Netflix saved the best for last during this year’s Geeked Week celebration, the streaming giant’s annual event during which it promotes upcoming content by releasing trailers and sharing sneak peeks of some of its most highly anticipated titles. Among the teasers that it dropped tonight was the first for Squid Game Season 2, giving fans, at last, the first look at a new season of the biggest Netflix show of all time — albeit one that became a global sensation almost three years ago now, back in 2021.
“We’re ready to start the game,” a voice says in Korean in the teaser, which you can check out below. In it, a very tense Seong Gi-hun is wearing a green tracksuit emblazoned with his old number — once again, he’s Player 456.
“Seong Gi-hun, who vowed revenge at the end of season one, returns and joins the game again,” Squid Game executive producer, writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote in an open letter about where Squid Game will go next. “Will he succeed in getting his revenge? Front Man doesn’t seem to be an easy opponent this time either. The fierce clash between their two worlds will continue into the series finale in season three, which will be brought to you next year.”
It’s worth stopping to appreciate, meanwhile, just how extraordinary it is that we’re getting a new season of the hit series at all.
That’s because of something K-drama fans are well aware of — it’s somewhat uncommon for a show in this genre to get a second season, no matter how good it is, although that’s slowly beginning to change. Squid Game, however, is in a class of its own; it’s ending with an unprecedented third season. As much K-drama as I watch, primarily on Netflix, I’m hard-pressed to name a single K-drama that’s gotten a third season (someone, please let me know which three-season titles I might be overlooking!).
Netflix’s Crash Landing on You is certainly regarded as one of the best K-dramas of all time, but it ended on a heartbreaking cliffhanger that still pains me to this day. And despite the uproar from fans both when it ended and from those who’ve discovered it since then and likewise been crushed, Netflix has remained resolute up to this point: That one glorious season is all we’re getting.
I could point to so many other Netflix K-dramas that I would literally pay money to see extended. Vincenzo and Itaewon Class spring immediately to mind. “The thing that got me hooked (on) Kdramas,” a K-drama fan wrote in a Reddit thread about K-dramas and second seasons, “was that they were one and done. No unnecessarily dragging the plot out for God knows how many seasons even when the original plot was barely enough for one season. No canceling the series suddenly because nobody is watching it even though there are many plot points unresolved yet.”
Indeed, Squid Game — which racked up more than 2.2 billion hours viewed globally in its first three months, more than any other Netflix title — broke the mold, in more ways than one.
