I went into The WONDERfools expecting a gimmick. A superhero K-drama set during the Y2K scare sounded like exactly the kind of concept that looks fun in a trailer and falls apart by episode 3. It didn't fall apart. It was actually quite good.
This post contains minor spoilers for Netflix's WONDERfools
Setting the Scene
Quick rundown for anyone who hasn't heard of it: it's an 8 episode Netflix show, all dropped at once on May 15, 2026. It's set in the fictional city of Haeseong right at the end of 1999, when everyone's losing their minds over the millennium bug. Eun Chae-ni finds out she has a serious congenital heart condition, panics, and convinces her two neighbors to help her fake her own kidnapping so she can squeeze ransom money out of her rich grandmother and finally go see the world before she dies. It goes wrong almost immediately. Chae-ni suffers a heart attack in the middle of the scheme, they end up dumping her near a toxic waste site trying to cover their tracks, and that exposure is how the whole gang ends up with unstable, glitchy superpowers. It's a ridiculous setup and somehow it works.
Behind the scenes, this thing has a wild development history. It was first pitched back in 2018 as an adaptation of an original Stan Lee concept under the working title The B-Team, before getting completely reworked into its own original story by writer Kang Eun-kyung and director Yoo In-sik, the same director behind Extraordinary Attorney Woo. That's also the second time Yoo has worked with Park Eun-bin, and the reunion clearly paid off. Filming ran from October 2024 through May 2025, largely along the South Korean coast, with locations like Sam-bong Beach in Taean and Gyeongpo Beach in Gangneung standing in for Haeseong's teleportation scenes.
The cast carries this thing
Everybody's fully committed even when the script gets goofy, and that commitment is the difference between a show like this landing well or feeling embarrassing to sit through.
Choi Dae-hoon plays Son Gyeong-hun, a guy who's spent his whole life filing complaints at city hall about toxic runoff, completely unaware he's about to get hit by the exact thing he keeps complaining about. His power is one of the best running gags I've seen in a K-drama in a while: every time he lies, his hands turn sticky and glue themselves to whatever he's touching until he tells the truth. Imagine trying to get through a normal conversation knowing one little lie means you're stuck to a doorknob for the next ten minutes. Choi's comedic timing carries most of that gag, and outlets covering the show singled him out for the same reason I noticed watching it, his natural ad-libs make dialogue that could've read juvenile on the page actually land as funny on screen.
Then there's Im Seong-jae as Kang Ro-bin, the soft spoken pushover of the group who works in the kitchen at Chae-ni's grandmother's restaurant. His power only kicks in when his feelings get hurt, which, given how often this guy gets stepped on, means it's going off constantly. It's funny but also kind of sad if you actually sit and think about it. A guy whose strength is tied to how much emotional pain he can absorb is a strange thing to build comedy around, but somehow the show makes it work both ways without undercutting either the joke or the sadness underneath it.
Park Eun-bin carries Chae-ni well too. This is her comeback K-drama after Extraordinary Attorney Woo made her one of Korea's most recognizable leading actresses, and she plays all of Chae-ni's chaos and the sadness underneath it without ever making it feel like a switch she's flipping on and off. And Cha Eun-woo plays Lee Un-jeong, the stiff, rules-obsessed civil servant who shows up from Seoul and turns out to be hiding telekinetic powers of his own, the result of being one of the original test subjects in a shady project he's spent his whole life trying to outrun. This is Cha Eun-woo's first project alongside Park Eun-bin, which is honestly surprising given how long both of them have been major names in the industry, and it's also his final role before his mandatory military enlistment, which makes the performance feel like even more of a swing for him.
Effects-wise, nothing's going to blow your mind, but everything looks clean. Nothing felt cheap or rushed, which matters a lot for a show juggling this many moving parts at once.
Where it wobbles for me
Now here's my one real complaint. The Chae-ni and Un-jeong romance just did not do it for me. I know a lot of people are obsessed with their chemistry, and there's a real slow burn happening where he starts off closed off and the group slowly wears him down until he actually lets people in. I get why people love it. For me it just never fully clicked. Maybe it's the pacing, maybe his whole emotional walls arc felt more like a plot requirement than something I actually believed, or maybe I'm just tired of romance as a genre right now. Could be a me problem. But credit where it's due, the show never lets the romance take over and steal time from the parts that are actually working, so it didn't ruin anything for me either, it just left me a little cold whenever the show slowed down to focus on it.
The bigger picture
What surprised me is how much is actually going on under the comedy. There's a whole conspiracy involving shady experiments connected to the chemical leak, a creepy doomsday cult, and a scientist with way darker motives than you'd expect from episode 1. That scientist, Ha Won-do, runs something called the Wunderkinder Project, and once his backstory starts unfolding it becomes clear he's not just a mad scientist stereotype, he's got a real personal reason for wanting what he wants, tied directly to Un-jeong's own traumatic childhood. The show takes its time getting there too, letting all the personal, character-level stuff breathe first before it drops the bigger conspiracy on you all at once. A few critics pointed out that the tonal whiplash between the slapstick comedy and the heavier trauma material can feel uneven, and I get where that criticism comes from, but for me the show earns the shift because it spends so much time on the small character beats first.
It's also worth noting how well this thing has actually done since it dropped. It debuted at number 6 on Netflix's Global Non-English chart, then climbed to number 2 in its second week and stayed there into week three, eventually crossing 18 million views and over 170 million hours watched globally within its first five weeks. For a show that started as a shelved Stan Lee pitch from 2018, that's a wild turnaround.
Final rating and overall thoughts
My rating: 8.3
Overall, a strong watch. Gyeong-hun and Ro-bin alone make it worth the time, and I really liked that the show keeps its heroes messy instead of pretending they're secretly cool the whole time. These aren't chosen ones who slip into their powers with ease, they're regular, flawed people who spend most of the season fumbling through abilities they didn't ask for and can barely control, and that's a much more interesting hook than the usual superhero origin formula.
Watch it if you want something that doesn't take itself too seriously but still hits real emotional beats when it wants to. The comedy actually lands, the conspiracy stuff gives the back half real stakes, and even with the romance not fully working for me, it never got in the way of everything else the show was doing right.
I'd love a season 2, but it's Netflix, and with Cha Eun-woo now serving his enlistment, I'm not getting my hopes up anytime soon.
Did the romance work for you, or was it just me?
Drop your take in the comments.
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