With their finite running times, Korean dramas are able to
explore topics that are essentially impossible for American
television—including debilitating diseases and terminal illness. You can’t very
well build a show around a character that might not survive the first season
when your ultimate goal is making it to the TV version of the afterlife:
syndication, a lucrative state of being that’s generally only possible after
100 episodes of a show have aired. When a central character dies on American TV, you can bet it’s a form of punishment for a misbehaving actor
or because someone’s contract was too expensive to renew.
This doesn’t mean that Americans are immune to sentimental
storytelling about illness or physical disability. This kind of plot may be
less in vogue today, but we did more than our fair share of grappling with
obscure cancers and other tragic physical ailments during the weekly TV-movie fad of
the 1970s. In fact, this kind of death-and-dismemberment porn was so popular
that a new term was coined for the genre: Disease-of-the-week. With the demise
of short-form TV on these shores, though, so too came the near-complete
extinction of this kind of programming. In the past twenty years, I can only think of main characters in three American series that dealt with anything of the kind: Life Goes On, a 90s-era family show that featured a character with
Down Syndrome; The Big C, a
currently airing Showtime series about cancer; and Glee, whose giant, diverse cast includes a nonspecifically
wheelchair-bound character.
In Korea, on the other hand, the disease-of-the-week genre is alive and
well (if you’ll pardon the perhaps inappropriate cliche). This week’s batch
of spoiler-free reviews is devoted to shows focusing on a central character’s
illness or disability.
