Some dramas announce themselves with a prestige trailer and a moody logline. Our Sticky Love announced itself with a piece of candy. The Korean title translates roughly to "this yeot-like love" — yeot being the chewy traditional taffy that clings to your teeth and refuses to let go — and that stubborn, faintly ridiculous image turned out to be the most honest description of the show anyone could have written.
Netflix dropped all twelve episodes on August 7, and the series has been climbing ever since. Jung Hae-in plays Jang Tae-ha, a former youth boxing champion whose life took a detour through a criminal organization before he landed as a coach at a small-town gym. Ha Young plays Go Eun-sae, a prosecutor chasing that same syndicate who loses her memory in the middle of the pursuit. When Tae-ha finds her, he recognizes her instantly as his first love. She recognizes nothing at all. So he tells her he is her boyfriend, moves her in, and starts improvising a relationship that only one of them remembers agreeing to.
It is an outrageous premise, and the show knows it. The first episode opens closer to crime thriller than to romance, and the tonal gearshifts keep coming. Jung described the script as a page-turner that begins as a rom-com, slides into melodrama, dips into thriller and noir, then loops back to romance. On set, he joked, scenes with Ha Young felt like pure romance until she wrapped for the day — after which the whole production turned gritty. He said it felt like filming two projects at once.
For Ha Young, this is the leap. She built her reputation in supporting roles — Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Bloodhounds, The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call — and Our Sticky Love is her first time carrying a series. She framed the central dynamic simply, calling it "an anxious girlfriend meeting a grounded boyfriend who keeps her centered," and credited her co-star with steadying the harder scenes. Watching the show, you can see why the framing works: Eun-sae is the one with everything to lose, and Tae-ha is the one holding a lie together with both hands.
Why It Matters
The numbers arrived fast. According to Netflix's own Top 10 data, Our Sticky Love debuted at No. 5 among non-English shows for the week of August 3 to 9, pulling roughly 3.2 million views from a partial week of availability. It landed at No. 1 in Thailand and Vietnam and charted in the top 10 across 44 countries. By August 10, tracking site FlixPatrol had it at No. 1 in eighteen countries and inside the top 10 in eighty-one, including a No. 1 finish in Brazil and top-10 placements in Germany, Italy, Canada and the United States.
That trajectory matters because of what it says about the shape of Netflix's Korean bet. Since 2024, Korean content has been the platform's second-most-watched category behind American programming, and the company has been working through a multi-year commitment worth roughly $2.5 billion to Korean originals — a cycle scheduled to close out this year. The easy assumption was that the big returns would keep coming from prestige thrillers and survival spectacles. A rom-com about amnesia and taffy suggests the appetite is broader and stranger than that.
The production itself is a reminder that Korean television has quietly decentralized. Principal photography began in April 2025 and ran through locations in Dangjin, a coastal city in South Chungcheong Province — the Myeoncheon pond, the Sunseong cherry blossom trail, the Ami Art Museum. Director Kim Jang-han, whose credits include Do You Like Brahms? and My Demon, reunited here with writer Mo Ji-hye after their 2021 collaboration, and the two of them use that small-town geography as more than backdrop. Tae-ha's whole deception depends on a place where nobody asks too many questions.
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The Reaction
Viewers came for the couple and stayed for the whiplash. The most consistent note in early conversation was surprise at how much crime story the show is willing to carry. This is not a rom-com with a light antagonist subplot bolted on; the syndicate is a real engine, and it is anchored by Heo Sung-tae as the boss. Heo has spent years building a specific kind of screen menace — global audiences know him from Squid Game — and his presence changes the temperature of every scene he enters.
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The supporting bench is deep in a way that rewards attention. Lee Jae-won plays An Ki-jun, a neuropsychiatrist and Tae-ha's old high school classmate, which gives the amnesia plot a character who can actually interrogate it rather than just gasp at it. Kim Yeong-ok, Jeon Bae-soo, Seo Jeong-yeon, Jang Hye-jin and Cha Chung-hwa fill out the town. Lee Jun-young turns up in a special appearance that fans spent weeks speculating about after it was first reported last November.
The international spread has been the most striking part. Vietnam and Thailand took the show to No. 1 almost immediately, and the Southeast Asian response held while Western markets caught up over the following days. That pattern — regional saturation first, global diffusion second — has become the standard route for Korean hits, but the speed here was unusual for a series with no established IP behind it and a first-time lead actress at its center.
What Comes Next
The show has a full twelve episodes already sitting on the platform, so there is no weekly cliffhanger economy to sustain — everything now depends on word of mouth and the long tail. That is a different kind of test, and one that binge-released Korean titles have historically passed when the ending lands well. Whether audiences feel the finale earns the noir detour is the question that will decide how long this stays in the conversation.
Netflix is not slowing down either way. The 2026 Korean slate runs to thirty-three series and films, and the next major title arrives almost immediately: Mousetrap, premiering August 18, with Ryu Jun-yeol as a reclusive novelist whose identity is stolen by a figure known only as "The Rat" and Sul Kyung-gu as the loan shark he is forced to work with. Later in the month, tvN and Netflix pair up for a musical romance about two arts-high-school friends who grow into rival pianists. August is stacked, and Our Sticky Love will have to hold its ground.
For Ha Young specifically, the next twelve months are the interesting part. A first lead that charts in eighty-one countries is the kind of result that reshapes an actor's offer pile overnight. For Jung Hae-in, it is confirmation of something already established — he has been one of Korean television's most reliable romantic leads for years — but the genre-blending demands here stretched the register further than Snowdrop or Love Next Door ever asked him to.
Closing Thoughts
There is something clarifying about a show that names itself after candy. Yeot is not elegant. It sticks to everything, it takes forever to chew, and it is sweeter than it has any right to be. Director Kim pointed out that yeot tastes different depending on how it is made, which is a nicer way of saying the metaphor is doing double duty: the bond between these two characters is sweet and inescapable, and it is also, at moments, exactly the kind of mess the Korean idiom implies.
What makes the series work is that it never apologizes for wanting everything at once. Amnesia romance is one of the oldest devices in the drawer, and the show uses it without irony while also building a genuine crime story around it. That combination could easily collapse into tonal soup. Instead, it holds — mostly because Jung and Ha Young play the romance completely straight, as if neither of them has noticed the noir happening in the next room.
It is also a useful data point about what travels. The biggest Korean exports of the past few years have been high-concept and high-stakes. This one is a small-town love story with a lie at its center, filmed largely in a coastal city most international viewers have never heard of, and it went to No. 1 in eighteen countries in seventy-two hours. Sometimes the thing that sticks is the thing that was never trying to be slick.
한글 요약
넷플릭스 시리즈 <이런 엿 같은 사랑>이 8월 7일 12부작 전편 공개 후 빠르게 글로벌 차트를 올라갔습니다. 정해인이 조직을 거쳐 소도시 복싱 코치가 된 장태하를, 하영이 그 조직을 쫓다 기억을 잃은 검사 고은새를 연기합니다. 태하는 은새를 첫사랑으로 알아보지만 은새는 그를 전혀 기억하지 못하고, 태하는 자신이 연인이라고 거짓말한 채 동거를 시작합니다. 김장한 감독과 모지혜 작가가 2021년 이후 다시 호흡을 맞췄고, 촬영은 충남 당진 일대에서 진행됐습니다.
성적은 즉각적이었습니다. 넷플릭스 공식 집계 기준 8월 3~9일 주간 비영어 시리즈 5위로 진입해 약 320만 시청 수를 기록했고, 태국과 베트남에서 1위, 44개국 톱10에 올랐습니다. 8월 10일 기준으로는 18개국 1위, 81개국 톱10까지 확대됐습니다. 허성태가 조직 보스로 무게중심을 잡고, 이재원이 태하의 고교 동창이자 신경정신과 의사로 기억상실 설정을 실제로 파고드는 역할을 맡습니다. 하영에게는 첫 주연작이며, <이상한 변호사 우영우>·<사냥개들>·<중증외상센터>의 조연을 거친 뒤의 도약입니다.
넷플릭스의 2026년 한국 라인업은 시리즈·영화 33편 규모이고, 8월 18일에는 류준열·설경구 주연 <마우스트랩>이 이어집니다. 로맨틱 코미디가 범죄 스릴러를 통째로 끌어안는 이 시도가 끝까지 균형을 지켰는지가 장기 흥행을 가를 지점입니다. 엿처럼 달고 끈적하게 붙어 떨어지지 않는다는 제목의 비유는, 결국 두 사람의 관계뿐 아니라 이 작품이 시청자에게 남기는 방식에도 그대로 적용됩니다.