The King of Tears, Lee Bang-won

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.