I watched Game of Thrones so I wouldn’t miss out. There’s no value in repressing them, no shame in expressing them. (Bonus: beautiful clothes.) The shows prize emotional clarity, whether the feelings are loving or ugly or just little: worry, pettiness, a first crush, the dancing insecurity of early friendships. To me, a K-drama’s core tenets are its satisfying moral arcs-even for side characters-plot twists, and a preponderance of feeling. And Little Women, nominally based on the Louisa May Alcott classic, is a visually jaw-dropping thriller about family, class, and morality in which three hustling sisters wind up at the center of a major conspiracy involving the wealthiest family in South Korea. Crash Landing on You is a romantic drama, but it’s also part mystery and part satire that winks at K-drama tropes. K-dramas come in all genres- intimate dramas, yes, but also fantasies, histories, horror multiple genres often swirl into one show. Of course there are tropes (amnesia, rich-girl-poor-boy or vice versa, tragic illness, overlapping past lives). Of course there are low-quality duds, and some are ridiculously plotted, if still good fun (no judgment). Like their cousins the telenovela and the Indian serial, K-dramas (the term broadly refers to Korean-language TV series made in South Korea) are critically sidelined as melodrama, given their sensational plotlines. K-dramas, in all of their multitudes, expanded the boundaries of what I thought good storytelling could be. To paraphrase my colleague and eminent critic of all things BTS, Lenika Cruz, first, you aren’t a fan. In 2021, Netflix, which has a bit of a stranglehold on the streaming market for new K-dramas, said it would spend about $500 million on Korean programming that year (and enabled the production of about 80 new Korean shows and films between 20). As a disaffected teenager, I considered my mother’s devotion to Winter Sonata’s Bae Yong-joon embarrassingly out of tune, but she had been one of millions to join in the beginnings of the Hallyu wave. For two decades, in between the demands of teaching, she would watch Dae Jang-geum (a 2003 drama that follows a girl who grows up to be the first female royal physician of the Joseon era) and savor the series Winter Sonata (a thoughtful 2002 romance about first love and second chances). Throughout the first year of the pandemic, she watched Yoon Se-ri and Captain Ri fall in love, hide and then unearth their respective familial traumas, and find friends and purpose, in and out of North and South Korea. Netflix first waved the show in my face in January 2020, but I was preoccupied with the self-imposed assignment of finishing all eight seasons of Game of Thrones, because I felt left out at the cultural watercooler. What follows are 16 episodes, totaling more than 20 hours, of a story so propulsive I could watch nothing else for weeks after. After a paragliding test from Seoul gone wrong, a South Korean heiress and entrepreneur crash lands, literally, onto a stunningly handsome North Korean army officer, who, despite being lawful and rigid, decides to hide her and help her return home. To describe the plot of Crash Landing on You to the uninitiated is to invite mockery. The Oscars’ incredible knack for being wrong
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