Last night Susan and I watched our 100th K-drama. We started watching about three and a half years ago, at a time when we were growing increasingly frustrated about what to watch in US television’s supposed Golden Age. We didn’t like any of the most highly praised shows. Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad: they all seemed to glorify violence and general nastiness, not to mention completely misrepresentinging the idea of what makes an antihero. And the shows we did like had all jumped the shark, whether it was the neverending failed reboots of the DC, Star Trek, and Marvel universes, or the shift from comedy to drama in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
We wanted to watch something fun.
So there we were in late November, flipping through Netflix in complete frustration, when a crazy title caught our eye: Strong Girl Bong-Soon. What was this? A superhero story? From South Korea? We’d heard of K-Pop, but we’d never heard of K-Dramas, but what the hell, nothing else was interesting, so why not try it?
We loved it. From the very first episode, all the way to the end. Strong Girl (or Strong Woman as it is more correctly titled) is not a show for everybody. A weird mashup of romcom, superhero adventure, and the Three Stooges (feces wine, anyone?), show was, through it all, incredibly sweet and fun. It wasn’t remotely perfect. The main villain was a serial killer/kidnapper, the tone of which didn’t really mesh with the rest of the show. (We have since discovered that a frequent flaw of both good and bad K-dramas is the addition of serial killers into the mix. Why? Who knows? Part of the fun of K-dramas is they often go off in odd narrative directions.) But the rest of the show was so relentlessly good-natured and surprisingly amusing that we wanted to watch more K-dramas immediately.
So we did. Ghost stories and screwball comedies. Sageuks and time-traveling cops. Weightlifting fairies and inventors pretending to be robots. Chaebol villains and chaebol leading men. Gumihos and shamans. Our favorites were the comedies and ghost stories (Korean ghost stories tend to be played more for comedy or pathos than horror), but we also have enjoyed more than a few dramas. My Mister, anyone? Not all of them are great (despite our best efforts we have picked some real clunkers), but many have turned out to be true gems.
Best of all? There are rarely any sequels. The typical K-drama is sixteen episodes long (occasionally as short as twelve or as long as twenty (though there are some shows that can run much longer)), with episodes twice a week for eight weeks, and that’s it. When show ends, it ends. There is no second season. The writers, actors, and directors move on to other projects, and the viewer moves on to watch something else as well.
This is the single biggest difference from US TV. The system is not set up to beat every last ounce of possible viewership out of the audience over years and years of stale shows and little story development. Shows tell their stories and move on.
What a novel idea!
There are other aspects of K-dramas we love, but this sense of narrative finality is probably what we most appreciate. We do enjoy the almost complete lack of world-weary cynicism and irony that deaden so many US shows (US movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s also have little cynicism and irony, which is probably why I love them as much as I like K-dramas.), but what we really, really like is the fact that K-dramas have a beginning and end.
Just like books.
