5/17/2023 0 Comments Hopefully coming back kdramaMen, women, Caribbeans, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesians, Malaysians, Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Americans, Europeans, the Turkish. I had - without knowing it - joined a rather happy, fairly democratic group of people. Unlike most other televised entertainment, strangely, K-Dramas don’t shy away from discussing painful and hard feelings. They also, strangely, put me in touch with some uncomfortable feelings: all that discussion of sadness, anger, memories of old scars - it’s bound to strike a chord somewhere. Like an unending stack of potato chips, they left me satiated and flushed of face, happy. In these difficult times, sinking into a K-Drama feels like a pleasurable treat. What exactly is going on here? The nation’s Aunties need to know. Following the growing attraction between him and his secretary, Mi-so, each time they lean in to kiss (with all of us Aunties palpitating in front of our light-emitting devices), he shudders in terror and pulls back. They talk of real things like trauma, pain, fear, happiness and courage, without being self-conscious, or for that matter, maudlin.įor example, the male lead of …Secretary Kim, Chairman Lee, dates top models but doesn’t get intimate with them. I tried to explain to the still-drowsy family that K-Dramas take the stock situations of romantic fiction and go further in terms of sensitive writing and unexpected narrative twists. Every toe-curl-inducing romantic motif: attractive, arrogant hero meets somewhat-flawed heroine in an impossible coming-together of different worlds old friends hesitate at the brink of a changing relationship older woman notices a younger man noticing her - it’s all here. If you’re a veteran of the Mills and Boon romance, K-dramas are like these mass-market books on steroids. The cheekbones, the doe eyes, the smiles, the fabulous clothes, the chiseled abs, the broad shoulders - it was more than that. ‘What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?’ Starring Park Seo Joon and Park Min YoungĪt breakfast the next morning, I reassured my family that I had not spent hours on my laptop just gawking at the male beauty on flagrant display. I rushed around making guilty and appropriately annoyed maternal noises. Three enthralling hours in front of my laptop, and many blushes later, I wondered what my teenaged child was up to, now that her mom, enforcer of bedtimes and patron saint of ‘Less Screen Time!’ was herself slack-jawed in front of the screen. When the spouse was busy with WFH one night during our designated TV slot, I idly turned on the K-Drama recommendation for ‘entry-level’ folk like me: What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim? Because you don’t want to startle the family with trailers for shows with hot, bare-chested men taking showers. That’s why, said the girl squad, god made smartphones, laptops and headphones. How does one watch a romantic soap opera on the family TV? Do people not laugh out loud at one’s poor taste? One might enjoy watching good-looking men displaying toxic masculinity, but would it scar the teenager for life if she saw her mom gleefully watching the odd non-consensual kiss? We watch shows that the teenager enjoys, and as a couple, we watch - what else? - crime shows. I’d have given it a shot except that in our family, TV-watching is a communal activity. The gushing wouldn’t stop: the men looked so good, the food on the shows was so yummy, the story telling was so inventive. Seriously? I tried to side-eye these friends on the phone, but there is no way you can shame people who feel that they’ve finally found their entertainment ‘home’. Some women friends - entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, filmmakers - strongly suggested Korean soap operas or K-dramas. I asked friends for new show recommendations. When I was done with the tenth corpse being pulled out of an Icelandic floe by a detective with relationship issues, I began to feel a sense of malaise. If there are no bodies left unclaimed in the woods, what am I even doing watching this show or reading this book?īut the lockdown has changed many things. I’ve replaced them with novels that have a minimum of one corpse per book. Now, seven months and 50 shows later, I have more to say!)įor someone whose teenage superpower was being able to demolish one Mills & Boon novel per day, I gave up on romantic fiction and rom-coms fairly easily about two decades ago. (I wrote a shorter version of this piece for Scroll.in in October 2020, when I’d watched just about 15-odd K-Dramas. Auntie Anita and the Scriptwriters - Or How I Learned to Love K-Dramas
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