Category: K-dramas, Mutable Books

Five Years of K-Dramas and Counting

Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and this is one of the reasons why – I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy watching K-dramas! (Not really. I’m just too lazy.) At any rate, Susan and I have been watching K-dramas for five years now, driving people crazy with our proselytizing, and enjoying every minute of it. Nerd that I am, I keep a spreadsheet that rates every show (I used to do this for my favorite movies too), so I figured what better way to share the joy than to post my spreadsheet! With ratings, brief comments, and everything! How could this not generate a million pageviews, right? Anyway, the spreadsheet is simple. Shows are listed in the order we watched them, from Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon to Love in Contract (gotta love the titles), with a few extra columns showing whether or not the show’s on Netflix, or is SFF, and comments at the end. The shows are often too long, often start better than they end (they’re frequently written on the fly), and almost always without any of the irony or cynicism of so much American entertainment these days. Which is one of the main reasons we love them. And if you like fantasy, especially ghost stories, no one does it better. Enjoy!

My K-Drama List

(Sadly the formatting doesn’t quite work on the phone. Maybe someday I’ll figure WordPress out. )

Why do I watch K-Dramas? Sky Castle, which my wife and I just finished, is an excellent example. It’s too long (twenty episodes rather than the usual sixteen), is an over-the-top soap opera, and has a central plot about high school students. (Boys Over Flowers? Blecch.) If Sky Castle were an American show we wouldn’t even pick up the remote. So why did we watch it? And like it?

Because K-dramas frequently leaven their histrionics with humor, something I can’t remember ever seeing in an American soap opera unless the show is also a parody. (Dallas, anyone?) But Sky Castle is no parody. Sky Castle takes its characters as seriously as any four-hankie weepfest. Even as it skewers those characters and the insanely competitive Korean educational system that is its ultimately satirical focus, the show demonstrates as much sympathy and understanding for its villains and buffoons as it does for their tortured victims.

I can’t imagine any American show combining straight-up melodrama and biting satire in the same way. In Korea, the two meet up in surprisingly sweet and horribly funny combinations all the time.

Or maybe I just need to watch Big Little Lies.