All things considered, the first quarter of 2024 has proven to be quite a jam-packed period for Netflix releases — with the streaming giant giving us everything from splashy new movies like Spaceman and Damsel to live events like last weekend’s Netflix Slam tennis match, broadcast from Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
The coming week will bring another influx of new content, ranging from brand new K-dramas to docuseries, feature films, and much more. Among the biggest and best of those Netflix releases we’ll be featuring in this post are Queen of Tears, a major new Korean drama featuring some high-profile actors, as well as a new Netflix docuseries that will help make sense of what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Also part of the week’s upcoming mix is Girls5eva, a charming Peacock comedy about a one-hit-wonder girl group that got kind of overlooked on NBC’s streamer.
If you need more ideas for what to watch next, don’t forget to also check out our weekly snapshot of the streamer’s global Top 10 TV show list, as well as our regularly updated guide walking through what’s new on the streamer over the entirety of each month. Here, meanwhile, are all of the week’s new titles we’ll be spotlighting in this post:
- Queen of Tears (now streaming)
- Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War (March 12)
- Girls5eva (March 14)
- Chicken Nugget (March 15)
- Irish Wish (March 15)
New Netflix K-drama releases
First up is a Netflix release that gets my vote as the weirdest K-drama Netflix will probably ever release. I can sum up the plot of Chicken Nugget for you in a single, extremely weird sentence: A pretty girl transforms into a chicken nugget.
The bizarre mishap emerges from her encounter with a strange machine, but I take heart from the fact that it comes from director Lee Byeong-heon — the creator behind Extreme Job, the second-highest-grossing film in Korea, as well as the TV series Be Melodramatic.
From Netflix: “Ryu Seung-ryong steps into the shoes of Choi Sun-man, a desperate father and the owner of ‘More Than Machine,’ who will stop at nothing to bring his daughter back to her human form. Ahn Jae-hong is set to charm audiences as Ko Baek-joong, an intern at Sun-man’s company, secretly smitten by Min-ah. Special appearances by Kim You-jung as Choi Min-ah, who turns into a chicken nugget, and Jung Ho-yeon as the top Korean culinary columnist, Hongcha, add to the star-studded cast.”
The show, as so many of the best K-dramas are, is based on a Naver Webtoon created by Park Ji-dok.
As for the 16-episode Queen of Tears, the first episode of which is now streaming, what we have with this next Netflix series is a romantic comedy featuring a high-profile wedding between two bosses: She’s an executive over a group of department stores, while he’s in charge of legal for a supermarket chain. They wed, then hit a rough patch, and then encounter a near-tragedy. Will true love win out in the end? This is a K-drama, what do you think …
By the way, if you’re a fan of the genre, there is some major talent behind the camera on this series. The writer? Park Ji-eun worked in a little show you might have heard of, called Crash Landing on You. Queen of Tears also includes co-directors, one of whom previously worked on Vincenzo.
Set against a backdrop of cutthroat corporate intrigue, Queen of Tears is a story of love, resilience, and evolution.
The best of the rest
That’s the week’s big K-dramas from the streamer out of the way, so let’s now turn to look at what the rest of the week’s big releases entail.
Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War: Over the nine episodes of this extremely timely docuseries, director Brian Knappenberger leads viewers through a vital history lesson that not only contextualizes modern Russia, Ukraine, and Putin. It starts by revisiting the development of the atomic bomb, and how it shaped geopolitics across the decades that followed.
To tell that story, Knappenberger’s docuseries draws on more than 100 interviews, including everyday people whose lives have been shaped by the Cold War as well as current world leaders like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (that interview, of course, being a reflection of the fact that Ukraine war is very much an extension of the Cold War).
Girls5eva: This next Netflix release really fell victim to the limited scale of Netflix rival Peacock.
Peacock — for reasons that are unique to its own service, which I don’t want to bash at all because there’s some great content to watch there — ended up cancelling this show about a girl group from the late ‘90s whose members reunite as older women to chase their pop star dreams one more time. Only now, of course, there are complications like spouses, kids, jobs, and debt.
What’s interesting about this un-cancellation, of course, is that Netflix does this kind of thing all the time, taking a show that was cancelled or little-watched somewhere else (Manifest, Cobra Kai, etc.) and turning it into a beast of a hit. For Girls5eva, the “Returnity” tour is just a few days away. Release date: March 14.
Irish Wish: Finally, Lindsay Lohan (aka, the queen of cheesy Netflix romantic comedy movies) is back, this time starring in a story that’s set on the Emerald Isle. Per Netflix, “when the love of her life gets engaged to her best friend, Maddie (Lohan) puts her feelings aside to be a bridesmaid at their wedding in Ireland. Days before the pair are set to marry, Maddie makes a spontaneous wish for true love and finds herself in an alternate reality where a chance encounter shows her that sometimes you need to be careful who you wish for.”
The film is set in the rolling green moors of Ireland, and it was filmed on location on the country’s eastern coast in Wicklow. And it hits Netflix just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. Release date: March 15.
