It is very sad to see how Korean broadcasting company SBS has destroyed the ratings of the excellent crime drama The Killing Vote since it began airing on August 10th.
Not only by switching it from an originally planned twice-a-week drama to its present once-a-week, but also managing to schedule it on a weeknight that has seen constant postponements of The Killing Vote since its 7th episode aired in September.
A scheduling problem that, yet again last night, caused The Killing Vote, Episode 11 not to air on SBS as planned.
The reason?
Just like last week’s planned episode of A Good Day to Be a Dog, The Killing Vote, Episode 11 was scheduled in a time slot needed to air a baseball game — Game #3 in the 2023 Pro Baseball Playoffs.
The Killing Vote‘s disastrous scheduling
That a 12-episode K-drama that premiered on August 10th, and was originally scheduled to end on October 26th, is still ongoing and not expected to get its finale until November 16th at the earliest is problematic.
Especially as SBS executives could have and probably did foresee all the scheduling problems the 12-episode drama would reap in its time slot several months before it even began airing.
After all, while The Killing Vote‘s audience was almost immediately negatively impacted by SBS dropping it to a once-a-week drama from its first episode, the K-drama was also then postponed for three weeks starting on September 28th due to SBS airing various segments of the Asian Games.
A major sporting event that was years in the planning, so not something that was a surprise suddenly dropped on SBS executives’ desks a week before The Killing Vote was due to premiere.
That SBS executives then thought a once-a-week drama could survive with its ratings intact after the three-week disruption to its schedule those Asian Games caused is quite laughable.
Throw in last night’s baseball game, and whatever else might be coming next, and it is a wonder the Korean drama has any audience left.
That it does then is a testament to the excellent job the writer, the actors and the crew have done in creating a show that deserved a much higher audience than it has been able to garner.
Will The Killing Vote ever get its series finale?
With that in mind, if you are still watching The Killing Vote –– a superb crime drama whose ratings have dropped from Episode 1’s 4.1 percent to last week’s 3.2 percent of the audience share –– when is Episode 11 likely to air?
While The Killing Vote, Episode 11 is currently scheduled to air on November 9th at 21:00 (KST), with its series finale airing on November 16th, should a little league baseball game from a kindergarten in Gyeonggi be ongoing at the same time, the drama may yet be postponed.
Honestly though, and joking aside, it is the superb cast and crew of The Killing Vote I feel sorry for, as I doubt any of them signed up for this scheduling mess.
Then again, with more and more K-dramas now appearing on streaming platforms like Netflix as exclusives, and with Netflix about to spend $2.5 billion on Korean properties over the next four years, maybe it is about time Korean actors targeted their job-searching efforts towards streaming platforms?
That way, not only will they be paid well, but their dramas will air on time and without ongoing postponements due to random sporting events.
In other words, just like much of the audience has now left traditional public and cable TV for on-demand streaming platforms, maybe Korean actors should do the same thing.
At least then they could be sure the dramas they work so hard to create would get the release schedule they were promised.