Netflix’s 83% RT Crime Thriller Edged Out ‘Breaking Bad’ With Just 6 Episodes
Netflix’s Korean crime thriller *Karma* drew 12.7 million views in the first half of 2025, surpassing the 11.4 million recorded for season one of *Breaking Bad* over the same period. Its audience and 83% Rotten Tomatoes score mark a strong response for a bleak, six-episode series built around the consequences of its characters’ choices.
Based on Choi Hee-seon’s Kakao webtoon, *Karma* is written and directed by Lee Il-hyung. It begins with a badly burned man claiming to be Park Jae-yeong, then rewinds 15 days to trace how six people become entangled. Their intersecting stories include a debt-ridden factory worker’s insurance scheme, a doctor concealing a fatal mistake, a hitman, a con-artist couple and a dangerous witness.
- *Karma* drew 12.7 million views in early 2025.
- It exceeded *Breaking Bad* season one’s 11.4 million.
- The Korean thriller tells its story across six episodes.
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Karma is a South Korean crime thriller adapted from a webtoon, a comic published online. Its six episodes follow six people whose lives become connected through debt, deception and violence.
The story centres on the consequences of choices made by a factory worker, a doctor, a hitman, a couple running cons and a witness in danger. The tangled plot and its bleak tone place it within the crime thriller genre, where suspense often comes from how characters’ actions affect one another.