There are a lot more and better Korean shows on Netflix than Squid Game. Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Inspector Koo, We Are All Dead, My Name (I really loved My Name), The Kingdom...
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.
My wife watches these, especially the historical dramas (which are often some variety of portal fantasy).
> 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.
My small sampling of Kdramas informs my opinion that most directors instruct villains to overact, with the worst offenders being Japanese favorable characters in historical periods of Japanese occupation of Korean peninsula ala Mr. Sunshine, Bridal Mask where when a character has a heel turn or heel-hero turn and changes acting style immediately.
The historical dramas are typically called costume dramas. I’m kind of burned out on Chinese costume dramas, especially Empress of China after the CCP took out the cleavage.
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).
What shows like Dark and a good Korean drama have in common is that unlike many Western shows, they don't run past their prime and outstay their welcome.
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.
> a good Korean drama have in common [...] they don't run past their prime and outstay their welcome
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
Additionally, I've found that they're a bit less risqué than Western productions and that creates broad appeal.
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.
> they show more feelings and are less "cold" when interacting with each other
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.
They've already produced a lot of high quality content for Netflix, IMHO, so they deserve it. That and German content make up the large majority of the foreign content that I actually look forward to. Good stuff.
I have been watching trailers of new (seasons) of TV shows these past few days. Am I mad for thinking the acting for TV actors are uniformly very bad, even compare to 10 years ago? Or is it that the trailers only show exaggerated scenes?
There are some Korean shows that don't do that and have more realistic/older characters, e.g. "My Mister" and "Liberation Notes". It's a bit of a niche but there's good work in that area too.
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.
I’ve been thinking the exact opposite. I recently finished Last of Us and Perry Mason (season 2) and am now in the middle of Beef and I think all three are great.
It's been interesting to watch Korea's breakout in film and television since the 00s. My first steps into it then were Oldboy, Oasis, and Mother, all very rich films, and all very distinct from what Hollywood was occupied with, which for whatever reason I'd found unengaging.
Netflix loves to pound out utterly formulaic series. They've mainstream documentaries by producing docudramas and convincing everyone they're real stories and their dramas always seem to have the worst actors.
Vaguely related: Disney+ seems to have also gone in on SK reality with shows like "The Zone" and "Pink Lie," etc. I think it's tough to make it work outside of Korea because Westerners aren't used to the style where they're constantly writing commentary on the screen and playing sound effects (afaik originated from Japanese reality but copied by other cultures with block writing.) Most of the Westerners who can stand that sort of thing are already watching it.
The Disney+ shows iirc minimize screen writing and sound effects or don't use them at all.
> Most of the Westerners who can stand that sort of thing are already watching it.
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 generally agree with your premises other than Asian movies (especially Japanese) have always been considered amazing and were a major part of supporting arthouse cinema from the 60s on, it's Korean movies that have caught on. Kung Fu Hustle was literally the highest grossing foreign film in the US in 2005. Korean movies caught on not because of some change in Western aesthetics, but because they got better; Park Chan-Wook led the way.
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.
It was specifically Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk that my friends outside the arthose/festival circuit rejected at the time, though, for example Seom or even Old-boy, as "too foreign".
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.
One thing I've noticed about my watching habits is that I won't put on a super intense, prestige TV show after work usually (maybe if it's Barry, damn, Barry is so good). Instead I'll watch something lighter or more repetitive like House MD or Schitt's Creek. Now k-dramas are not quite old school network television, but they're certainly more of a palatable affair than your average Showtime or HBO show. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix realized that for every marquee top tier Emmy winning show, there's hundreds of people just turning on something to watch in the background that is familiar but slightly different.
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.
I feel like there is a certain level of cynicism and/or irony in much of western media that is not as present in Asian shows (I think this is a big part of anime's popularity). Strangely while over acting and over dramatization is a mainstay of SK and Japanese shows they somehow they feel more authentic, I think that is because the writers voice feels less edited in many ways. Anyway I hope the growing popularity of foreign shows leads to western media taking time to reassess what people are looking for in shows.
I think what OP means to some extent is that the Korean media, while often showing "fantasy worlds", also rarely injects this with a pretense of authenticity as Western media nearly constantly does.
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.
> also rarely injects this with a pretense of authenticity as Western media nearly constantly does
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.
> instead of the way it is in modern Western media, which is being an instrument of social change first
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.
yeah I think there is absolutely a way to do a good show and have a social/political message and it usually comes down to tone and respecting the audience. Studio Ghibli is known for there positive and even relaxing tone but underneath the story is often a social/political message. That message is often subtle and weaved into the fibers of the story, its a message you feel not hear, if that makes sense. I think they achieve this because they respect their audience enough to give them something they will enjoy and to be smart enough to pick up on the subtle message in the content.
Korean shows are definitely also an instrument for change. K-culture is a deliberate strategy from the SK government to increase its soft power. SK is resource poor, brain rich, and caught in between bigger players. It needs all the good will it can foster. In addition, the themes explored by K-dramas are often also meant to shape the narrative in Korea, or give visibility to problems. It's not uncommon for a social problem to be highlighted by a drama, and then for public outcry to cause the government to change laws or policies in response. But because SK society is quite conservative and patriarchal, it might not seem to you like social change or controversial.
> 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,
Look up e.g. Karl Martin Sandberg, Shellback, Cheiron Studios, Dsign Music, The Kennel, EKKO, Cosmos, Merlin, ... the composers themselves are often contractors working with many of these, and in turn it gets sold to big labels often via e.g. Warner or Universal. Sweden, Norway and Denmark are the pop songwriting hotbed, and pop music is a very systemized industry.
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.
When you were a kid and coming up with fun creative stories or just playing creatively did you inject a level of authenticity and realism to that play? Probably not because you were just being your authentic self, unedited and unspoiled, having fun. I think this is a little bit of the feel I get from a lot of korean/japanese media.
Why is it desirable for art to have "authenticity and realism"? Nowadays, those terms are just code for the malevolent and disturbed world view of some creators.
I prefer art that depicts life as it could and ought to be.
Eh, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds captured the blend of levity and somber urgency that populated the seasons of original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation
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.
Firefly is over twenty years old at this point, it's no longer a contemporary sci-fi show, and its status as a cult classic is really played out at this point, let it go.
That said, it is funny how the much more recent and relevant The Expanse did have horror/zombie elements.
Post-post and meta-meta concepts were really cool and interesting when they first popped up in indie circles back in the 90s, and even when they hit the mainstream in the late 00s. But now it feels like we've seen all these jokes, fourth wall breaks, and gritty, realistic remakes of everything. Instead of seeming like a writer's original ideas inspired by the real world, it just looks like they're copying from other shows and movies for no better reason than "everybody is doing it."
Honestly, it's time to move on and find some other way to tell stories.
I love all these shows, but they are building their own storytelling techniques instead of trying to repeat Community. Which was awesome and still looks great, but inspired too many mediocre screenwriters in 2010s.
They certainly have that in spades. Unfortunately they also seem to be "stuck" in the old fashioned 60-90 minute per episode korean time slot, which isn't super great for western audiences (I can only take so many 3-minute long slapstick filler interludes in a single episode). Hopefully this investment includes some encouragement to make more streamlined shows.
In the korean reality show Physical 100 they make a point of not showing sob stories for contestants. In US reality shows, the sob story is always something stupid like they got a bad haircut or shameless trauma dumping that I somehow doubt will be remedied by some literal hoops to jump through or the prize money.
Asian shows have a similar level of cynicism and/or irony as western shows, but western viewers often don't understand them because they are simply lacking the cultural background, or it's just lost in translation. So they are not aware of the subtle parts which they understand in western shows.
Can you expand upon this? Curious to learn more (as an American who has consumed a lot of K-dramas, I often feel like subtleties sometimes fly over my head).
It's weird making a divide between western and asian here, especially on an article based on South Korea. Asia is very diverse, and there's massive differences in the content produced across different countries. South Korea is essentially on-par with the US in terms of production quality, whereas live-action Japanese shows are b-films at best.
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.
You are right that I shouldn't lump all Asian media together when I meant Japanese and South Korean. Also I said cynicism is less present not all together missing. I think there is a difference between portraying cynicism and espousing cynicism. I think shows like Evangelion and Squid Game portray a cynical world view but it is portrayed in a negative way not endorsed as a positive world view. Much of that is up for interpretation though I guess. There are other aspect that affect this as well context, contrast, etc. Maybe its not so much that western media is more cynical or ironic maybe its just that they don't do it in a way that works well in the story.
I really wish they would invest more into the subtitles. Korean has a myriad of ways to convey something, each with a distinct meaning and often times the translation is just super lazy.
The elephant in the room here is the obsession western TV now has with being woke. It has become quite difficult to not have trendy political points shoved down your throat.
+1, it's unbearable, especially on Disney/Netflix content.
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.
I'm confused. Is Netflix editing books from 100 years ago? Is Disney? It seems like you're conflating two completely unrelated phenomena:
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.
Then I'm curious how "sensitivity readers" relates to Netflix investing $2.5 billion in South Korean television programming. Could you perhaps explain how these two things relate to each other at all?
> The elephant in the room here is the obsession western TV now has with being woke.
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!
"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?
Woke is not new, it's around for 40, 50 years? But the way liberals are using it is different from how right-wings are using it today. For them, it's now a plain insult for anything not on their side. And this meaning has spreading like cancer in recent years.
When asked in court what was meant by the term "woke," Ron DeSantis' general counsel said "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Other than using the modifier American, the parent comment's use of the term woke fits very well with this definition.
Yes you will find politics in everything if you look close enough, but not everything is trying to program you on what is and isn't acceptable to think. Even with Squid Game, one can enjoy it without ever thinking about capitalism. In fact some fans have even debated that it is actually criticism of communism which one can get away with because the viewer is given the room to think for themselves.
Unlike Korean shows, which would never have political topics as main subjects of the show. Like, itaewon class would have been totally ruined by having a trans character, or a black foreigner. Extraordinary Attorney Woo would have been ruined by having a character on the spectrum. God help us if revenge shows were based on class war. It would be a real shame if women's rights were discussed in any of these shows too.
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.
My partner will be pleased, as she loves her K-Dramas. But I hope this isn't just repackaged shows from other platforms that we already pay for.
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.
I most recently watched Extraordinary Attorney Woo and recommended it to many friends. The show was whole hearted and felt like a breath of fresh air. It evolved characters in a positive way and overall was positive and made me smile after most episodes.
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.
I have watched a few recently and me and my partner love them. Not only are the shows modest but are light to watch. Compared to US shows, which are loud, over, dramatic, headache-inducing.
I hope they spend some on decent English dubbing. They’ve had some interesting shows but captions aren’t great for background watching and the current dubbing is like 16 year old reading their English essay in front of class
For anyone wondering what this South Korean TV show thing is all about and want to check it out I suggest starting with Alchemy of Souls (8.8/10 on IMDB).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadAgree that overall, Squid Game was an "average good" Korean show.
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).
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
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4445154/
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.
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.
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.
“I’m sorry, but as an AI language model created by OpenAI”…
“I apologise for the previous confusion.”
“While it’s important to X, it’s also important to Y” (in this one)
“You are correct. I made an error in my previous response.”
“Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
Those are some I can think of from memory
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.
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.
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.
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.
Often I point to “Brokeback Mountain” as an example of progressive Western media made by grownups.
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.
>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.
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.
The Oscar winning movie Parasite is also steeped with pessimism and cynicism.
Hope you have a good poop-scooper.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.