This hard-hitting crime drama quietly became one of the biggest shows on Netflix

Netflix famously makes a lot of movies and TV shows, more than any one person could ever hope to watch. That means that sometimes a show that you’ve never heard of could bubble to the top of the worldwide ratings, as happened recently with the detective series Detective Hole.

It’s happening again with Bloodhounds, a South Korean crime drama that dropped its second season on April 3. The show has been riding high on the charts for weeks, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you could be on the precipice of your next big binge.

What is Bloodhounds about?

Boxing for justice

Bloodhounds is about a pair of young boxers: Kim Gun-woo (Woo Do-hwan) and Hong Woo-jin (Lee Sang-yi). They meet in the ring, where the careful, tactical fighter Gun-woo squares off against the brash, showboating Woo-jin. Afterwards they get dinner and strike up a friendship that blossoms despite their contrasting personalities. The two train together, hang out, and soon get pulled into some serious underworld criminal shenanigans.

Gun-woo’s family is harassed by loan sharks led by the shady Kim Myeong-gil (Park Sung-woong). These loan sharks are manipulating and extorting small business owners like Gun-woo’s mother Yoon So-yeon (Yoon Yoo-sun), so our two heroes decide to do something about it. They team up with a noble-hearted money lender named Choi Tae-ho (Huh Joon-ho), who lends money to people free of interest. With his knowledge and their fighting skills, Gun-woo and Woo-jin set out to make a difference.

All of this goes down in the first season, which ends with our little team of Avengers defeating Myeong-gil, ensuring the safety of their families, and moving on with their lives. But trouble comes knocking again in season 2, when a brutal boxer named Im Baek-jeong (played by K-pop idol Rain) becomes fixated on fighting Gun-woo. Baek-jeong is involved in an underground fighting ring called the International Kings Fighting Championship, which also deals in trafficking, gambling, and drugs. Soon enough, Gun-woo and Woo-jin find themselves once again having to punch their way out of danger, and this season doesn’t end quite so cleanly for them.

Of bromances, boxing, and bloody vengeance

Bloodhounds is a great, gritty action fantasy

Bloodhounds works on a few levels. First up, it’s something of a superhero story, with characters like Gun-woo able to take down waves of goons solo using nothing but their fists and their wits. It is very easy to root for our main characters. They are beacons of goodness fighting against the worst kinds of sadistic, exploitative criminals. You want to see them succeed.

And it’s all the more satisfying when they succeed by punching the daylights out of our villains. The fight scenes are expertly choreographed, and show off how differently Gun-woo and Woo-jin fight. Gun-woo fights thoughtfully and defensively, conserving his energy for when he knows it’s going to count, while Woo-jin goes into battle fist-first. It may not be realistic for one boxer to take down a dozen hired goons by his lonesome, but the fights are so well-planned and shot, and the actors so convincing (it must be said that Woo Do-hwan, as Gun-woo, is a bit more impressive than Lee Sang-yi’s Woo-jin), that you don’t care while watching. It’s just a thrill to see these scenes play out, and the action gets bigger and better in the second season. In fact, the second season has gotten higher marks from fans in general, a sign that the show is getting more confident and comfortable as it goes along.

The other big draw is the relationship between Gun-woo and Woo-jin. Their friendship is at the center of the show, and it’s able to beat the weight that the story puts on it because Woo Do-hwan and Lee Sang-yi have fantastic chemistry together. It’s not static, either. In the first season, Gun-woo and Woo-jin are more or less peers, two young boxers trying to make their mark. But in the second season, which is set five years after the first, Gun-woo has continued in his boxing career while Woo-jin has largely stepped back to become his trainer. The show is willing to evolve, which is important if it’s going to capitalize on this momentum and become an even bigger hit.

Where is Bloodhounds season 3?

How much fight does the show have left in it?

Right now, it’s still a matter of if Bloodhounds will get to continue this journey, not when. Netflix has yet to formally announce a third season, although with the ratings as consistently good as they’ve been, fans expect to get good news any day now. While the show has been the most popular in its native South Korea, where it’s been the number one most-watched series pretty much non-step since the second season dropped, it’s been a hit worldwide, at one point taking the number two spot on the global charts. That includes in the United States, where Netflix views tend to matter the most.

Plus, the second season ends with a teaser for an even more dangerous threat on the horizon, so it would be a shame for Netflix to pull the plug now. Clearly, writer-director Jason Kim has plans for the further adventures of Gun-woo and Woo-jin, and there are fans the world over who badly want to see them play out.

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Beyond Bloodhounds

Foreign language dramas have been a staple of Netflix programming for years. South Korean programming has been especially big. Squid Game, the most obvious example, is among the most watched dramas in the streamer’s history, but it goes beyond that. Shows like The Glory, Doctor Cha, and Queen of Tears have all been hits. Bloodhounds fits right into that movement, but it’s just the start of a whole world of entertainment you may be missing out on.