Every time travel Korean drama is really asking the same question: what would you fix if you got to go back? A missed confession. A friend you couldn’t save. A signature you shouldn’t have put on that contract.
Korean writers have been chasing that question for over a decade now, and they’ve built an entire sub-genre out of it. Some of it is soft romance. Some of it is cold-case crime with a walkie-talkie that only works at 11:23 PM. Some of it is a Joseon queen possessed by a Seoul chef who wants his soju back.
This list covers 25 of them, sorted by what you’re actually in the mood for, with Indian streaming details next to each one. If you only have a weekend, skip to the “where to start” section near the end.
Quick picks: the five that matter most
| If you want… | Watch this | Year | Eps | Stream in India |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The best all-rounder | Lovely Runner | 2024 | 16 | Netflix, MX Player (free) |
| Crime, not romance | Signal | 2016 | 16 | Netflix |
| Revenge that actually lands | Marry My Husband | 2024 | 16 | Amazon Prime Video |
| Palace comedy | Mr. Queen | 2020 | 20 | Netflix, Viki |
| A good cry about your parents | Twinkling Watermelon | 2023 | 16 | Viki |
Streaming rights shift around a lot in India. Everything here was checked in September 2026, but if a title has moved, JustWatch India will tell you where it went.
The five kinds of time travel in K-dramas
Knowing which type you’re getting saves you from starting a 20-episode sageuk when you wanted a thriller.
Time slip (타임슬립). A character physically falls through time. Rain puddle, tunnel, bamboo flute, doesn’t matter. Usually modern person lands in Joseon, or a Joseon person lands in Gangnam and discovers escalators.
Regression or rebirth (회귀). The character dies, then wakes up in their own younger body carrying every memory. This one exploded through Korean web novels and now drives most of the revenge dramas on the list.
Parallel timelines. Two eras run at once and characters talk across them through a radio, a phone, a letter. Nobody physically moves.
Parallel worlds. Not time travel in the strict sense, but the fandom counts it, and so do search engines. Two versions of Korea, one door between them.
Looping. Same stretch of time, over and over, until someone gets it right.
Best time travel Korean dramas for romance
1. Lovely Runner (2024)
16 episodes | tvN | Netflix, free with ads on MX Player
Im Sol has spent years being kept alive by the music of Ryu Sun-jae, a K-pop star who dies in an accident. A broken watch throws her back to 2008, when he was nineteen, living across the street, and not yet famous. She sets out to save his life and keeps failing in new and worse ways.
What makes this the most-recommended time travel Korean drama of the last few years isn’t the romance, though Byeon Woo-seok and Kim Hye-yoon are ridiculous together. It’s the structure. The show runs on the rule that every rescue costs something, and it never cheats that rule for a nice moment. The swimming pool scene in episode 10 is the reason this thing went global.
Start here if you’ve never watched a time slip drama before.
2. Marry My Husband (2024)
16 episodes | tvN | Amazon Prime Video
Kang Ji-won is dying of cancer when she walks in on her husband and her best friend. He kills her for the inconvenience. She wakes up ten years earlier, healthy, employed, and fully aware of what’s coming.
Her plan is the best premise in the genre: instead of getting revenge directly, she redirects her fate onto the people who ruined it. Let them have each other. Park Min-young plays the slow build from doormat to strategist better than the web novel managed, and Na In-woo’s Yu Ji-hyuk has his own reason for remembering things he shouldn’t.
Prime Video India has this one, and it’s the single most-watched title on this list among Indian K-drama viewers.
3. Twinkling Watermelon (2023)
16 episodes | tvN | Viki
Ha Eun-gyeol is a CODA, a hearing child of deaf parents, and a guitarist his family wishes would go to medical school instead. He wanders into a strange music shop under a double moon and ends up in 1995, where he meets his father as a teenager who can still hear, joins his band, and watches his mother fall in love before she was his mother.
This is the one people don’t expect to wreck them. It uses the time slip to answer a question most of us can’t ask: who were my parents before I existed? Bring tissues and a 1990s Korean rock playlist.
4. Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (2016)
20 episodes | SBS | Netflix, Viki
Go Ha-jin drowns during a solar eclipse and wakes up in the Goryeo dynasty in the body of Hae Soo, surrounded by princes who will all eventually try to kill each other for the throne. She falls for the gentle eighth prince first. She ends up with the scarred, feared fourth prince, played by Lee Joon-gi in the performance that defined his career.
It flopped in Korea and became a phenomenon everywhere else. Fair warning: knowing history doesn’t help Hae Soo save anyone, and the show is honest about that. It hurts.
5. Queen In-hyun’s Man (2012)
16 episodes | tvN | Viki
A Joseon scholar carries a talisman that yanks him forward whenever his life is in danger, which is often. He keeps landing in 2012 Seoul, where an actress named Choi Hee-jin is filming a drama about the exact palace conspiracy he’s trying to survive.
Fourteen years old and still one of the tightest time travel plots Korean TV has produced. Twelve episodes of setup pay off completely. If you like a story where the rules are clean and the writer respects them, this is your pick.
6. Rooftop Prince (2012)
20 episodes | SBS | Viki
Crown Prince Lee Gak and three of his men investigate the death of the crown princess, chase a clue, and land on a rooftop apartment in modern Seoul three hundred years later. The comedy of four Joseon men discovering instant ramyeon and Google carries the first half. A reincarnation mystery carries the second.
Dated in places. Still very funny.
7. The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract (2024)
12 episodes | MBC | Viki, Amazon Prime Video
Park Yeon-woo, a widow from 19th century Joseon, crawls into a wooden chest and comes out in 2023, into a contract marriage with a chaebol heir who needs a temporary wife. Lee Se-young sells the culture shock without playing it as a joke, and the show goes somewhere genuinely sad by the end.
Underrated. Twelve episodes, no filler.
8. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty (2025)
12 episodes | tvN | Netflix
Yeon Ji-yeong wins a major French cooking competition and promptly falls into the Joseon palace kitchen, where she has to feed a tyrant king with an impossible palate or die. Yoona is having an obvious blast. Lee Chae-min’s Lee Heon is a better-written villain-adjacent lead than the premise suggests.
The food photography alone justifies the watch.
9. Faith / The Great Doctor (2012)
24 episodes | SBS | Viki
A Goryeo warrior travels to modern Seoul to kidnap a doctor, because his queen is dying and legend says a “heavenly physician” waits behind a portal. He grabs a plastic surgeon at a department store. Lee Min-ho and Kim Hee-sun, a lot of sword fighting, and a slower middle stretch that you can survive.
10. Splash Splash Love (2015)
2 episodes | MBC | Viki
A high schooler drowning in exam pressure jumps into a puddle during a downpour and lands in Joseon during a drought, where her middling grasp of basic maths makes her a genius. Two episodes. Barely ninety minutes total. Completely charming.
The best entry point for anyone who says they don’t have time for K-dramas.
Best time travel Korean dramas for thriller and mystery fans
11. Signal (2016)
16 episodes | tvN | Netflix
A profiler in 2015 finds a dead walkie-talkie that crackles to life at 11:23 PM with a detective from 1989 on the other end. They start solving cold cases together across the gap. Every case they close rewrites the present, and not always the way they wanted.
Written by Kim Eun-hee, who later wrote Kingdom. Most Korean critics still rank it as the best thing on this list, and the cases are drawn from real unsolved Korean crimes, which gives the whole show a weight the romances can’t touch. No romance to speak of. Ends on a note that still annoys people nine years later.
12. Tunnel (2017)
16 episodes | OCN | Viki
A detective chasing a serial killer in 1986 runs into a tunnel and comes out in 2017. The killer is still out there, still unidentified, and the detective’s own wife and daughter have lived thirty years without him.
The procedural is solid. The emotional engine is a man watching his family’s life happen without him. Choi Jin-hyuk is excellent.
13. Nine: Nine Time Travel (2013)
20 episodes | tvN | Viki
A news anchor finds nine sticks of incense. Each one burns for thirty minutes and sends him exactly twenty years into the past. He has nine chances to stop his brother’s death, and every change he makes in 1993 rearranges the life he returns to, including who he’s allowed to love.
The strictest time travel rules of any K-drama. Also the most ruthless about consequences. If Signal is the genre’s best thriller, Nine is its best puzzle.
14. Life on Mars (2018)
16 episodes | OCN | Viki
A modern detective is hit by a car and wakes up in 1988 as a cop in a rural station where evidence gets planted and suspects get slapped. Whether he’s dreaming, dead, or actually there is the question the show keeps in play.
A Korean remake of the British series that improves on it. Jung Kyung-ho is very good.
15. Alice (2020)
16 episodes | SBS | Viki
Time travel as a business. There’s an agency, there are rules, there are people who break them. A detective who can’t feel emotion meets a physicist who looks exactly like his dead mother. Messy in the back half, but the first six episodes are gripping.
16. Sisyphus: The Myth (2021)
16 episodes | JTBC | Netflix
Cho Seung-woo’s genius engineer discovers that people from a ruined future have been quietly living in the present. Park Shin-hye plays a warrior who came back to save him. Big budget, big ideas, wobbly execution. Worth it if you like your time travel loud.
17. Kairos (2020)
16 episodes | MBC | Viki
A man whose daughter has just been kidnapped starts getting phone calls from a woman living exactly one month in the past. She can still stop it. He can tell her how. Every choice she makes changes what he remembers mid-conversation.
Tense in a way very few dramas manage. Almost no romance, almost no comedy, just the clock.
18. 365: Repeat the Year (2020)
24 short episodes | MBC | Viki
Ten strangers accept an offer to go back one year and redesign their lives. Then they start dying in the order they signed up. Part time travel, part death game. Nam Ji-hyun and Lee Joon-hyuk hold it together.
Best second-chance and revenge dramas
These are the regression stories: no portals, no flutes, just waking up younger with everything you know intact.
19. Reborn Rich (2022)
16 episodes | JTBC | Viki
Yoon Hyun-woo cleans up messes for the Soonyang conglomerate for years, then gets shot for knowing too much. He wakes up in 1987 as Jin Do-jun, the youngest grandson of the family that killed him. He remembers the 1997 IMF crisis, the dot-com crash, and which films made money. He uses all of it.
The most-watched cable drama in Korean history at the time it aired. Song Joong-ki playing a man in his forties trapped in a child’s life is the whole draw. The ending divided everyone, and you will have an opinion.
20. Again My Life (2022)
16 episodes | SBS | Viki
A prosecutor investigating a corrupt power broker is murdered and sent back to his own university days by a grim reaper who gives him a second run with his memories. He rebuilds, recruits, and comes back for the same man with fifteen years of foreknowledge.
Lee Joon-gi doing competent-hero work. Satisfying in a straightforward, fist-pumping way.
21. My Perfect Stranger (2023)
16 episodes | KBS2 | Viki
A reporter and a woman investigating her father’s death both slip back to 1987, where they meet their own parents as young adults and realise the serial murder case they’re chasing is about to begin. Warm, sad, and much better than its ratings suggested.
22. Go Back Couple (2017)
12 episodes | KBS2 | Netflix, Viki
A married couple at the end of their patience wake up in 1999, back in university, before the marriage and the baby and the resentment. Jang Na-ra and Son Ho-jun.
The time travel is a device for a much harder story about a woman’s mother, and an apology neither of them got to make. Twelve episodes. It will get you.
23. Perfect Marriage Revenge (2023)
12 episodes | MBN | Viki
Han Yi-joo is killed on the night of her wedding and wakes up a year earlier, so she proposes a contract marriage to the man her cousin wants. Trashy in the best way, short, and paced like a webtoon, which it was.
Best comedies
24. Mr. Queen (2020)
20 episodes | tvN | Netflix, Viki
Jang Bong-hwan, a Blue House chef with a serious ego problem, falls into a pool and wakes up inside Queen Cheorin in the Joseon court. He is still, in his head, entirely himself. The court thinks the queen has gone insane.
Shin Hye-sun’s performance is one of the great comic turns in Korean television. The show also sneaks in real political drama about King Cheoljong’s powerlessness, and the shift in the second half from farce to something warmer is handled well. Note that the source material is a Chinese novel whose author drew controversy in Korea, which is why the drama distances itself from it.
25. Live Up to Your Name (2017)
16 episodes | tvN | Netflix, Viki
A Joseon acupuncturist and a modern heart surgeon keep swapping eras through the Han River, arguing the whole time about whether needles or scalpels are real medicine. Kim Nam-gil and Kim Ah-joong. Funny, then unexpectedly moving.
Also worth knowing: The King: Eternal Monarch (2020)
16 episodes | SBS | Netflix
Not strictly time travel. Lee Gon rules the Kingdom of Corea and crosses through a bamboo forest into the Republic of Korea, where Jung Tae-eul is a detective who’s never heard of him. The show does play with time, since crossing the gap stops the clock for both of them.
Lee Min-ho and Kim Go-eun. Divisive, beautiful, confusing in the middle. It shows up on every list of this kind so you should know what it is before you commit sixteen hours.
Coming next: 2026 time travel K-dramas
My Royal Nemesis premiered on Netflix on 8 May 2026. Lim Ji-yeon plays Kang Dan-shim, a feared Joseon villainess who is poisoned and wakes up in present-day Seoul in the body of a struggling actress, then gets tangled up with a chaebol heir played by Heo Nam-jun. It’s the closest thing 2026 has produced to a Bon Appétit, Your Majesty follow-up.
Night Traveler is the one to watch for. Writer Yoon Ji-ryeon, of Boys Over Flowers and Move to Heaven, is adapting a Chinese novel about a lawyer in 1937 Gyeongseong and a forensic doctor in the present who share the same apartment across eighty years. Park Bo-gum and Shin Ye-eun have been attached in reports. No confirmed release date yet.
Where to start, based on how much time you have
One evening. Splash Splash Love. Two episodes, done.
A weekend. Perfect Marriage Revenge or The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract. Twelve episodes each.
You want the one everyone’s talking about. Lovely Runner.
You hate romance. Signal, then Nine, then Tunnel. In that order.
You want to cry about your family. Twinkling Watermelon, then Go Back Couple.
You want a villain to get destroyed. Marry My Husband or Reborn Rich.
You’re watching with someone who doesn’t like subtitles. Lovely Runner has a Hindi audio track on MX Player, and Prime Video and Netflix both carry Hindi dubs for a growing chunk of their Korean catalogue.
Where to watch time travel K-dramas in India
Netflix has the biggest licensed chunk, including Lovely Runner, Signal, Mr. Queen, Moon Lovers and Bon Appétit, Your Majesty. Its mobile plan starts at ₹149 a month.
Amazon Prime Video carries Marry My Husband and a rotating set of MBC titles.
Rakuten Viki is the specialist. Most of the older tvN and OCN dramas on this list live here, a lot of them free with ads, and the fan-subtitle quality is usually better than the licensed versions.
Viu works in India and carries a good run of Korean network dramas.
MX Player streams a surprising number of K-dramas free with ads, including Lovely Runner, often with Hindi dubs.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best time travel Korean drama?
For a first watch, Lovely Runner. For writing quality, Signal. Lovely Runner won Best Drama at the 2024 Blue Dragon Series Awards and is the title most Indian viewers start with, while Signal is the one Korean critics keep at the top of the genre.
Which time travel K-drama has the best romance?
Lovely Runner, Twinkling Watermelon and Queen In-hyun’s Man are the three most consistently recommended. Moon Lovers has the most devoted fanbase but the saddest ending.
Are there any time travel K-dramas on Netflix India?
Yes. Lovely Runner, Signal, Mr. Queen, Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, The King: Eternal Monarch, Sisyphus: The Myth, Go Back Couple, Bon Appétit, Your Majesty and My Royal Nemesis are all on Netflix in India as of September 2026.
What does “time slip” mean in Korean dramas?
Time slip, or 타임슬립, is the Korean term for a character physically crossing into another era, usually without meaning to and usually without a machine. It’s distinct from 회귀 (hoegwi), which means regression: dying and restarting your own life from an earlier point.
Which time travel K-drama has a happy ending?
Lovely Runner, Marry My Husband, Mr. Queen, Reborn Rich (arguably), The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract and Splash Splash Love all end well. Moon Lovers, Nine and Signal do not.
Are any time travel Korean dramas available in Hindi?
Lovely Runner has a Hindi dub on MX Player. Netflix and Prime Video have both been adding Hindi audio to Korean titles over the last two years, though coverage is patchy and older dramas rarely get it.
What’s the shortest time travel K-drama?
Splash Splash Love, at two episodes. Perfect Marriage Revenge and The Story of Park’s Marriage Contract are both twelve.
Is Lovely Runner actually about time travel?
Yes. Im Sol travels fifteen years into the past, multiple times, and the plot depends on what changes each time she does.
Do I need to know Korean history to watch the Joseon ones?
No. Mr. Queen, Splash Splash Love and Bon Appétit, Your Majesty assume nothing. Moon Lovers is loosely tied to real Goryeo succession history, and the show explains what you need as it goes.
Which time travel K-drama should I avoid?
Nothing on this list is a waste, but The King: Eternal Monarch and Sisyphus both have a middle section that loses a lot of viewers. Don’t make either one your first.
The short version
If you’ve never watched a time travel Korean drama, start with Lovely Runner and see whether the genre works for you. If it does, Signal will show you how serious it can get, Twinkling Watermelon will show you how sad, and Mr. Queen will show you how stupid and wonderful.
Twenty-five dramas, roughly four hundred episodes, and every single one of them built on the same wish you’ve had at least once this year.
