K-streams: Global Korea and the OTT Era

"What's good Korea"
— BTS, "Idol" (ft. Nicki Minaj)

Midway through the k-zombie drama, All Of Us Are Dead, the high school students seeking refuge from their infected peers on the roof of a building cobble together an S.O.S. message for the passing government helicopters. "What does it mean," one student asks, "what does it stand for?", to which the female lead smartly replies, "It doesn't stand for anything. S.O.S. is just S.O.S." But that makes no sense, the student complains.

They cannot after all look it up because it is a zombie apocalypse and they don't have phones, the country's infrastructure is collapsing, the sun is about to set, and they need to start a fire to get them through the night. Under the circumstances, the verbal exchange is ordinary, bordering on phatic; it is dialogue to fill a scene and modulate the pace of the narrative. But from a different angle, with the whole of the media-technological situation in view, and with an internalized voice shaped by the recognition that you are watching yet another virtuosic drama from an industry at the top of its game, the scene plays as a witty display of the formidable soft power of Global Korea. Who cares about English; if the message is coming from South Korea, people are going to notice. 

It is January 2022, four months after Squid Game directed global attention to the extraordinary creative vitality of the Korean media industry, six years since Netflix launched in South Korea and 130 other countries, and three years after the streaming of the first "Netflix original" k-drama, the Joseon-zombie horror series, Kingdom. Adapted from a wildly popular Naver webtoon, All Of Us Are Dead is keenly aware of its own moment, its national-cultural context, and its place in the new creative content ecosystem.1 It contains the inevitable references and allusions to the k-zombie canon (Kingdom, #Alive, Train to Busan), but the story of viral outbreak, community transmission, and not just failed but malign strategies of control can only be read through the lens of the COVID pandemic, which was far from contained when shooting began in June 2020. More particular to South Korea, the zombie battles are characterized by social and familial solidarity rather than radical individualism, and the allegorical anchor for the story of a younger generation abandoned by government and emergency services is the tragic sinking of the MV Sewol in 2014. The common phrase, "The most Korean is the most global / 가장 한국적인 것이 가장 세계적인 것이다," thus perfectly encapsulates the industry, which is pioneering a new set of correlative arrangements between the local and the global.2

All Of Us Are Dead then is a drama clearly attuned to global audiences and their narrative expectations for genre (mixing zombie thriller with comedy and coming of age) and visual style (making spectacular use of CGI and combining drone aesthetics with the optics of the first-person shooter), both leveraging and showcasing the non-trivial capital investments in Korean media by governmental agencies and corporations alike. By the time of its release, audiences had been conditioned by months of coverage of the success of Squid Game and could by that point apprehend and appreciate the consequences of Netflix's financial and infrastructural investments in the industry.3 Netflix is only part of the story of the dramatic transformations in the Korean media industry as it has adapted to streaming services (OTT, 'over-the-top'), but it is unquestionably at the center because it continues to attract high-profile talent from the film industry and expand the field of generic possibility beyond melodrama and romance.4 One could go further then and say that its investments mark an institutional and media-epistemic shift, the start of a new wave or phase increasingly understood as "Stage 3" or Hallyu 3.0.5 As we will suggest, however, Post-Hallyu may be the better category or rhetorical frame because it allows for periodization and also looks to what comes after the evolution of a discrete media industry into an entire creative ecosystem—one that has already surpassed the Korean Creative Content Agency's founding ambition, to make Korea "one of the world's top five content powerhouses."6

A particularly striking, well-documented, and indeed constitutive aspect of the story of Korea's ascendance as a global cultural power is the intense investment of its audiences. BTS-mania crystallizes these affective attachments, but well beyond k-pop there is now a generalized fantasy structure built up around all things "k," manifest in an increasing global appetite for beauty products, food, drink, video games, esports, lifestyle videos, tourism experiences, and language instruction.7 There is not an adequate word in either English or Korean to describe this phenomenon. Popularity, buzz, hype, cool, hip, daebak (대박) — none of these quite captures the logics and dynamics of a cultural environment in which there is not only the attachment but also a narration of that attachment that reiterates the same. Hence the ubiquity of the first-person plural, "why we love k-dramas," in headlines and hashtags alike. Such articulations of shared sensibility and commitment, and the structure of common feeling that they index, are not unlike fandom and the fetish, and they are also available to sociological analysis as productive of culture as a habitus, but to use these frameworks alone would be to suggest an orientation toward settled objects and structures. The mode of attention commanded and reinforced by the "k," rather, is mobile and manipulable; it can and indeed does fasten on particular objects, gestures, and expressions (soju cocktails, face masks, the latest drama), but truly what is at work is something closer to atmosphere. In this respect, virality might be the best way to account for not just the new formation, "Global Korea," but also the emergence of the academic field of "Global Korea Studies" that both subtends and extends it.8

It seems then not incidental that Pinkfong's "Baby Shark" should be the viral video par excellence. Views, likes, comments, shares: these social media metrics are the means by which the abstract notion of "buzz" comes to qualify audience investments, although partial streaming platform data, along with Nielsen ratings and sales of drama-associated merchandise, especially scripts, do their part as well. In a noisy media landscape, common expressions of enthusiasm can sometimes be the clearest signals and in turn reinforce the consensus, as with the TV critic effusively writing of All of Us Are Dead: "God, South Korea is good at this sort of thing."9 To write of buzz may seem to imply a suggestible audience, available to persuasion by critics, influencers, and recommendation algorithms, as if people are watching k-dramas because of some sort of coercive force. But such a line of thinking would of course discount the myriad viewing practices available to all of us in the OTT era and thereby repeat the old mistake of dismissing the realm of popular engagement as unrigorous, trivial, and mere psycho-social and -sexual feeling.10 A two-minute tour of the k-drama subreddit alone makes the point: audience commitments, practices, and modes of engagement are no joke precisely because they are animated by such feelings.        

There is a deep, complex, and equally well-documented history of global demand for Korean cultural exports, as the rich body of scholarship on Hallyu and Hallyu 2.0 attests.11 And especially now, in the context of the OTT era, the demand has been met with supply, with content produced and distributed at scale and speed by streaming platforms that continue to expand (after Netflix, those with the largest subscriber bases and high-profile dramas are Disney+, Coupang Play, Apple, Kakao, Naver, TVING, Wavve, Watcha, and YouTube).12 It is truly, as has been said, "gold rush time for Korean TV," and as with all bubbles, the boom cycle is driven by both an irrational speculative mania and concrete conditions of emergence.13 What exactly those conditions are — in other words, why k-drama now — is the billion won question, although many have already endeavored to answer it, and we can offer our own hypotheses.

To start, it is hard to overestimate the force of historical accident. In a nutshell, the already-formidable Korean creative ecosystem was able to continuously deliver new content throughout the pandemic, when it was most needed and while other media industries struggled to navigate quarantines and other pandemic protocols.14 From the time of its global expansion in 2016, Netflix primed the pump with its re-airing of near-canonical dramas from KBS, tvN, and SBS, beginning with Boys Over Flowers (2009/2016) and The Heirs (2013/2019), and the notable inclusion of the SF-thriller-police procedural Signal (2016/2018), whose departure from the generic mold in hindsight reads as a sea change in the industry.15 The truly accelerative move however was simultaneous cable/streaming broadcast, beginning with Mr. Sunshine (tvN; July 2018), such that a significant global audience was in place by the time the wildly popular romance Crash Landing On You (CLOY) began airing in December 2019.16 Its run extended through February 2020, as the COVID headlines grew more dire, and it was closely followed — in March 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared the disease a pandemic — by tvN's Hospital Playlist, a slice-of-life ensemble drama from the writer and director of the widely acclaimed Reply series. To fill out this picture, we highlight Netflix's airing of the dystopian film, Time to Hunt, the original drama, Extracurricular, and The King: Eternal Monarch (SBS), all in April 2020, as well as It's Okay to Not Be Okay (tvN) and the much-loved and re-released drama My Mister in June 2020, both of which remain touchstones for both new and seasoned viewers. When global economic activity came to a halt, then, there was a surfeit of high-profile and high-quality work coming out of Korea and audiences were, as they say, there for it. In the background and foreground of all of this is the now-massive production company Studio Dragon, also established in 2016 and one of Netflix's primary partners.17 Having been taught to recognize the Studio Dragon brand, who among us after all can resist its siren call and the immersive story worlds it produces?

At least some of the appeal of contemporary k-content, then, is that it offers virtuosic escapist narratives, but it does so paradoxically via an often-direct and unflinching engagement with social and economic issues that are global and at the same time clearly situated in a Korean context: debt and predatory finance, precarity, housing crises, class aspirations, military hazing, school bullying, sentiment mobilization, sexual harassment, environmental crises, institutional collapse, and political and corporate corruption.18 The depth and breadth of the fantastic but still incisive social realism would necessitate many more essays if not books, but to underscore the point we note Hwang Dong-hyuk's account of the "simple idea" behind Squid Game: systemic inequality and his own family's economic hardship during the global financial crisis, a time when he sought refuge in survivalist comics like Battle Royale and Liar Game. What the drama starkly illustrates, in terms both realist and allegorical, is Hwang's brutal point: "We are fighting for our lives in very unequal circumstances."19 

K-content of course is not all dystopia all the time and truly by numbers alone it would be more accurate to characterize the field as sentimental and, well, melodramatic. Varied as the listings may appear in any given week, however — body swaps, time travel, and courtrooms here; chaebols and nine-tailed foxes there — the content ecosystem does strongly cohere, held together not only by a shared set of references, but also by a tone, sensibility, and mode of orientation both to viewers and to itself. Even as dramas veer wildly between deep pathos and variety-show comedy, they are anchored in time and place by a library of tropes (among them, wrist grabs, umbrellas in the rain, trucks of doom, bandaids, forced cohabitation, and piggyback rides) and allusions to iconic scenes and characters from the back catalog of Korean media: kimchi slaps, a red scarf, Won Bin as ajeossi, maybe some ramen before you go. In this respect, the creative ecosystem may no longer be containable as Hallyu but it nonetheless functions as a kind of diegetic world in itself, a transmedial universe akin to Marvel and the DCEU, for a moment in which the global appetite for these is exponentially increasing. What we can see then in the incorporations of dramas within dramas, the many gestures toward k-pop and k-film, and the equally numerous cameos and cross-over references is a continuous circulation of signs, figures, references, expressions, and gestures — the cumulative effect of which is that "k-drama" can function as a discrete, self-reflexive, and iterative media category. If comparable collective cultural formations such as Bollywood and Nollywood are constituted around single media like film and video, and others constituted around single genres (Nordic noir, Japanese anime), "Global Korea" is by contrast constituted around itself.

Little of the previous sentence will make sense for those who have never seen CLOY and that is precisely the point: the k-drama ecosystem is one big training exercise with levels of achievement that are marked along the way. Explicit moments of instruction by proxy make it accessible for global audiences at the start — this is how you drink makgeolli with an elder; this is when you say daebak; this is what it really means if you ask someone to come in for ramen — and the embedded references from one drama to other parts of the creative ecosystem are so many and so various as to reward repeated viewing.

In the context of a drama, the cham functions like a wink and a nod, manifesting in those moments when the viewer is interpellated as one who is in on the joke, recognized for their own act of recognition. The basic form of this is allusion, as with the reenactment of a scene or the reappearance of a prop or character that reiterates and thus reinforces the creative ecosystem-as-fictional universe. More subtle, and thus more pleasurable and rewarding, are those moments when the cham is tonal, when the viewer can discern the ironic self-reflexivity hiding in plain sight.

It is difficult to find a k-drama that does not in any way gesture to "drama" as a category — hence the continuous meta jokes about story and character actions ("do you like watching dramas?").22 What has started to emerge within the OTT creative ecosystem, however, is a next-level or next-generation self-reflexivity that takes the form of a staging of spectacles within spectacles, with diegetic audiences — notably the VIPs in Squid Game — both mirroring and serving as proxies for the audiences of the dramas themselves.23 Time and again, in dramas that are themselves global media events, we can see a self-reflexive comment on the same, particularly through the representation of streaming video, live commenting, and Twitch aesthetics. The streamer's videos in All Of Us Are Dead, as well as the streaming video in the Netflix original, Hellbound (2021), serve as just two concrete examples of this dynamic of incorporation, whereby a staged spectacle with its technologized apparatus of observation, judgment, and interpretation is situated within a drama-as-spectacle that is itself informed by this very apparatus.

Notwithstanding the continual flex of soft power, there is then another aspect to the creative ecosystem's almost-abyssal self-reflexivity, and that is its self-awareness about the need to motivate audience investments as it competes with other forms, modes, and genres of online content. If it can be said that some of the global appeal of the Korean creative ecosystem is that it strikes a nerve in its capture of the truth of the world we inhabit — in other words, that for all of the zombies, speculative science, and romance, k-drama now functions primarily as social realism — then it might also be said that its sharpest mimetic work is happening in the domain of media, and mediated, affects.   

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Eunjin Choi (@echoi_24) is a lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. Her main research area is Korean cinema, media history, and popular culture, with a particular focus on division films and changes in the Korean media industry in the Hallyu era.

Rita Raley (@ritaraley) is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her contribution to the this cluster is part of an ongoing research collaboration with Eunjin Choi on the topic of Korean media in the streaming era. 

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