Apples and Oranges: Korean and Taiwanese Drama

Playful kissing in Taiwan...

...and Korea

When I first fell down the rabbit hole of Kdrama, I never expected that my viewing habits would expand. One country at a time, I thought when I found myself faced with literally a hemisphere worth of shows to catch up on. But I kept hearing about dramas from other countries that were too good to miss, and adding them to my queue anyway.

At this point I’ve only watched a handful of Japanese and Taiwanese dramas. I’ve enjoyed them all, but like my early days of watching Korean drama, I’ve started off with the cream of the crop—the shows that are good enough to make people remember them and talk about them years after they air. They’re the Coffee Princes and Autumn’s Concertos and Nobuta wo Produces.

At first, I expected dramas from around Asia to be alike in the same way programs produced in America and Canada are alike. I watched the entire pilot episode of the show Rookie Blue without even realizing that it was set, filmed, and produced in Canada. And no matter how many times I watch Property Virgins, I can never guess if the ongoing house hunt is taking place in Chicago or Toronto. Thanks to hundreds of years of close proximity and shared history, television shows made in Canada and America are pretty much interchangeable.

By extension, it seemed to me that thousands of years of co-existence would mean that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese shows would also be similar. In some ways, they are: most Asian dramas have short, finite running times, unlike shows in the West. The love triangle is king. And raw materials regularly cross national borders to find new audiences. Since its release in the early 1990s, the Japanese manga Itazura na Kiss has been the basis for four live-action dramas in three different countries: Japan’s Itazura na Kiss, Taiwan’s It Started with a Kiss (and its sequel, They Kiss Again), and Korea’s Playful Kiss.

The differences between shows from different Asian countries are even more significant than their similarities, though. Japanese dramas seem to downplay over-the-top romance in favor of profound friendship; Korean dramas tend toward cozy, homey storytelling that revolves around the dinner table; and Taiwanese dramas often incorporate zany comedic elements. And even when content is borrowed from another country, the settings, details, and names are always replaced with local equivalents.

I can’t imagine that any other national television will eclipse my love for Korean shows. They specialize in all my favorite themes—swoony romance, insane melodrama, and character-driven stories that focus on people in all their fallible wonder. Taiwanese dramas have their own appeal, though: they feel more organic, and the relationships they depict are often less formal than those in Kdramas. They also have a way of telling longitudinal stories that take advantage of the passage of time to keep shows feeling fresh from beginning to end. (Korean time-skips, on the other hand, rarely have an impact on the plot beyond providing an epilogue.) Taiwanese dramas even present believable kissing and skinship, in contrast to the more modest approach to relationships taken by Korea’s network shows. And it’s always interesting to see Asian dramas that treat actors who on the heavy side as characters rather than freaks. 

The three Taiwanese dramas I’ve watched actually have parallel Korean versions, whether the similarities are intentional or not.

 

Fated to Love You (Taiwan, 2008)

I Do, I Do (Korea, 2012)

Both these shows revolve around single women who find themselves pregnant after a chemical-fueled one-night stand. (The Korean couple was loosened up by drinking too much soju, while the Taiwanese pair had cold medicine and some sort of homemade viagra to blame.) Both dramas have their failings: I Do, I Do focuses on its go-nowhere workplace setting too much, and Fated to Love You is plagued with broad, improbably cartoony humor.

I Do, I Do’s biggest selling point is its slick production, which made for a crisply shot show full of expensive-looking designer shoes and grand sets. But all the money in the world couldn’t save it from a boring script with a listless plot—the female lead doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant until episode 5, and then proceeds to waste the rest of the show hiding the fact from the father instead of actually engaging with what’s happened to her.

On the other hand, the Fated to Love You has rock-bottom production values—the male lead wears one of two outfits for essentially the entire show—but its story feels bigger and less claustrophobic. Instead of focusing on one person in one situation for its entire run, like I Do, I Do, it actually dares to insert serious, life-changing plot developments in nearly every episode. The female lead even hits the reset button on the entire show by moving to mainland China at the drama’s midpoint, thereby incorporating new settings, characters, and plot arcs.

Sure, the Taiwanese version was obviously made on the cheap, but I Do, I Do is proof that it takes more than a big budget to make a show worth watching.

It Started with a Kiss (Taiwan, 2005)

Playful Kiss (Korea, 2010)

Who would have guessed that a girl with no spine and a boy with no heart would be such a perfect couple? Both these dramas revolve around a bumbling, ambitionless girl chasing her dreamboy crush through their high school and college years. As is the way with Asian drama, she eventually catches him—but only after he calls her stupid about 300 times and spends entire episodes avoiding all contact with her. (Wouldn’t it have been revolutionary if she realized her beloved was kind of a dick and moved on to someone who would have treated her well?)

The Korean version of the story is gorgeous. From its snazzy logo to its good-looking cast to the colorful cascades of noodles at drying at a restaurant, every episode of Playful Kiss is a visual treat. Unfortunately, the storytelling isn’t quite as wonderful. It overlooks one major component in any great love story: characters that like each other. A wooden actor and unfortunate direction make it difficult to believe that the male lead doesn’t actively loathe the female lead until the final episode. His character has only one consistent, observable trait: disdain for her.

Playful Kiss was one of the first Korean dramas I watched, back when I could never manage to remember anyone’s name. This show was an exception, though: Oh Ha Ni was both the female lead’s name and what I said every time she appeared on screen.

The male lead in the Taiwanese version isn’t much better. He’s aloof and abrupt and eager to point out how dim the female lead is. He’s never quite as bad as the Korean lead, though—he memorizes a love letter he’s not meant to see, while his Korean counterpart uses a red pen to mark errors in said letter. As the show progresses, the Taiwanese lead slowly comes around and the chemistry between the two leads turns from one-sided to sizzling.

It’s the little details that make this happen. He starts smiling at her when she’s not looking, and eventually kisses her out of sheer terror that she might really decide to get over him. While the Kdrama version of this kiss is pretty sexy (picture Kim Hyung Joon leaning above you, all intense eyes and knowing smirk), I came away from it thinking his character was too busy manipulating the female lead’s emotions to have any of his own.

The Taiwanese kiss provides just the humanizing moment the character needed. After, he stands perfectly still, staring at her in something like disbelief. Finally deciding to pretend nothing happened, he spitefully sticks out his tongue and stalks away. This male lead is a little boy who doesn’t know what to do with his emotions, not a heartless seducer of young girls.

Playful Kiss was cute enough, but It Started with a Kiss gave us a lead couple worth rooting for.

In Time with You (Taiwan, 2011)

Coffee Prince (Korea 2007)

These dramas have very little in common, other than being practically perfect in every way: One focuses on the relationship between a career woman and her male best friend. The other is about a girl pretending to be a boy in order to earn money for her family (and spend time with her hot boss, of course). But there are some similarities, if you look a little more closely. They’re gorgeously shot and staged. Both feel homey, with their huge casts of characters connected by wonderful, warm friendships and loving family ties. Their female leads are each independent-minded caretakers who earn the respect of the people around them with kindness. And their love stories are sweet, tender explorations of what happens when friends become something more.

In Time with You and Coffee Prince are as good as television gets, as far as I’m concerned. Wherever they were made, whatever language their characters speak, these dramas are some of the best television the world has to offer.

(Oh. And about that poll on the upper right side of this page: If more people answer yes than no, I will post some brief, quippy notes about the possible prowess of some of my favorite male Kdrama characters. It will be naughty with a lowercase n, rather than Naughty. (Because I have to live with myself after posting it, you see.) It just occurred to me as something fun to write about, but I couldn’t decide if it was too trashy for a town this size. So I leave it up to you, dear readers. What to do?)