What to Watch After Itaewon Class: Three K-Dramas That Hit the Same Note
If Itaewon Class left you wanting revenge with a future attached, these three follow-ups keep the fight personal.
Itaewon Class lands because Park Sae-ro-yi refuses to let Jangga decide what his life is worth. A wronged high schooler turns one Itaewon pub into a 15-year challenge against a food empire, and the grudge never feels small because it keeps pulling other people into orbit. Jo Yi-seo brings sharp awakening energy, Oh Soo-ah keeps the old wound complicated, and Chairman Jang Dae-hee gives the fight a face. The mood is revenge, duty, found family, and the release of watching stubborn work become power.
1. Vincenzo
Same cathartic revenge register as Itaewon Class. 2021, tvN / Netflix.
Pick Vincenzo if the Jangga fight made you want another corrupt empire put under pressure.
Park Jae-bum’s 2021 tvN / Netflix drama follows an Italian-Korean mafia consigliere who returns to Seoul for hidden gold and ends up taking down the corrupt Babel Group. The overlap with Itaewon Class is direct: revenge, dread, duty, class friction, plot-dense pacing, and a cathartic ending. In both, power is protected by money, reputation, and people who assume ordinary workers will fold first.
The difference is flavor. Sae-ro-yi builds slowly, step by step, with DanBam becoming proof that a punished person can still create a future. Vincenzo moves faster and darker. It is less about a pub becoming a home and more about a rotten system meeting someone willing to be worse than polite society expects.
That makes it the next step if your favorite part of Itaewon Class was not the romance triangle or the business ladder, but the fantasy of consequences arriving with teeth.
Read the Vincenzo review → /reviews/vincenzo/
2. The Glory
Same long-revenge payoff as Itaewon Class. 2022, Netflix.
Pick The Glory if Sae-ro-yi’s 15-year refusal to forget was the hook.
Kim Eun-sook’s 2022 Netflix drama follows a bullying survivor who spends 17 years engineering revenge against the five tormentors who walked away free. That gives it the same cathartic promise as Itaewon Class: time does not erase harm just because the powerful would prefer a clean reset. A ruined young person survives, waits, learns, and turns memory into a plan.
The register is colder. Itaewon Class carries awakening and found-family heat around the revenge. The Glory leans into betrayal, dread, and isolation. It is slow-burn rather than plot-dense, so the pleasure comes from pressure gathering rather than businesses moving, alliances shifting, and public wins stacking up.
Choose it when you want the revenge score turned up and the comfort score turned down. If Chairman Jang Dae-hee made you hungry for a harsher kind of justice, this is the sharper branch of that craving.
Read the The Glory review → /reviews/the-glory/
3. Reply 1988
Same ensemble and found-family pull as Itaewon Class. 2015, tvN.
Pick Reply 1988 if DanBam mattered to you as much as the grudge.
Lee Woo-jung’s 2015 tvN drama follows five childhood friends and their families sharing one Ssangmun-dong alley in Seoul from 1988 to 1994. On paper, it is the curveball: no revenge tag, no plot-dense business fight, no cathartic takedown. The match sits in the ensemble feeling. Itaewon Class works because Sae-ro-yi’s fight stops being only his. The pub becomes a place where ambition, loyalty, hurt, and chosen people gather.
Reply 1988 takes that found-family pull and removes the war against an empire. The taste tags are joy-nostalgia, tenderness, healing, and a redemptive-quiet ending. It is slower, warmer, and more ordinary by design. That can be exactly right after a revenge drama that kept asking you to stay tense.
Go here if you left Itaewon Class thinking less about Jangga and more about the people who made DanBam feel worth protecting.
Read the Reply 1988 review → /reviews/reply-1988/
What you actually want next
If you wanted revenge with a bigger bite, pick Vincenzo. If you wanted the long grudge without the found-family warmth, pick The Glory. If you wanted the people around Sae-ro-yi more than the climb against Jangga, pick Reply 1988.
That is the real decision after Itaewon Class: punishment, patience, or home. Stay in the fight, go colder, or let yourself land somewhere softer. Or browse by mood at quizfandom.com/find-your-next-kdrama.