Programming Profile

Do Hyoung Lee, general director of broadcasting at Korean cultural agency Kocca, explains the ongoing demand for South Korean content while introducing 18 new shows to the international buying community.

 

South Korean drama has been a global phenomenon for many years now, with wave after wave of hit shows spreading out from Asia and reaching the US and Europe in recent years.

 

But things have certainly moved on from the good old days of Winter Sonata, the KBS hit that put Korean drama on the global map almost 20 years ago. Things have changed even from the more recent crossover hits like The Good Doctor, another KBS show from 2013 that was successfully adapted for ABC in the US in 2017 and travelled the globe.

 

Since then, the streaming boom – both within South Korea and internationally – has changed the landscape for Korean drama in a number of ways. Over to Do Hyoung Lee, general director of broadcasting at South Korean cultural agency Kocca, to explain how.

 

“The popularity of Korean drama has continued globally this year, just as it did in 2020,” he says. “As competition has been getting more fierce among domestic and foreign online streaming services, such as Netflix, Disney+, Wavve and TVing, demand for Korean drama has increased and there has been more investment in production. This trend has stimulated the diversity of Korean drama.”

 

South Korea certainly still produces romantic sagas and romcoms, like the ones the Korean Wave was initially defined by. However, it now also produces a much more varied slate of drama, including edgier crime series, sci-fi, horror, comedy and other genres.

 

And by tapping into online audiences, the format of new Korean drama has changed as well, Lee continues. “Demand for series having episodes of between 10 and 30 minutes – called shortform or midform – has increased.”

 

Examples include streamer Kakao TV’s No Thank You and Lovestruck in the City in 2020 and Mad for Each Other, How to Be Thirty and Start Up the Engine in 2021. “Each episode recorded more than three million views – a very good audience response,” says Lee.

 

Furthermore, series with fewer episodes are adding to this diversity, making the format of the series, in terms of length and number of episodes, more appropriate to the story the creator wants to tell.

 

“Short drama, which had once faded into history, has recently come back in a number of ways,” Lee explains. “Last year, tvN’s shortform anthology Drama Stage was grabbing audience attention. Its various genres, ranging from thriller to black comedy to romance, were attractive enough to catch the eyes of viewers. New writers, in particular, have added freshness to it.”

 

Other examples of this new approach to storytelling include Penthouse on SBS, Hospital Playlist of tvN, Love (ft. Marriage & Divorce) on TV Chosun and MBC shows Got a Goal and Check Out the Event. “By producing dramas in the formats appropriate to their subject matter and concepts, such as season and short drama, the needs of viewers are met,” says the Kocca director.

 

Another factor driving the Korean drama boom is the popularity of webtoons as a source of IP for live-action series. “Webtoons and web novels have become the essence of the content industry. This year has been dominated by dramas based on webtoons, such as Love Alarm 2 [Netflix}, Navillera [tvN] and Taxi Driver [SBS]. Almost 20 webtoon-based originals are being produced this year. It is much easier to make shows from webtoons as they can serve as the storyboard and producers can better predict whether the show will be a hit based on how well the webtoon performed.”

 

With all this in mind, Lee points to 13 new dramas that Kocca is showcasing this week via C21’s Digital Screenings. They include two series from Yoon & Company: Casting A Spell To You, a romantic comedy based on the web novel Love Affair With My Enemy, and King of Hiphop, about the rise of a new rap star.

 

From Korea Telecom-owned prodco KT Alpha comes a trio of new titles. These include dramas Green Life, about a girl who draws a webtoon about the plants in her life, and Twenty Hacker, which follows the rivalry between two hacker groups. The third show, Revenge Note 2, is a teen comedy-drama about a girl with a mysterious app that allows her to take revenge on people.

 

KBS Media has two new dramas on offer: ‘love triangle’ series To All The Guys Who Loved Me and A Man in a Veil, about a man who turns a tragedy into a miracle. Both are also being sold as scripted formats.

 

On the drama slate from JTBC Studios is Beyond Evil, which tells the story of two men who are prepared to break all laws and principles to catch a notorious serial killer, and Undercover, an action-mystery-romance about a man who will do anything to protect his wife and children.

 

More fresh Korean drama comes with two titles from MBC: The Veil and On the Verge of Insanity. The first is a revenge drama about an agent lost in action who comes back to find his betrayer, while the second follows the “wild and turbulent” lives of the senior staff at a fictional Korean corporation.

 

Rounding out Kocca’s drama offering is Doom At Your Service, a fantasy romance series from CJ ENM about a man who has only 100 days left to live; and made-for-TV movie K-School, from Kang Contents, which follows millennials at fashion school and counts numerous real-life K-pop stars in the cast.

 

As any reader of C21 will know, the Korean content export boom is not just about drama – entertainment formats from South Korea have also been hot for some time, judging by demand for IP such as MBC’s The Masked Singer and CJ ENM’s I Can See Your Voice in recent years.

 

Explaining that growth in demand for K-formats, Lee says entertainment shows from South Korea successfully combine originality and universality, so they can find new stories and concepts while also gaining the empathy of people around the world.

 

“For example, those in the broadcasting industry in the Americas, those channels leading the global trends, are all watching programmes from all over the world, getting proposals and reviewing them, eager to find something new,” he says. “Among them are some K-formats because they try something new, not seen before in existing formats, and they are attractive enough to fascinate people around the world.”

 

It is worth noting that even though The Masked Singer went global a few years ago now, the K-format boom is continuing well into 2021. As evidence, Lee cites recent deals with LA-based Fox Alternative Entertainment for Seoul company FormatEast’s gameshow property Lotto Singer and Battle in the Box from Something Special.

 

New entertainment formats on Kocca’s playlist for C21’s Digital Screenings include Funstaurant, from KBS Media, in which celebs battle it out with their own recipes, which are then available to buy in shops the next day. Home Alone, meanwhile, is an MBC reality format that looks at the phenomenon of single-person households and peers into their trendy single lives.

 

And from SBS-backed FormatEast comes a pair of new formats: Dish is Alive is a cookery battle in which celebs must recreate dishes seen in famous animation and Who Are You is a musical competition in which celebs create ‘alternative characters’ which then compete.

 

Korean producers are now looking far beyond just drama and entertainment formats into other genres, as shown by Kocca’s inclusion of documentary titles in its playlist. Fisher Queen – Women vs Nature, for example, is a documentary from Min Productions about women challenging the stereotype that fishing is exclusively for men. The show centres on fly-fishing expert Jung Park, fierce spearfisher Hyeri Kang and free diver Ryujin Ko, each of whom fish in order to be at one with nature rather than exploit it.

 

The diversity of content on offer from South Korean suppliers is growing, as Kocca’s playlist and Lee’s comments illustrate, all of which is helping to boost content exports. “The total amount of exports in the content industry for the year 2020 was about US$10.83bn, an increase of 6.3% year-on-year,” says Lee. This total included not just TV content but also gaming, music and character design.

 

“Demand for K-content has continued but since Covid-19 it has been increasing. The continuous success of K-broadcasting content, combined with the global popularity of K-pop stars like BTS and Blackpink and the prize-winning movies such as Parasite and Minari have added more heat to this craze,” Lee says.

 

“Under lockdown, people stay at home and binge-watch shows on global OTT platforms, which allows them to discover K-content for the first time. Covid-19 has led to increasing demand for content and people spending more time consuming content, in particular via OTT platforms. This allows greater access to high-quality K-content, allowing it to fascinate more and more people around the world.”