This essay explores the global city of Seoul and its history of uneven development through the genre of Korean drama or K-drama (serialized televisual narratives). All released in the first decade of the new millennium, What Happened in Bali (2004), East of Eden (2008), and Giant (2010) depict pivotal nodes in Seoul’s transformation into a global city: the rapid modernization of the 1960s–1980s, the frenetic real estate development that created urban districts like Gangnam, and the economic tumult that followed the IMF crisis. Taken together, these K-dramas offer a trenchant critique of global capitalism by dramatizing problems of uneven development, precarious labour, and social inequality that persist in twenty-first-century Seoul. Furthermore, the essay traces a genealogy of disaffection with the neoliberal economic policies, authoritarian politics, and capitalist logic that led to Seoul’s wealth and status as a global city. The essay argues that K-dramas perform vital cultural work by conveying to their audiences the suffering and trauma caused by asymmetries in the development of global cities. To this end, the essay analyses Squid Game (2021) as a necropolitical text that might perhaps signal the end of the global city as a place of sociocultural innovation and better futures.