...I’m not sure if I’m annoyed or thrilled that the unsubbed jTBC dramas we English speakers have been drooling over are now available online...but you’ve got to pay to watch anything beyond episode 2.
I Live in Cheongdam Dong
Wife’s Credentials
Queen Insoo
I guess this explains why most of the recent jTBC dramas haven't been showing up on DramaFever, those sly foxes.
Showing posts with label Housekeeping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housekeeping. Show all posts
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
New Feature: Drama Shorts
For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the old Currently Watching posts from this blog’s sidebar. They’re hard to read on the current archive page, so I toyed with the idea of relocating them to Twitter or Tumblr. (Both of which I hate for crotchety old woman reasons: What’s the world coming to when people think 140-character bursts of nothing and “reblogging” are creative output? Get off my lawn you pesky kids!).
Ultimately, though, I decided to inaugurate a new feature here: Drama Shorts. Tidied up into actual posts, the Currently Watching quips become speedy little overviews of all the dramas I watch, including ones that don’t get written about in more depth. They’re not particularly involved or insightful, but my rationalization is that sometimes you just want to know what you’re getting into when you start a new drama. When I finish watching a show I’ll create a new post for it and delete its entries from the Currently Watching sidebar.
Because I’ve got quite a backlog of this stuff—and because I’ve now officially stuck with this blog for six whole months, miracle of miracles—I’ve decided to celebrate by getting a little crazy and posting two Drama Shorts a day for this whole week. That’s the fruit of more than 160 hours of drama watching, horrifyingly enough (which translates into practically every minute of free time I've had since Christmas).
(P.S. For me, Twitter’s entire existence is justified by this single account: Gosling Literary Agent.)
Ultimately, though, I decided to inaugurate a new feature here: Drama Shorts. Tidied up into actual posts, the Currently Watching quips become speedy little overviews of all the dramas I watch, including ones that don’t get written about in more depth. They’re not particularly involved or insightful, but my rationalization is that sometimes you just want to know what you’re getting into when you start a new drama. When I finish watching a show I’ll create a new post for it and delete its entries from the Currently Watching sidebar.
Because I’ve got quite a backlog of this stuff—and because I’ve now officially stuck with this blog for six whole months, miracle of miracles—I’ve decided to celebrate by getting a little crazy and posting two Drama Shorts a day for this whole week. That’s the fruit of more than 160 hours of drama watching, horrifyingly enough (which translates into practically every minute of free time I've had since Christmas).
(P.S. For me, Twitter’s entire existence is justified by this single account: Gosling Literary Agent.)
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Housekeeping Update/ WTF drama #1
I’m
still waiting to run out of things to say on this blog, or maybe the motivation
to say them. But that day isn’t here yet: years of laziness may have gotten me
out of the habit, but come right down to it I really do enjoy writing and the
satisfaction that comes from synthesizing random thoughts into something
resembling a coherent post.
On
the housekeeping update front, I plan to continue publishing a new piece of
content every Tuesday, but also to make super-short WTF drama posts as they
occur to me during the week. (Putting them in the sidebar is kind of lame,
because they’re so hard to read there.)
And
today’s WTF drama moment? How is it that the heroine of Summer Scent has had a heart transplant,
yet loves to wear cute, low-cut shirts? I appreciate that the ailments in the
Endless Love series are largely window dressing, but couldn’t someone at least pretend
to care
about the giant scar she should have?
(Which is not to say that I’m not enjoying the show—it’s an unbelievably, unapologetically sappy love story filled with fetishistic shots of beautiful summer scenery and beautiful actors. You can’t go wrong with that.)
 |
| Nice scar. Or not. |
Thursday, December 29, 2011
In the Beginning, there was Netflix streaming. And it was good.
Barring a move to the international space station, I could not possibly live further from Korea than I do. (It’s so far, in fact, that to the best of my knowledge I’ve never once met someone who’s actually set foot in the country.) And unlike many established bloggers, my family heritage is as un-Asian as it gets: I’m a third-generation American descended from French-speaking Canadians. If my grandmother had ever seen kimchi, she would probably have wrinkled her nose and thrown it out, sure it was leftover boiled dinner forgotten in the refrigerator for far, far too long. I don’t speak Korean or have any profound insight into Korean culture beyond what I gleaned from reading a few books on Asian business etiquette for a previous job.
Yet here I am, presuming to post on the Internet about a topic I barely understand. (Of course, one might make the argument that this describes everything on the Internet, but still.) That topic? Korean drama, a diversion that has essentially eaten my life for the past six months.
My first exposure to Kdrama was like falling down the rabbit hole, or swallowing the red pill; it opened my eyes to an entire world I had long overlooked, one that was completely foreign and yet familiar in a lot of fundamental ways. I hold Netflix responsible: If they hadn’t offered Boys over Flowers on their streaming service, I might have lived my entire life without staying up all night to see whether Jan Di would chose Ji Hoo or Jun Pyo, without scouring the internet for information about mandatory military service in Korea, without yearning to call someone “oppa.”
What sold me at first was the realization that, unlike American TV shows, Kdramas have beginnings, middles, and ends. They are not specifically created to draw storylines out over multiple seasons and hundreds of episodes: some degree of satisfying closure is essentially guaranteed for every single drama. True, the shows are sometimes extended or shortened by a few episodes in the middle of their runs, but that’s nothing compared to coming to love a television show only to have it forever yanked off the air after two underperforming episodes. (I’m talking about you, Wonderfalls.)
These finite runs allow for the other thing that initially drove my obsession with Korean drama: love stories. When you need to plan ahead for season 7 from day one of your show’s run, as in America, it’s just not possible to focus on two lovers the way you can in a 16-episode Kdrama. Other than repugnant, Katherine Heigl-starring chick flicks, American culture isn’t something that gets a lot of mileage out of love. Romance is ghettoized onto channels providing “television for women” or serves as a temporary plot point on sitcoms—it’s not something our entertainment is built around the way Korean dramas are. Kdramas are stuffed to the gills with the things we Miss-Independent-style American girls dream of in our secret heart of hearts: big, unredeemably cheesy romantic moments, professions of undying love, and the kind of true gentleman who will piggyback a drunk girl for miles, no questions asked.
As far as I can tell from dramas, Korean culture is different from American culture in a lot other key ways. For one, it values cheerful, smart, hardworking types in a way that’s antithetical to modern America, where “smart” means “geeky” (see Big Bang Theory) and “hardworking” means “too dumb to know better” (see Office Space). In America, we hunger for coolness and independence and freedom, all of which can be great things—but not when they come at the expense of genuineness, and appreciating joy and beauty wherever they appear—all common themes in Korean drama.
Add these things to the sheer number of Korean dramas available for viewing online (7,000 hours worth on Drama Fever alone), and you have the perfect storm for an OCD-level completeist like myself. My motto has become a simple one: I want to watch Korean dramas now, and I want to watch them all—the old, the new, the classic, the trash.
I also don’t want to shut up about them and their cracktacular fabulousness, which is one of the reasons why I’m here, littering the Internet with still more nothing-special ramblings about something pretty special. Another reason? Much to my dismay, there just don't seem to be that many English-language blogs about Korean drama. The few I've found are fabulous beyond measure, but it feels like there's room for one more.
Yet here I am, presuming to post on the Internet about a topic I barely understand. (Of course, one might make the argument that this describes everything on the Internet, but still.) That topic? Korean drama, a diversion that has essentially eaten my life for the past six months.
My first exposure to Kdrama was like falling down the rabbit hole, or swallowing the red pill; it opened my eyes to an entire world I had long overlooked, one that was completely foreign and yet familiar in a lot of fundamental ways. I hold Netflix responsible: If they hadn’t offered Boys over Flowers on their streaming service, I might have lived my entire life without staying up all night to see whether Jan Di would chose Ji Hoo or Jun Pyo, without scouring the internet for information about mandatory military service in Korea, without yearning to call someone “oppa.”
What sold me at first was the realization that, unlike American TV shows, Kdramas have beginnings, middles, and ends. They are not specifically created to draw storylines out over multiple seasons and hundreds of episodes: some degree of satisfying closure is essentially guaranteed for every single drama. True, the shows are sometimes extended or shortened by a few episodes in the middle of their runs, but that’s nothing compared to coming to love a television show only to have it forever yanked off the air after two underperforming episodes. (I’m talking about you, Wonderfalls.)
These finite runs allow for the other thing that initially drove my obsession with Korean drama: love stories. When you need to plan ahead for season 7 from day one of your show’s run, as in America, it’s just not possible to focus on two lovers the way you can in a 16-episode Kdrama. Other than repugnant, Katherine Heigl-starring chick flicks, American culture isn’t something that gets a lot of mileage out of love. Romance is ghettoized onto channels providing “television for women” or serves as a temporary plot point on sitcoms—it’s not something our entertainment is built around the way Korean dramas are. Kdramas are stuffed to the gills with the things we Miss-Independent-style American girls dream of in our secret heart of hearts: big, unredeemably cheesy romantic moments, professions of undying love, and the kind of true gentleman who will piggyback a drunk girl for miles, no questions asked.
As far as I can tell from dramas, Korean culture is different from American culture in a lot other key ways. For one, it values cheerful, smart, hardworking types in a way that’s antithetical to modern America, where “smart” means “geeky” (see Big Bang Theory) and “hardworking” means “too dumb to know better” (see Office Space). In America, we hunger for coolness and independence and freedom, all of which can be great things—but not when they come at the expense of genuineness, and appreciating joy and beauty wherever they appear—all common themes in Korean drama.
Add these things to the sheer number of Korean dramas available for viewing online (7,000 hours worth on Drama Fever alone), and you have the perfect storm for an OCD-level completeist like myself. My motto has become a simple one: I want to watch Korean dramas now, and I want to watch them all—the old, the new, the classic, the trash.
I also don’t want to shut up about them and their cracktacular fabulousness, which is one of the reasons why I’m here, littering the Internet with still more nothing-special ramblings about something pretty special. Another reason? Much to my dismay, there just don't seem to be that many English-language blogs about Korean drama. The few I've found are fabulous beyond measure, but it feels like there's room for one more.
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