All of Us Are Dead (Season 1)

Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.

All of Us Are Dead works because it earns its deaths. That sounds like a low bar, but in a genre full of disposable side characters and convenient plot armor, the show does something genuinely difficult: it makes you care about a large ensemble of teenagers and then refuses to protect them. The show was released all at once in January 2022 and spent three consecutive weeks at the top of Netflix’s global non-English chart. It watched over 474 million hours in its first month. That kind of reach isn’t accidental. The young cast — almost entirely newcomers — brings a physicality and emotional rawness that no amount of star power could manufacture. These feel like actual teenagers, which makes everything that happens to them land harder than it should.

The show’s real subject isn’t zombies. It’s the systems that fail young people — parents who can’t get to them, military command more concerned with optics than rescue, an education system so pressure-cooked that the virus’s origin is literally a father trying to protect his bullied son. Gwi-nam as the season’s primary villain is the most explicit version of this: he’s more dangerous than the infected because he retained his cruelty. The hambie concept is genuinely clever, using partial immunity as a metaphor for what happens when human ugliness survives even catastrophe. Where the show stumbles is pacing — the middle section sags slightly as the survival loop repeats, and the finale is rushed in ways that feel like a production decision rather than a creative one. Woo-jin’s death in particular deserved more space than it gets.

Cho Yi-hyun as Nam-ra is the season’s quiet revelation: a character who begins as a cold outsider and ends the series as something the show has no easy label for — not fully human, not monster, choosing her own meaning in the wreckage. The bonfire scene in Episode 8 is the best single scene of the season and one of the best in recent K-drama, period. Nam-ra saying it’s her first bonfire with friends is a line that shouldn’t hit as hard as it does. It does.