When Netflix premiered Squid Game in September 2021, it wasn’t expecting the South Korean series to become a global juggernaut.

“Our north star is making sure we please the local audience and become a cultural zeitgeist in that local market,” the show’s commissioner, Minyoung Kim, told Variety recently. She was hired by Netflix in 2016 as the streamer adapted its strategy in a bid to create locally successful stories that might then appeal worldwide.

The story of Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), who willingly enters a competition of children’s games to win a life-altering amount of money, only to realise that losing means instant death, became Netflix’s most streamed series ever. Incredibly, more than 1.65 billion hours of Squid Game were watched in the first month alone, according to Netflix.

Squid Game costumes became the Halloween outfit of the year, and the series won Emmy and Screen Actors Guild awards traditionally given to English language shows. It also led to Studio Lambert’s spin-off, Squid Game: The Challenge. As the drama draws to a close with a third and final series, what does the phenomenon tell us about how local shows gain global traction?

For producers, it’s a multimillion-pound question. The first series of Squid Game reportedly cost $21.4m to produce and was worth almost $900m in “impact value”, a Netflix internal metric, according to Bloomberg.

"So viewers in Nebraska wouldn't understand? Broadcasters have worked out that it doesn't matter"

The good news for the UK television industry is that we have a head-start at appealing beyond English-speaking countries. Tom Harrington, Head of Television at Enders Analysis, says: “English-language programming exports better than any other language. And, on Netflix in 2024, UK content performed better than US content for the first time. Perhaps it’s because the actors are now more famous internationally, or maybe they make better-looking shows. Whatever it is, it’s working.”

As Netflix’s Kim suggests, a show that travels is likely to have universal emotional appeal. With Squid Game, we rooted for the down-and-out characters who were in such dire straits that they bet their lives on getting rich. We saw how co-operation helped and selfishness hindered, and the high stakes kept us gripped. Andy Harries, CEO of Left Bank Picture, says: “It was an original, fresh idea with lots of political overtones, and a great story.”

Harries was executive producer of The Crown, Netflix’s first UK original series, and that, too, had a relatable premise. “The central theme is a family in crisis, which is universal,” he says. “Succession and The Crown are both shows about families. The dynamics of a family are understood everywhere. It’s also why Adolescence has done so well in America. In many senses, it’s uniquely British, but its themes, like the influence of the internet on kids, are global.”

Once a universal story is found, it’s then about the quality of the storytelling. It often helps if there’s a single voice in the form of a showrunner; Squid Game was created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk.

Harries says: “There’s often an auteur – someone with passion, vision and an original voice. The shows that work well are noisy. They need to have something that makes people go: ‘Have you seen that show!’”

Robert Franke, Vice-President of Drama at ZDF Studios in Germany, agrees. “Streaming platforms have lots of multimillion-dollar productions with big stars, but if the production is mediocre, it won’t [lead to] water-cooler talk. Only the best break out.”

 Franke cites two routes to international success: “Sometimes it’s from leftfield. Squid Game was an idea that was floating around the Korean industry for many years. Then Netflix jumped on it, and it turned out to be a great show because it’s a cool premise and extremely well-made.

“It landed at exactly the right moment. In the pandemic, people had time, were open to discovery, and were actively looking for content that broke the mould. La Casa de Papel (Money Heist, the Spanish crime drama bought by Netflix in 2017) also gained global fame under similar conditions.”

The other route is ensuring it is well-supported. Franke says: “I worked on The Swarm [a sci-fi show estimated to have cost €40m], continental Europe’s most expensive show in a long time, and that was a manufactured success. It came to fruition because a bunch of European players [including ZDF, France Télévisions and Italy’s RAI] wanted to do something together, so they bundled their resources, and it worked.”

It helps that even English-speaking viewers have become more used to watching shows with subtitles, and an often overlooked factor is the economic ecosystem that allows local shows to break through globally. For years, South Korea “has been exceptionally deliberate in developing its cultural industries as a core pillar of national soft power”, explains Franke. “Through institutions like Kocca [the Korea Creative Content Agency], the country has invested hundreds of millions of dollars annually into building out its creative ecosystem. This is not just funding content but also supporting talent development, cross-media IP creation, export infrastructure, international partnerships and global promotional platforms. The aim wasn’t just to make good shows but to ensure that Korean cultural content could travel and be seen. It’s not why Squid Game was a success but it was a factor.” 

There are some parallels with Scandi noir, the crime drama sub-genre that emerged in 2007 with The Killing, which set a new bar for local shows gaining traction internationally. While an element of serendipity was involved, The Killing, which reached the UK in 2011, had solid backing; it was a co-production between DR and ZDF Enterprises, for starters. “It also hit the zeitgeist,” says Franke. I don’t think it would work in 2025 because the zeitgeist is now lighter and more escapist.”

While Scandi noir’s success relied on many individual broadcasters taking a punt – for example, the BBC showing The Bridge in 2012 was critical to its international success – it helps the current state of play that streamers like Netflix are global distributors too.

Harrington says: “They’re able to release everything simultaneously and corral marketing efforts to a point where you get these international waves of interest. It’s an amplification that’s never happened before. We’re starting to get Netflix originals like Baby Reindeer and Adolescence that could have been on PSBs. They contain location-­specific references that a person who lives in Nebraska wouldn’t understand. Broadcasters have worked out that it doesn’t matter. The main thing is what the show is about.”

Still, even though we can unpick the contributing factors that make a show resonate internationally, every project remains a gamble. Franke concludes: “If you look at a show and try to replicate what has been done before, you most likely fail for the simple reason that the social, political and demographic environment has changed.There’s no magic playbook. You can’t orientate yourself around something like Squid Game to be successful. Ultimately, it’s about the stars aligning.”