Kdrama and the Korean wave

Fifteen or twenty years ago, investment advisors were suggesting that people put their money into the Tiger economies of Asia, and of the Asian economies, nowhere can have done as well as South Korea. In the fifty odd years since the end of the Korean war, South Korea has gone from being a country that was as poor as the poorest African countries, to a place with a first world economy that's roughly equivalent to somewhere like Spain.

Once can speculate endlessly as to the reasons why this might be, but there's no question that the Koreans are a determined people who value study and hard work. And you can see the evidence of their ambition on high streets all over the world, through the products of companies like Samsung, Daewoo, LG and Hyundae. Companies that were unknown twenty years ago, but vie for competition with the best of them on the global high street.

The other major manifestation of the Korean wave is less visible in Europe and the USA, but is apparent all over Asia, and that is the way that South Korea has come to dominate the entertainment industry in that part of the world. Korean movies, Korean pop music (K-pop) and Korean TV drama (K-drama) are dominating the whole of the Asian market at the moment. Countries with a long history of high quality cultural output, such as Japan and Hong Kong, are struggling to sustain market share in the face of American cultural imperialism, but not only has South Korea managed to sustain their home-grown entertainment industry, they've actually expanded it, to the extent that it's now dominating the Asian market.

And perhaps this is most true of Korean television drama, K-drama. The country has become an absolute machine when it comes to churning out long-form drama -- generally between 16 and 28 episodes, but they can run as high as 80 or more.

Eminently watchable, these k-dramas generally continue in the same tradition of the Korean film industry. The stories generally have a very high quotient of melodrama, which gives them a cliff-hanging quality that could lead people to compare them to soap operas. Somebody is always dying in K-drama -- a parent, a fiance, a best friend. There's also generally a high level of social injustice -- the wealthy are invariably acting to crush the ambitions and aspirations of the poor. And the corruption of politicians and major corporations is another persistent theme in the stories.

While many of them are set in the present day, a very high proportion are historical costume dramas, dramatizing either real historical events (as in Dae Jang Geum and Queen Seon Duk) or much loved Korean legends (as in the Robin Hood type characters, Hong Gil Dong and Jumong). As with the modern K-drama, some of them are just drawn from modern Manga (Iljimae).

While I tend to avoid the real weepy romantic melodrama form, I've become a big fan of the Romantic Comedy. Anybody who has seen global smash hit, My Sassy Girl, will know that the Koreans are rather good at romantic comedies. The form constrains the writers from relying on explicit sexual contact -- in fact, the star-crossed lovers tend to have to wait for most of the series before their lips ever come to touch, so the form is heavily dependent upon story for its success.

Recommended examples of the genre include Queen of Housewives, Bad Family and Bad Housewife.

Another enormously popular genre is the youth drama. One of the most popular, Boys Over Flowers, started life as a Japanese Manga and became a smash J-drama hit, before being remade by Korean television, where it sparked yet another amplification of the Korean Wave, selling into television markets all over Asia.

While I haven't watched Boys over Flowers yet, one youth drama I have watched was the remarkable God of Study. This is such a typical Korean drama in so many ways, that it might be worth spending a little more time on it.

God of Study also began life as a Japanese Manga, before first being made into a Japanese Drama series, Dragon Zakura, (starring the wonderful Hiroshi Abe) before being picked up and remade as a Korean TV show.

Like so many of these Kdramas, the show has a fantastic cast, with many significant Korean movie stars in the leading and minor roles. Again, like many Kdramas, a whole mountain of music is performed throughout the series -- performed by K-pop stars, which is released as an original soundtrack album to accompany the show.

While Japanese in origin, the story of God of Study is so typically Korean. A renegade lawyer is struggling against a firm of property developers who are destroying typical working class communities to replace them with luxury apartments. Although small business owners welcome the move because of the profit they'll make from land sales, the headmaster of a school in the area opposes the move and asks our lawyer to intervene.

Unfortunately, the school is a sink school. Nobody loves it and they don't care. Radical intervention is required, and so the lawyer says that he'll take any six students and get them into Seoul National University -- the most prestigious university in Korea.

Initially, nobody is interested, but eventually, he ends up with his six students. Unfortunately, they are the least promising students in the school. There's the rebellious youth who just wants to be out at work so he can support his grandmother. The not-clever kid whose parents want him to work in the family restaurant. The nice girl whose mother is a bar girl/prostitute. A couple of children of rich parents who don't pay them any attention. etc.

And so over time, our lawyer has to take this unpromising crew and weld them into a-list academic material -- and he has to do so, in the face of almost total opposition from the existing teachers.

The message behind this drama is all about the importance of studying like a maniac to achieve your goals. Which appears to involve dancing teachers, staying up until 4.00am, and co-educational boot camp. The idea that such a series would play with any success in the UK is completely unfeasible, yet I found the series completely compelling.

This blog is called Guns and Talks after a Korean crime film, so it would be remiss of me not to highlight some of the wonderful Korean crime drama series that I've had the pleasure of watching recently. Two of the best were both remakes of well-received Korean films, at least one of which was by the same director.

Friend (Chin-gu) was a very well received coming of age movie that gave rise to a great deal of online discussion over what the ending actually signified. Almost ten years later, the director got the opportunity to extend the work in a sixteen part series, and so was able to give us much more backstory, and provide much more depth to the characters. Personally, I much preferred the TV dramatization to the original movie.

Another recent crime series which was based on a movie was the TV dramatization of Tazza: War of the Flowers.

The Asian gambling movie is one of my very favourite of all cinematic genres. Whether they be Hong Kong Mah Jong movies, or Chow Yun Fat's very silly God of Gamblers series, I love them all. But I really disliked the original version of Tazza. I didn't understand the game they were gambling on -- the Korean card game, Stop Go, and the movie just didn't offer enough length to develop the back story to a tale with so many characters.

By moving to the long form, there's so much more time to develop character, to have complex, multi-threaded plots and situations. It's like the difference between a comic and a novel, in my view.

A word of caution here: the K-drama isn't for everybody. And it's definitely an acquired taste. Before I watched one, I asked about, 'what's worth watching', and everybody almost with one voice recommended one of the most popular Rom Coms, Coffee Prince.

Now, although I was seriously into Korean cinema by this point, and I had come to love Korean Rom Coms in the movies, I just couldn't get interested in Coffee Prince at all. I still have it on my hard drive though. Perhaps I should give it another shot?