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| Playful kissing in Taiwan... |
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| ...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.
