The King of Tears, Lee Bang-won

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.

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.

I don't think this show deserves to see the light of day. It wasn't worth the animal abuse that they condoned for a short shot in the show. Not only did they tie a real horse up and force it to land on its head, but the horse unfortunately died shortly after. If you're considering watching this show... don't. No show is worth the torture and death of an animal, especially not this one. There are many dramas that follow this unoriginal plot like this one that don't partake in cruelty like this.

I hope this show gets cancelled, and they people behind this suffer the consequences.

Don't support animal abuse in films or any other form of entertainment. The poor horse involved in this film endured horrific treatment which led to the unnecessary death of this innocent animal. They actually wired the horses legs together to make it fall and killed it. This is just beyond belief. Why was this allowed to happen? This is not entertainment.