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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>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, it's time to move on and find some other way to tell stories.
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.
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.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4445154/
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.
Hope you have a good poop-scooper.
Deleted Comment
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.