The series is far more interested in how people justify their worst decisions than in offering absolution. Money, pride, fear, and self-preservation drive nearly every action, and Karma never pretends those motivations are rare. Instead, it suggests they’re disturbingly ordinary — and that’s where the discomfort comes from.
Why 'Karma' Is Worth Revisiting on Netflix
Part of Karma’s success lies in timing. The growth in Netflix audiences' acceptance of hard-edged Korean thrillers means that the expectation of being unrelenting or engaging has become commonplace. Not only does the show's format allow it to be brief and intense, but it is also designed to foster discussions surrounding its conclusion (the ending begs for a conversation about what is actually just).
Reviews on social media have focused on the last few episodes, with long-running threads coming to a head, and the meaning of the title coming into painful clarity. Viewers may disagree on which characters deserved their fate, but that disagreement is precisely the point. Karma is asking viewers to sit with the aftermath.
For anyone who enjoys crime dramas that trust the audience, resist easy answers, and understand that suspense doesn’t require likable people, Karma is one of Netflix’s most compelling international releases from the past year.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.