A week before the Korean television series—or K-drama—Twenty Five Twenty One (2022) was to air its finale, fans were in a state of frenzied expectation. Since the first episode, the series had presented the audience with a prickly problem. The protagonist was a fencing champion named Na Hee-do and, ostensibly, her love interest was a journalist named Baek Yi-jin. However, Hee-do had a teenaged daughter, Min-chae, whose last name was not Baek, but Kim.
For 15 episodes, as Twenty Five Twenty One became one of the most-watched items on Netflix India—and occasionally ranked higher than Malaika Arora on Twitter India’s trending topics—writer Kwon Do-Eun kept the audience on tenterhooks. Episode after episode went by with viewers unable to figure out who Min-chae’s father may be, and if Yi-jin was Hee-do’s husband.
Crash Landing On You (2019), one of the most popular K-dramas of all time takes the enemies-to-lovers trope quite literally by making the heroine South Korean and the hero, North Korean
Dali and Cocky Prince a 2021 South Korean series is about the romance between a restaurateur and a young woman from a wealthy family who are trying to save a struggling art museum
Run On is a love story of a former sprinter-turned-sports agent and a subtitle translator
By 30 March at least one fan had lost it. On that day, for a brief window of time, the Wikipedia entry for Twenty Five Twenty One listed its genres as “coming of age” and “Finding Mr. Kim”. This was quickly fixed by Wikipedia’s editors. Another fan dug up the edit summary and found the genre had been re-edited multiple times to read “Happy Mr. Kim Ending”, “Who is Min-chae’s Dad?” and “suspense,” among other things. Over about nine hours, someone kept editing the genre each time it was fixed. Finally, the Wiki editors put up a plea: “Please stop messing with the genre.”
Welcome to K-drama fandom—a tribe of nerds, lunatics, overthinkers, overreactors and lovers of good stories.
The popularity of K-dramas seems to have taken some—particularly film and TV critics in English-language media—by surprise. It’s as though they feel they were betrayed by the zeitgeist. While they’d been scouring through Western entertainment to find shows worth recommending, audiences found K-dramas on their own. They voluntarily sat down to watch wordy foreign shows with hour-long episodes and subtitles. Western entertainment encouraged binge-watching, dropping entire seasons at one go. K-dramas, on the other hand, held on to appointment viewing, dropping two episodes a week, and the audiences grew.
"ULTIMATELY, WE STAY WITH K-DRAMAS BECAUSE THEY TELL GOOD STORIES WITH SENSITIVITY AND CHARM, AND THE WRITING USUALLY COMPENSATES FOR THE FLAWS. "Deepanjana Pal
K-dramas may sound like the longform of popular entertainment, especially since many of the narratives are richly literary. However, this is also a genre committed to being both accessible and commercial. Product placements for everything from sandwiches to jewellery are rampant. For instance, the romantic comedy Run On (2020) spent a good five minutes of an episode advertising a contact lens brand, including a scene in which the two male leads, while putting on a lens, enact the romantic cliché of gazing deep into one another’s eyes. The whole thing feels like an in-joke between the writer and the audience.