Before I can explain why I love Kdramas, I need to explain, to those who don’t know, what Kdramas are.
Think television and movies. South Korean with English subtitles. In every genre, just as in American television: drama, thriller, police, crime, legal, romance, action-adventure, politics, comedy-drama, horror, medical, reality, fantasy. Just no Westerns. But lots of historical dramas set in the 1700s full of palace intrigue and class struggles.
And fabulous sound tracks that you can stream on YouTube.
Kdramas are typically fourteen to sixteen episodes of an hour each. Very few get a second or third season. You can watch them on Netflix and Rakuten Viki, an Asian streaming service that also features shows as they are aired on Korean TV channels – usually two episodes a week.
My first Kdrama was Love Rain, a 2012 drama that I watched with my friend, Dani in 2018. It was a bittersweet story about the ill-fated love between two college students in the 70s whose children meet in the present day and fall in love. It was bittersweet to watch it with her; she was fighting cancer and died in 2019.
But I fell in love with Kdrama at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown when I watched Crash Landing on You, the story of a South Korean entrepreneur, Son Ye-jin, and a North Korean military captain, Ri Jeong-hyeok, who meet when Ye-jin is blown by a tornado into the DMZ while paragliding.
What is it about Kdramas I love? What need in me do they fill?
It has to do with stories.
From my earliest memory, I loved stories and couldn’t wait until I could read so I could “hear” more stories. I loved books because they were full of stories and I loved, even as a very small child, to invent and create stories.
Kdramas are visual stories. Like in a really well-written novel, the story unfolds gradually as you come to know and love the characters. You walk with them through sorrow, anguish, loss, fear, hope, delight, amazement, and love. Their struggles and triumphs capture your heart. I’ve always loved big, thick, slow-moving novels—Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte. Kdramas are like classic novels in their structure.
Stories of every kind transport and transform me. They take me to places of possibility and purpose, provide me hope in the midst of a world full of despair. They are transcendent and universal and teach me to believe that a rainbow follows a thundering storm. And every story teaches, not just about life, but also about story telling. By paying attention to their structure, the plot and character development, and use of language, I can improve my own writing.
