Forget The Witcher, Netflix's Fantasy Masterpiece Has A 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

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Published Sep 27, 2026, 5:11 PM EDT

Tom is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, with expertise covering everything from hilarious sitcoms to jaw-dropping sci-fi epics.

Initially he was an Updates writer, though before long he found his way to the TV and movies team. He now spends his days keeping Screen Rant readers informed about the TV shows of yesteryear, whether it's recommending hidden gems that may have been missed by genre fans or deep diving into ways your favorite shows have (or haven't) stood the test of time.

Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check.

Few, if any, Netflix shows misunderstood the brief quite like The Witcher. What should have been a streamlined action-fantasy adventure about Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill/Liam Hemsworth) traveling the Continent and battling fearsome creatures instead became tangled in its own mythology. Geralt's monster hunting was frequently pushed aside for sprawling political conflicts and twist-filled storylines that made an already lore-heavy fantasy world considerably harder to follow.

It’s especially frustrating for many reasons, though none more so than the fact that The Witcher wasn’t difficult to get right. Andrzej Sapkowski's novels and CD Projekt Red's games wear the franchise's biggest appeal on their sleeves: a hardened monster hunter encounters horrifying creatures while navigating an equally dangerous human world. Fortunately, Netflix now has another fantasy series that hits the same sweet spots as The Witcher novels and games, the 2026 dark fantasy K-drama The East Palace.

Set in a fictionalized Joseon-era Korea, The East Palace introduces audiences to spirit slayer Gu-cheon (Nam Joo-hyuk) and court lady Saeng-gang (Roh Yoon-seo) as they investigate a supernatural curse haunting the royal family. The show holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while its historical Korean aesthetic is markedly different from Geralt’s European-inspired world, it delivers the focused fantasy adventure that Netflix's The Witcher failed to.

The East Palace Is Everything Netflix’s The Witcher Should Have Been

Gu-Cheon and his sword in The East Palace

The similarities between The East Palace and The Witcher go considerably deeper than both being dark fantasy shows, which is why the success of the former makes the failures of the latter impossible to ignore. East Palace’s hero, Gu-cheon, can cross between the human world and the Realm of Gwi, a mirror dimension, making him a specialist uniquely equipped to confront the malicious spirits that escape it to terrorize ordinary people and royalty alike. This setup provides the monster-slaying fantasy formula that should have remained the backbone of Geralt's Netflix story.

The East Palace wastes no time getting to the heart of this formula too. The story kicks off when Gu-cheon is summoned by the King (Cho Seung-woo) to deal with a pond spirit believed to be connected to the deaths of royal heirs. From there, his investigation alongside Saeng-gang introduces further ghosts and increasingly dangerous entities, all linked by an underpinning central mystery. Even as the central conspiracy unfolds, its eight episodes remain anchored by the simple pleasure of watching a supernatural expert confront things nobody else can.

However, the relative simplicity behind its appeal doesn’t mean The East Palace lacks depth. The King’s royal court is filled with conspiracies, family secrets, competing agendas, and questions about whether apparently supernatural events might conceal distinctly human crimes. Impressively given its complexity, the political intrigue supports the central ghost-slaying fantasy adventure instead of replacing it.

That balance is exactly where The Witcher repeatedly struggled. Geralt's adventures both on the page and in videogames provided Netflix with what should have been a winning formula of episodic monster-slaying supported by a background serialized plot. Instead the series divided its attention between different kingdoms and character arcs until it lost itself in the confusion. The East Palace proves that a fantasy series can build an elaborate world without allowing that world to overwhelm the monster-hunting adventure audiences came to see.

The East Palace Continues A Netflix K-Drama Trend

A ghost whispering to Saeng-gang in The East Palace

Not only is The East Palace the kind of dark fantasy adventure that The Witcher TV show should have been, it also reinforces something Netflix K-dramas have demonstrated for years: most of the streamer's most distinctive fantasy TV shows come from Korea, especially when fantasy collides with horror.

2019’s Kingdom is another clear example. Like The East Palace, Kingdom’s Joseon-era setting combines royal power struggles with supernatural threats (in this case, a rapidly spreading zombie plague) with masterful results. Then there’s the three-season horror fantasy series Sweet Home, which centers on survivors of an event that transformed thousands of people into savage monsters. Leaning even further into horror than fantasy, the two seasons of Hellbound revolve around terrifying Biblical-scale beings publicly condemning people to death and executing them.

The East Palace is the latest addition to that tradition. It’s yet another fantasy horror K-Drama that delivers on the promise of its premise to the point it stands out as one of the strongest original Netflix series. The East Palace has ghosts, monsters, swordplay, palace conspiracies, supernatural fantasy mythology, some great horror visuals, and a charismatic spirit slayer at its center. Not once does it lose sight of why viewers would want to watch a show with those ingredients, which is less than can be said for The Witcher and many other Western live-action fantasy shows on Netflix that failed to understand the brief.