K Dramas Are About To Take Over Streaming And It’s About Time

While K dramas manage to cater to all genders, they are often more popular with women. This is because a lot of K dramas you find on your favorite streaming platform are made for women and feature the female gaze.

I am not a huge fan of romances or heavy-action media from Western directors. Big superheroes, cowboys, and soldiers aren’t my thing, and the romances originating in the West often feel shallow and based on looks more than actual personalities and bonding.

However, K dramas I’ve come across while on streaming platforms do it differently. Countless K drama stories, even horror shows, focus on emotions and characters’ feelings more than their appearances. True Beauty is one such show, based on the idea that beauty truly comes from within, and though people know this, there’s still a struggle to want to be beautiful on the outside as well.

Women can be gorgeous and still get a job done, and they can be standard-looking without a glow-up to get the guy. The popular Extraordinary Attorney Woo makes this point by having an autistic female main character who doesn’t have to change herself or give up her passions to find the man who loves her. The show was a favorite among many, hitting the top 10 on Netflix with at least 77.4 million hours of watch time.

The men in these dramas are often better, in my opinion, as well. While some are strong, muscular men, many of them are average-looking and absolute sweethearts (in the romances, at least). There are scenes with men crying in fear or heartbreak and showing their emotions.

While men are sometimes the heroes, they’re just as likely to be equals to women, or even the one who causes the problems in the show, like in Hotel Del Luna or Mr. Queen.

Overall, it’s refreshing and breaks down all of the boring tropes I’m used to seeing in shows and movies anymore outside of K Dramas on streaming platforms. A lot of the credit comes from the high number of women writers, editors, and directors in Korea.

The Fan Verdict, in an email conversation with Vogue India, goes into more depth on the popularity of Korean Dramas: “With K dramas, the thrill is always about the emotional journey, and physical intimacy is consistently treated as secondary.”

While K Dramas might not be as famous as Western shows, I’m not the only one who loves them. The reason people are seeing more and more K Dramas on streaming services like Netflix is because they are popular.

Take Squid Game for example. When it came out in 2021, it took it less than a month to become Netflix’s number-one show of all time with over 1.65 billion hours, or 182,000 years, of watch hours. Squid Game is a K Drama on Netflix’s streaming platform. The show is a thriller drama that focuses on a group of people playing deadly games for a chance to win millions of dollars.

Sweet Home wasn’t as popular as Squid Game, but it still managed to reach the 3rd most-watched show on the platform for a while. It’s based on a webcomic and focuses on a high school student who lost his entire family and now has to deal with a barrage of monsters trying to wipe out humanity.

No matter what your favorite genre is, there is a K Drama out there on a streaming platform you use that takes everything you know and twists it. You get to see women being bosses, men who are authentic to themselves, and realistic struggles. If you’re looking to shake up your normal shows, I definitely suggest giving a Korean Drama a shot.

Source: Vogue India, Variety