‘Extraordinary Attorney Woo’ Ratings Spike Following Netflix Global Success
Legal drama “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” is living up to its name following its international success on Netflix.
Domestic Korean audiences for the series have spiked, in line with its streaming growth.
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The drama stars Park Eun Bin as a young female lawyer with Asperger’s syndrome who, thanks to her powerhouse 164 IQ, exceptional memory and creative thinking processes, graduates top of her class. When she joins a major law firm, she uses her particular skills to deliver results that others would not be able to achieve. But she still struggles with social interactions.
Already the top non-English-language series globally on Netflix for the past two weeks, the show claimed a 13.1% share of the Korean TV audience last Thursday, halfway through its 16-episode run. That was a nationwide audience of 3.4 million viewers, according to data from Nielsen Korea, cited by Content Asia. The season’s production budget is reported to be in the region of KRW20 billion ($15 million).
Between July 11-17, the series ranked No. 1 on Netflix for the second consecutive week, logging 45.58 million hours of viewing worldwide. The total was almost double the viewing time of the second most popular non-English show on the platform, Season 1 of “The Longest Night” (24.2 million hours).
“Extraordinary Attorney Woo” has scored particularly well in East Asia: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
In Korea, the show plays on Skylife’s ENA, a drama and general entertainment channel that was previously called Skydrama. Episodes are released in primetime on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and continue until Aug. 18.
Audiences have grown strongly and steadily from the show’s modest debut, on June 29, when the rating agency calculated just 400,000 viewers and a 0.95% share. The second episode almost doubled those numbers with a 1.81% share.
The third episode, six days later, was the highest-scoring show of the evening, with a reported nationwide rating of 4.03%. According to local media, the 13%-plus score achieved on Thursday is ENA’s highest-ever rating.
Production company AStory is reported to have received at least one offer for a U.S. remake. Given the obvious parallel with “The Good Doctor,” a 2013 Korean Broadcasting System drama about a junior hospital doctor with autism, which is now in its sixth season in the U.S. on ABC (and Netflix in some markets), that seems like an obvious outcome.
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