A scene from the fantasy romance drama, "Lovely Runner" / Courtesy of tvN

U.S. magazine TIME has selected "Lovely Runner" as this year's best Korean drama, its website showed Tuesday.

The magazine carried an article on this year's 10 best K-dramas with the fantasy romance drama topping the list, as it noted K-dramas have broken into the American mainstream — a process that it said was aided by the massive investments Netflix and other U.S. firms have made in the Korean entertainment industry.

"Lovely Runner was never supposed to be 2024's best K-drama. It didn't have the industry's biggest budgets or its most high-profile stars," the magazine said. "Instead, it had a good, well executed story—in the end, the thing that matters most."

"Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born" ranked second, followed by "Love in the Big City," "A Shop For Killers," "The Atypical Family," "The Judge From Hell," "Pyramid Game," "Marry My Husband," "Death's Game," and "Mr. Plankton."

The magazine said that international streamers' interest in Korean entertainment has expanded and diversified the global K-drama audience.

"While romantic melodrama remains a backbone of the Korean TV industry, the popularity of a show like Squid Game has whetted the appetite of international streamers for K-dramas that more men will watch too," it said.

From a viewing perspective. the magazine cast 2024 as a "relatively humdrum" 12 months though one might have predicted that 2024 would be a banner year for Korean TV. (Yonhap)