Korean BL Dramas: The Complete List (2026)

Korean BL spans the Love Class trilogy, Check In to You, The Lie We Lived In, Blossom Campus and both source works behind the Thai Payback. The full list sits below, newest first. Korean BL is the fastest-changing corner of the genre, so this page is maintained rather than archived.

How Korean BL got here, in six years

Korean BL has a clear starting line. Where Your Eyes Linger ran eight episodes from 22 May to 12 June 2020, produced by W-STORY and Energedic Company, and was Korea’s first BL drama. A director’s cut followed on 16 July 2020 across Netflix, Wavve, TVING and Naver TV. That release pattern set the template for almost everything that came after: a short web drama first, a wider platform pickup second.

Thailand had been producing BL at scale since the mid-2010s by then. Korea arrived late, and it arrived through a different door. Thai BL grew out of television studios with in-house talent pipelines, most visibly GMMTV, which develops actors as long-term assets and pairs them across multiple series. Korean BL grew out of web-drama production houses and webtoon publishers, which meant shorter formats, smaller casts, and a much tighter link between a series and the comic or novel it came from.

The consequence is a genuinely different viewing experience. Neither model is better. They are answers to different questions about how the money comes back, and the four practical differences that follow from that are set out further down this page.

What the list below contains

Two of the entries are not dramas: the Payback manhwa and the Payback novel are the Korean source works that the 2026 Thai series adapts, and they sit here because they are Korean BL, not because they are television. Underneath the list you will find the complete table version, the platform map covering Netflix, Wavve, Heavenly, Rakuten Viki and GagaOOLala, a cast index of the Korean BL actors who front these series, and the four new Korean BL titles licensed for release through 2026.

This Korean BL dramas list covers South Korean BL dramas and the source works behind them. It is a small shelf, and it is better to say so than to pad it. The full list, the platform map, the cast index and the four new Korean BL series arriving through 2026 follow.

The complete Korean BL dramas list

The Korean shelf is small next to Thailand’s or Japan’s. That reflects how much BL each country has produced and how much of it has an official English-language release, which is the only kind worth pointing readers toward.

The last two are Korean print and digital works rather than dramas, and they are here because they are the origin of a story that reached most international viewers through a Thai television adaptation in 2026. That point is worth sitting with. The single most visible Korean BL story of 2026 was not a Korean drama. samK wrote the novel in 2010 and self-published it for twelve years. Fujoking adapted it into a 95-chapter webtoon that ran on Bomtoon from 2021 to 2025. The live-action version was Thai, made in Bangkok, with the Korean publisher Kidari Studio credited as a production partner. Korea now exports source material as readily as it exports finished shows, and any list that counts only Korean-made dramas will understate the country’s actual footprint in the genre. The novel, the webtoon and the 2026 live action version are covered together in the guide to the Payback source works.

Popular Korean BL series, and where to start

If you are new to the category, three of the six dramas above do most of the introducing.

Love Class is the longest-running Korean BL property anywhere. It is an anthology rather than a serial: three seasons across 2022, 2023 and 2026, a new cast and a new story each time, and no watch order to get wrong. No other Korean BL franchise has reached a third season. The full cast of all three seasons, the runtime arithmetic and every legal streaming route are set out on the dedicated page, Love Class: all three seasons explained.

The Lie We Lived In is the one title here that is not a campus romance. Directed by Son Tae-gyeom, it is an eight-episode noir in which a contract killer ends up trapped in a house with the man he was sent to kill. Episodes run 20 to 24 minutes, two a week, from June 5 to June 26, 2026 on Wavve and Rakuten Viki. Kim Seung-beom plays a dual role.

Blossom Campus comes from STRONGBERRY, the studio behind Long Time No See and Where Your Eyes Linger, which makes it the closest thing here to a house style. Six episodes of roughly 25 minutes each dropped together on Heavenly on May 16, 2024.

Korean BL on Netflix, Wavve and every other platform

Where to watch is the practical problem that frustrates international viewers most. Thai BL has broad licensed distribution through iQIYI, WeTV, Viu, GagaOOLala and YouTube. Korean BL is often licensed for Korea first, with international rights following later or not at all. A Korean BL title with no international licence is not being withheld from you. It has not been sold yet.

Four names come up constantly and they do four different jobs. Netflix carries Korean BL only occasionally, which is why “Netflix Korean BL” returns so few real answers: the platform picks up a title now and then rather than commissioning the category. Wavve is the mainstream domestic OTT, formed when Korean regulators approved a four-way merger in 2019 between SK Telecom’s Oksusu and the terrestrial broadcasters’ Pooq service; when a Korean BL title reaches Wavve, that is the genre being treated as ordinary programming. Heavenly is the opposite proposition, a Korean OTT built specifically for BL and GL, launched February 25, 2022 and operated from Seoul on a two-track model of virtual currency plus monthly membership. Rakuten Viki and GagaOOLala are where most international viewers will actually find these shows.

New Korean BL series arriving in 2026

The gap between the Korean shelf and the real size of Korean BL is closing, and the reason is corporate rather than creative. In March 2026 KT Studio Genie announced a licensing arrangement with production house Oak Company covering four BL dramas scheduled to release sequentially across 2026.

Oak Company’s earlier title Thunderclouds, Wind, and Rain reached Wavve and led to an Asia fan meeting tour, which is the kind of downstream revenue that persuades a distributor to commit to a slate rather than a pilot. A telecoms distributor signing four BL titles in one announcement is a structural signal, not a one-off. Read alongside Heavenly’s growth since 2022, the picture is of a category acquiring infrastructure. Korean BL spent 2020 to 2023 proving that a domestic audience existed. It is spending 2025 and 2026 proving that the audience can be served through the same distribution machinery that carries mainstream drama.

Korean BL actors in these series

Korean productions cast per project rather than developing a pairing across several shows, so a Korean BL couple name is less likely to survive past its own series. That makes the cast index below more useful than a ship list: these are the actors who carry the six dramas above, and several are idols in working groups. The Love Class rows list leads only. All 21 credited performers across the three seasons, with characters and roles, are on the Love Class page.

Is there a Korean BL movie list?

There is no Korean BL movie list to give, because Korean BL so far means web dramas, manhwa and novels. Korean BL grew out of web-drama production houses and webtoon publishers rather than film studios, so the category’s centre of gravity sits at six to ten short episodes rather than a ninety-minute feature. Where a Korean BL story does get a cinema-scale treatment, it usually arrives as a director’s cut of an existing web drama assembled for a festival or a platform premiere, not as a standalone film. If you are searching for a Korean BL movie list and finding thin results, that is why.

How South Korean BL drama differs from Thai BL

If you have watched a great deal of Thai BL and are moving across for the first time, four adjustments help.

• Episode length. A Korean BL episode usually runs 15 to 30 minutes against a Thai one at 40 to 60. It is not a short version of the Thai format. It is built differently, with fewer subplots and less time spent on the friend group around the leads. If a Korean series feels sparse in episode one, that is the format rather than a budget problem.
• Release rhythm. Weekly Thai broadcast creates a seven-day fandom cycle: clips, reaction threads, trending hashtags, a fan meeting announcement. Korean web drama releases are often compressed or dropped as a block, which produces a much quieter public conversation around a show that may be just as widely watched.
• Endings. Korean BL adapts finished source material and tends to stop where the source stops, including when the source stops somewhere uncomfortable. Thai BL has a stronger commercial incentive to deliver reunion and a possible second season. Neither approach is more honest; they are responses to different funding structures.
• Casting logic. Thai BL builds around a named pair who work together across projects and carry a fandom between series. Korean productions more often cast per project. That single difference is what separates the two in franchise terms.

Last updated: August 15, 2026.

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