The King of Tears, Lee Bang-won

I totally agree with rkpmthk's observation. I really wanted to see this and I started watching it at a Korean friend's place - couldn't continue. Animal cruelty is the most abhorrent thing to me and this just turned my stomach; then again, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

The series was great. Every episode of the series was wonderful and exciting and the actor of the main character "Joo Sang Wook" was great in it. His acting was very cool and impressive and I liked him very much. His facial expression and acting in different scenes made me think that he is a versatile actor. He's a really talented actor. Definitely, he's been in the industry for so long, but he's still able to deliver amazing performances.

And about the story of the series, because it was completely based on Korean history and historical facts, it was very attractive and exciting to me.

It was such a touching series Thanks to all the creators of this series.

The show overall is tasteless. It's not only tasteless but they killed a horse while filming. Absolutely terrible. Whoever came up with the idea to tie the horse should get fired and should go to jail for animal cruelty. Disgusting.

The tv series itself is great. It's like a Korean Game of Thrones - many characters and parties fighting for the throne, each has bad side and good side. Complex characters, great writing and storyline. It's like the dark truth of history, not a fairytale-like story like many other historical kdramas. This is definitely the best Korean tv show I have seen!

All the complaints and bad ratings are because of the animal abuse scandal. One horse died during filming, sadly. While this is very unfortunate and I hope the responsible ones were fired and the necessary actions were taken to avoid such abuse in the future, I don't think it has anything to do with the quality of the series itself. There were probably a few production workers who work with the horses, they made this terrible mistake. But there are hundreds of others, innocent people, who work on this production! The great actors, the script writers, the costume designers, the set designers, the cameramen, etc! Don't degrade their work too just because a few others made that terrible mistake! It's as if you canceled the great movie The Pianist because of the director Polanski's scandals. You can't cancel or degrade a whole production, which is the great work of hunderds of good people, because of the scandal of a few people.

Firstly, the low ratings are due to the death of a horse on set. Focusing only on the show, it is one of my all-time favourite non-romance historical k-drama. The show is paced wonderfully, not too slow and not too fast. It also makes the various titles and ceremonies involved easy to understand and remember. Unlike most other historical k-dramas, the acting is not too over-the-top that it feels unreal. The actors do a very good job of making the scenes real, engrossing and believable. All events depicted in the series are also almost completely accurate (the places, people and decisions shown are accurate, while the dialogues are obviously fictional). As a bonus, the series also shows the buildings depicted in the series which have survived to this day in the end-credits.