The ‘0% Actor’ Label on Park Jinyoung Was Fake From the Start

The “0% actor” label that stuck to former GOT7 member Park Jinyoung this spring was fake from the start. The 0.8% belonged to a failed show, not a failed actor, and what changed in the seven months since is not the actor but the drama built around him. Put his two 2026 dramas side by side and you can watch Korean TV pin a show’s failure on one man.

Official trailer with English subtitles, Netflix K-Content (757,000 views as of Oct. 25, 2026).

Same actor, 0.8% and 10%, seven months apart

In Korea, TV ratings are still the scoreboard every drama is judged by, and Nielsen Korea’s numbers land in the headlines the morning after each episode. For a cable drama, 10% is hit territory. Under 1% is the kind of number that becomes the story.

This spring, Park’s JTBC drama Still Shining drew 0.8% for its eighth episode, the lowest ever for JTBC’s Friday drama slot (Nielsen Korea, nationwide pay-TV households; Money Today, Apr. 3, 2026). About seven months later, episode 4 of his tvN drama 100 Days of Deception averaged 9.0% and peaked at 10% minute by minute (same measure; Slist, Oct. 19; Etoday, Oct. 22). The show also reached No. 4 on Netflix’s global Top 10 for non-English TV for Oct. 12 to 18 (Etoday, Oct. 22).

The label was printed in a headline back in the spring. As Still Shining was ending, Money Today ran Park’s farewell comments under the headline “Ratings are at 0%. Will it reach anyone?” (Apr. 3). That is the moment a failure number gets parked next to an actor’s name, and “0% actor” is simply that framing said out loud.

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Directing and writing made the 0.8%

Still Shining ran for 10 episodes from March 6 to April 3, 2026 (Wikipedia, “Still Shining”). It opened at 2.1% and fell every week, to 0.9% in episode 6 and 0.754% in episode 8 (The Fact, Apr. 4; Money Today, Apr. 3). That was lower even than the slot’s previous drama, Love Me, whose worst night was 1.1% (Money Today, Apr. 3).

Official trailer with English subtitles, Netflix K-Content.

Viewers aimed their anger at what was on screen, not at him. The biggest complaint was a scene in episodes 7 and 8 that read as a character driving after drinking. One viewer filed a complaint with the government’s public petition portal, saying the show kept using the scene as a tension device without treating it as dangerous, and the production team said it “accepts the criticism” (The Fact, Apr. 4). The other complaint was a plot that kept breaking the couple up and putting them back together until viewers gave up (same report). None of the coverage at the time named Park’s acting as the reason people left.

The audience that did watch was not walking out on him either. Netflix’s own clip of Park and Kim Min-ju’s workshop date from the show has passed 2 million views on YouTube, more than any official clip from his current hit.

Official clip, Netflix Philippines (about 2 million views as of Oct. 25, 2026).

In the drama that hit 10%, the acting is what people saw first

100 Days of Deception is tvN’s 16-episode 20th-anniversary special. Set in Gyeongseong in 1932, it is a spy romance between Lee Ga-gyeong (Kim You-jung), a pickpocket turned undercover agent, and Sato Hideo (Park), an interpreter for the Japanese Government-General whose Korean name is Kim Tae-woong (The Korea Times, Sept. 29). Gyeongseong is what Seoul was called under Japanese colonial rule. The numbers climbed through the first four episodes: 5.3% for episode 1, 7.6% for episode 2 (My Daily, Oct. 16), then 9.0% with a 10% peak for episode 4. On Good Data’s FUNdex buzz chart it ranked No. 2 among dramas with a 20.84% share, and Park ranked No. 3 among all drama cast members at 5.35%, up 1.70 points from the week before (Top Star News, Oct. 20).

“When the enemy becomes your doctor”: Hideo treats Ga-gyeong’s injured ankle, then warns her not to get caught if she means what she says. Netflix K-Content, English subtitles (108,000 views).

The reaction to his acting is the opposite of the spring. He plays a man who moves between Korean, Japanese and English, and he said it was his first time acting in foreign languages, so he drilled the lines until they came out naturally (Wikitree, Oct. 2). Ilgan Sports wrote that he left “an intense first impression” from his first scene (Oct. 12). My Daily praised how finely he drew a son’s resentment toward his father and his hunger to be acknowledged (Oct. 16). Viewers at the episode 1 screening posted that the show “broke the stereotype that a first episode is boring setup” and that “tvN and director Yoo In-shik clearly went all in” (summarized by Wikitree, Oct. 2).

Ga-gyeong, posing as a maid, warns Hideo during an assassination attempt on his father. Netflix Philippines (68,000 views).

The cast on tvN’s official channel, with English subtitles: an hour of Kim You-jung, Park Jinyoung, Kim Hyun-joo, Lee Moo-saeng and Jin Seon-kyu talking, teasing and dancing (675,000 views).

8.4%, 0.8%, 9.0%: a career line with one dip

Lay out his whole career and the 0.8% stands alone. In 2023 he won Best New Actor in film at the Baeksang Arts Awards, Korea’s version of the Golden Globes, for Christmas Carol. His first project after military service (May 2023 to November 2024), Our Unwritten Seoul (2025), drew 8.4% and stayed in Netflix’s global non-English Top 10 for five straight weeks (Wikipedia; Korea JoongAng Daily, July 9, 2025). That role earned him a 2026 Baeksang nomination for Best Actor in television (Wikipedia).

Year	Drama	Ratings (Nielsen Korea)	Netflix
2025	Our Unwritten Seoul (tvN)	8.4%	Global non-English Top 10, 5 weeks
2026	Still Shining (JTBC)	0.8% (episode 8)	—
2026	100 Days of Deception (tvN)	9.0% avg, 10% peak (episode 4)	Global non-English TV No. 4

Our Unwritten Seoul, official clip with English subtitles, Netflix K-Content (619,000 views).

Park winning Best New Actor (Film) at the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards for Christmas Carol, official Baeksang channel.

8.4%, 0.8%, then 9.0%. When an actor has a hit on each side of a flop, the cause of the flop is inside that one show. And the criticism of Still Shining really was about its directing and its story.

The record before that runs the same way. Fans who found him through Sato Hideo can work backward through these:

• He Is Psychometric (tvN, 2019), his first lead, as a teenager who reads secrets by touch. The official trailer on Viki has 1.96 million views.
• The Devil Judge (tvN, 2021), as junior judge Kim Ga-on opposite Ji Sung.
• Yumi’s Cells 2 (TVING, 2022), as Yoo Ba-bi. TVING’s clip of the episode 4 kiss, told through the characters’ cartoon “cells,” has 2.68 million views.
• Christmas Carol (2022), the twin-revenge thriller that won him the Baeksang.

The industry shares the credit and hands him the blame

The 10% is not Park’s alone either. In the cast buzz ranking Kim You-jung is No. 2 at 9.38%, ahead of him (Top Star News, Oct. 20), and posts collecting her best scenes have been circulating on the community site theqoo (same report). The director is Yoo In-shik of Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Episode 5 then slipped to 6.5% on Oct. 24, on a night the reviews were raving about the acting (Nielsen Korea; OSEN, Oct. 25). Nobody wrote that the cast got worse overnight.

That is exactly the contradiction in the label. If a rating is the report card of an entire production, then 0.8% was never his alone either. Park did not suddenly get better in seven months. He met a strong script and a strong director and got the chance to show what he already had. When asked why he signed on, he named “the script, the director and the writer” first (Wikitree, Sept. 16).

Until Nov. 29, the only question left is double digits

100 Days of Deception is scheduled to end on Nov. 29 (Esquire India, Oct. 16). Two numbers are left to watch over the last five weeks: whether the average breaks into double digits, and how many weeks it holds on Netflix’s non-English chart.

Episode 7 preview, tvN DRAMA (posted Oct. 25, 2026).

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Sources: Money Today (Apr. 3, 2026); The Fact (Apr. 4, 2026); Wikipedia, “Still Shining” and “Jinyoung (entertainer, born 1994)”; The Korea Times (Sept. 29, 2026); My Daily (Oct. 16, 2026); Slist (Oct. 19, 2026); Etoday (Oct. 22, 2026); Top Star News (Oct. 20, 2026); Wikitree (Sept. 16 and Oct. 2, 2026); Ilgan Sports (Oct. 12, 2026); OSEN and Atstar1 (Oct. 25, 2026, episode 5 ratings); Korea JoongAng Daily (July 9, 2025); Esquire India (Oct. 16, 2026). Ratings are Nielsen Korea, nationwide pay-TV households. YouTube view counts as of Oct. 25, 2026. Featured image: Park Jinyoung on the set of 100 Days of Deception, still from BH Entertainment’s official YouTube video via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0, cropped.