Curious about…Korean Soap Operas.
I’m sitting alone in the Korean Airlines lounge in Incheon airport in Seoul - it’s the middle of the night and I feel like I ought to be dancing on the walls and ceiling like Christoper Walken in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” video. However, there is some appropriate drama going on - a lone TV is playing Korean soap operas. My good friend and college Dana Cho and I often discuss the melodramatic plot lines and extreme characterizations, so I thought I would look more deeply into the genre, sitting as I am, a captive audience.
Korean dramas (한국드라마) are televised dramas, in a miniseries format, produced in Korean. Many of these dramas have become popular throughout Asia and have contributed to the general phenomenon of theKorean wave, known as “Hallyu”, and also “Drama Fever” in some countries. The most popular Korean dramas have also become popular in other parts of the world such as Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
There are two main genres of Korean dramas, generally speaking. The first genre is similar to American soap operas but without the never ending plot and overtly sexual content. These dramas typically involve conflicts such as single and marital relationships, money bargaining, relationships between in-laws (usually between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law), and often complicated love triangles where the female hero usually falls in love with the main character who may treat her badly since the beginning, instead of the one who always cares for her. These dramas last anywhere from 16 episodes to over 100.
The other main genre is Korean historical dramas (also known as sa geuk), which are fictionalized dramatizations of Korean history. These historical dramas typically involve very complex story lines with elaborate costumes, sets and special effects. Martial arts, sword fighting and horsemanship are frequently a big component of these historical dramas as well. In both cases, whether historical or modern dramas, Korean shows are characterized by excellent production quality, characters with depth, intelligent scriptwriting but largely reliant on the use of archetypal characters.
The first Korean drama to gain widespread popularity in Japan was Winter Sonata which was broadcast in 2003. The program was aired twice in the same year due to high demand from viewers. Former Japanese first lady Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, has often proclaimed her love of Korean drama even claiming that it is the secret to her youthful appearance.
What Of It? To me, soap operas act as a massive magnifying glass, taking the nuances and taboos of a culture and dramatizing them - I remember a lengthy business trip a couple of years ago where I went from watching German soap operas in Munich - melancholic, moody, serious, almost existential in the way that only Germans can be - to essentially the same shows but set in Sao Paulo in Brazil, where they were full of sex, screaming, slapping and hyperbolised family drama. In Korea, there seems to be a middle-ground filled with a lot of unrequited love, angry meddling mothers-in-law, valiant longing (and often noble death) and lots of pensive gazes into the horizon, lost looks in cars and on the street, and of course, the requisite socially mismatched lovers.
I am Curious about entertainment that acts as a cultural window, about stories that help decode and communicate the subtleties and taboos of a culture, of contrasts between cultures as seen though the lens of something as simultaneously simplistic and complex as a half-hour TV melodrama.
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