Netflix to invest $2.5B in South Korea to make TV shows, movies
reuters.com
reuters.com
>Anyway I hope the growing popularity of foreign shows leads to western media taking time to reassess what people are looking for in shows.
Agree. The age of everything being ironic, sassy, and whiny needs to end.
Looking at you, modern Star Trek - a prime example of ironic, sassy and whiny not necessarily being any smarter.
Honestly, I'm shocked that SNW even came out, after seeing what an abomination Discovery was.
Looking at you, The Orville.
And not every science fiction show has to evolve into a horror/zombie series.
Looking at you, Firefly.
I have never heard this said about Firefly. I consider the show to be more about human experimenting and creating super soldiers (River Tam) and that it just got cancelled before they could really get into it. I guess Serenity was more about conflicts with Reavers but I wouldn't exactly pin the Horror/Zombie label on the series because of that.
That said, it is funny how the much more recent and relevant The Expanse did have horror/zombie elements.
Honestly, it's time to move on and find some other way to tell stories.
I hope not, I want more 'Barry' or 'Succession' or 'Better Call Saul' even if they share some already seen templates.
Also, I don't know what shows you're watching, but it's hard to understand what you're describing. A lot of anime (including some of the most popular) are full of cynicism and irony. Evangelion, attack on titan, ghost in the shell, etc.
Korean shows especially tend to have this. Squid game being a prime example, but also most of the revenge shows (itaewon class, the glory, etc).
Also, overacting is purposeful in Japanese shows (annoyingly), but less so in serious Korean dramas. Rom-coms everywhere purposely have overacting, because it's funny.
The Oscar winning movie Parasite is also steeped with pessimism and cynicism.
I think people find the differing tropes to be refreshing, but once you recognize that culture’s tropes you’ll be at square one again.
It's easier to articulate in pop music, where a large chunk of popular pop songs is written, composed and demo-tape'd/vocal-guide'd by the same dozen or so of Scandinavan service companies, for both Western and Korean pop artists equally. But while the Western pop stars may act as if they're the auteurs of "their music" rather than being entertainers who were given a piece of music to sing as part of a carefully crafted product vision, in Korea, this is relatively above-board and neither talent nor consumers pretend otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, the Korean pop music industry is terrible in many other ways (as is the pop industry in general), but there's something to be said for content not trying to fool you about what it is.
In other words, a show is just a show, instead of the way it is in modern Western media, which is being an instrument of social change first and only incidentally a show. The latter is exhausting.
Often I point to “Brokeback Mountain” as an example of progressive Western media made by grownups.
All art is a form of personal expression and it is full of new views and political change. I think that the difference is that in the West reactionary criticism permeates all social media.
If a Japanese show tells the story of a set of characters fighting the global goverment injustices its viewers enjoy the show. If an American show tries to do the same a very small part of the population but very noisy will criticize it as "communist" and "politicized" instead of enjoying the real feelings of love and justice that humans enjoy in their stories.
any links to back this up?
It also happens every year that the same pop song is licensed multiple times into different markets where it's given localized lyrics and sung by locally popular pop artists. I'm too scatter-brained to immediately think of a recent example, but check out e.g. "Hot Summer" existing in German and Korean girl band versions.
I prefer art that depicts life as it could and ought to be.
I'm from Germany and all my mother watches these days are Korean dramas on Netflix.
She tells me that, in contrast to Western productions, they show more feelings and are less "cold" when interacting with each other.
Shes a gentle soul and there are some very genteel K-Drama that don't include sex, violence, rude jokes or dark themes. Which is quite hard to find in UK and American programmes these days.
They just want some feel-good stuff to watch and I fully support that. :-)
> She tells me that, in contrast to Western productions, they show more feelings and are less "cold" when interacting with each other.
This reads as pretty extreme over-acting, to me. Think, the very most over-the-top acting from '40s and '50s US film musicals. But, how much your actors should be acting and how much they should be ACTING! is a matter of taste, I suppose.
These days I prefer the Japanese indie rom coms when on a trans pacific flight with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American options available. They just feel less produced and more authentic than the Korean rom coms (but of course, they are produced to be like that).
Crash Landing on You was a heartwarming (and cheesy) story told in a very "PG" way. It not only appealed to me, my wife, and our friends, it appealed to my modest Indian in-laws.
Dark, Babylon, How to sell drugs online, and 1899 (RIP) are all fantastic series.
Korean dramas by default are 16-20 eps and end there, and if they're done well, stick the landing and provide a satisfying ending to a complete, pre-planned narrative arc, which Dark also managed to pull off.
No Lost syndrome there.
For me, it doesn't feel like it though. I got tired of k-dramas (and I usually watch the 16 episode ones, instead of 20), because it feels that around the 12~13 episode mark they throw in an unnecessary twist or something, just to get to the 16 episode mark. I do feel like they would be miles better if they usually aimed for 12~14
May I speculate that asian cultures are simply more prone to that due to their languages and possibly culture?
Anime content may look stereotyped in some sense, but I've interacted with enough Japanese citizens to know that they emphasize a lot the emotional aspect in their verbal (through tones) and non-verbal communication.
But what do you expect? They are editing books from 100 years ago to "bend with the times". Books! As if having an informative introduction or contextualization to the book but leaving it alone would be a worse option.
1. Publishers getting tons of free publicity by announcing cosmetic changes to old books, and
2. Netflix investing $2.5 billion in South Korean programming.
As for 1 above, the publisher of Roald Dahl's books have released the original AND edited versions of his books, thus creating new content for people to purchase and demand for consumers to rage-buy the old version.
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/matilda-roald-dahl-rewrit...
My dude. Some of the most popular shows of the past 5-10 years across Asia have prominently included the topics you think of as "woke". You somehow think this is only a thing in America, but that's your weird weeby goggles.
The biggest Korean series on Netflix is absurdly "woke": I don't know how one could watch Squid Game and miss how critical it is of capitalism. I also find most movies by Bong Joon-ho to be similarly "woke" - not at the periphery, but as a central theme of the work - for instance Snowpiercer, Parasite and Okja, and they are hits in Korea and abroad.
Meta commentary: your appreciation for diverse types of movies (and not just the same-old bland Hollywood ones) is pretty woke too!
Wokeness is a recent aesthetic trend, liberal politics is ancient.
"Woke" has become a fuzzy culture-war term with no clear meaning when used perjoratively. Racial diversity? "Woke". Non-heteronormative relationships? Also "woke". A sci-fi movie about blue native cat-people fighting imperialism is apparently also woke[1].
A conservative strategist boasted that they successfully co-opted the term to be malleable enough to fit any topic that the conservative voters may dislike. So my definition of woke is accurate by their standard; where are you basing your definition?
1. I'm taking Ben Shapiro's word for it.
Hope you have a good poop-scooper.
My girlfriend watches a few shows too, including Single's Inferno. Dating shows aren't my typical genre, but in the few episodes I saw the interactions were modeled to be overall more respectful and positive compared with the US produced shows.
A few other folks commented on similar trends. Fictional works don't need to represent every negative aspect of the real world, they are fiction after all.
Really, this isn't a new discovery. Soaps have existed since before television. But it is interesting how instead of one long-lived show, it's now a multitude of similar but different shows.
It was still very good TV but it felt like a completely different vibe than the first two seasons.
The Disney+ shows iirc minimize screen writing and sound effects or don't use them at all.
This is a matter of exposure and habituation.
I remember 6-7 years ago when I used sticker packs in KakaoTalk and Line, Western friends were baffled by all the silliness. Now they're all the rage on Telegram & co.
I remember when Western friends rejected Korean pop music as too artificial and commercial vs. the "more authentic" Western pop. Now Kpop concerts fill stadiums here.
I remember when friends rejected "Asian movies" as "bizarre and unrelatable". Now they win Academy Awards.
All those forms of entertainment proved a lot more portable than anticipated, over time. That said, sadly the golden era of entertaining Korean reality/variety shows (Running Man et all) is kind of over already, it died with the peak of broadcast TV. The Netflix crop of shows is already far more Westernized and MTV-style. There may not be much worth exporting there.
I deeply disagree with your conclusion, however. Westerners have had plenty of opportunities to like (e.g.) Running Man since K-Dramas became popular. Plenty do. It's not a new exposure to something different. Any show with subtitles operates at a disadvantage; shows that have constant titles appearing and disappearing on the screen and also have subtitled speech are an extremely tough sell, especially since (e.g.) Running Man is dumb and it's target audience is going to be people looking for a laugh.
edit: you could get people used to the stupid noises and canned laughter, but all that stuff is usually used to punctuate the appearance and disappearance of on-screen titles.
I think the internet- and streaming-driven globalization of media & subsequent exposure have definitely reduced the sort of knee-jerk inhibitions against watching something where the entire cast of characters is non-Western, or something subtitled. Content outside the Western bubble has increasingly lost the "this is a little strange and foreign" patina for average people in the millenials and younger gen.
If you're below 25, and your fav sports team is perhaps an e-sports team from Korea rather than your local football club, you may not even realize people really, broadly used to think like that.
When I was young, it was nearly impossible to watch a non-dubbed movie in theaters in Germany unless you lived in a major city, and even then it would be a special screening stuffed into an 11pm slot for the nerds. Which meant that content that didn't get dubbed would never be seen, and hardly anything not from Hollywood or major European countries would get dubbed. Now a big chunk of the programming in any theater is "original audio" screenings and it's no longer something that strikes people as odd to attend at all. Many countries' cinemas now get to contend in the market.
I think American producers could learn something from the shows that come out of Asia. My partner really loves the lightheartedness of the shows. That they aren't overtly using sex and violence to sell their product, their stories are less sentimental and samey as what Hallmark makes. The few that I've watched are quite good, I enjoy that they aren't all following a strict formula, aren't trying to be a franchise and the shows don't run on forever.
Man, the $ never sleeps ... just let the quality out instead of throwing a tonne of cash at it.
Since virtually all Korean dramas are in mini-series format, the right way to do it is to basically wait until the year's awards season, see which dramas of the 200+ the industry produces annually made the cut, then pick the 2-3 you find interesting and watch those.
Interesting and varied modern story telling in KDramas and fantastic historical story telling in CDramas.
There's also quite a bit of it to consume from over the years on alternative platforms like Viki.
Sadly most of the "best" can't be found on Netflix so most people just don't have any idea about it.
Full of characters pursuing romantic values ("romantic" here meaning values that earnest individuals should pursue) and understandable conflicts.
And unbelievably beautiful to look at too.
I also love The Glory, Little Woman, Vincenzo and Itaewon class too.
Agree that overall, Squid Game was an "average good" Korean show.