Squid Game, Blackpink, K-pop and K-drama make South Korea a cultural superpower

Evan Barringer was 14 years old when he came across Full House, a South Korean romantic comedy where two strangers are forced to share a house.

Sitting at home in Memphis, he pressed play assuming it was an Asian remake of a beloved 1980s American sitcom. It wasn’t until the third episode that he realized they had nothing in common except the name. But I was hooked.

That accidental choice changed his life. Twelve years later, he is an English teacher in South Korea and says he loves it here: “I have to try all the foods I have seen in K-dramas and I have seen several of the K-dramas. -pop artists at concerts whose lyrics I used to study Korean.”

When Evan discovered Full House in 2012, South Korean entertainment was a twinkle in the world’s eyes. Psy’s Gangnam Style was the best-known Korean pop export at the time.

Today, it is estimated that there are more than 220 million Korean entertainment fans worldwide – that’s four times the population of South Korea. Squid Game, Netflix’s most popular show, just returned for a highly anticipated second season.

How do we get here?

The so-called Korean Wave spread around the world, experts say, when the success of streaming joined the value of American-inspired production. And Korean entertainment – ​​from pop music and sentimental dramas to acclaimed hits based on universal themes – was ready for it.

BTS and Blackpink are now household names on the global pop circuit. People are swooning over cheesy K-dramas from Dubai to India to Singapore. Overseas sales of all this Korean content, including video games, are now worth billions.

Last month, after poet and novelist Han Kang, 53, won the Nobel Prize for her literature, online forums were filled with memes highlighting South Korea’s “Cultural Victory,” a reference to the popular Civilization video game series.

And there were jokes about how the country had achieved the dream of founding father Kim Koo, who wrote that he wanted Korea to be a nation of culture rather than strength.

It turns out this moment had been years in the making.

After the end of South Korea’s military dictatorship in 1987, censorship was loosened and numerous television channels were launched. Soon, there was a generation of creators who had grown up idolizing Hollywood and hip-hop, says Hye Seung Chung, associate professor of Korean Film Studies at the University at Buffalo.

Around the same time, South Korea got rich quickly, benefiting from a boom in automobile and electronics exports. And money from the conglomerates, or chaebols as they are known, flowed into film and television production, giving it a Hollywood-like sheen.

They came to own much of the industry, from production to cinemas. So they were willing to splurge on making movies without worrying much about the losses, says Professor Chung.

Meanwhile, K-pop had become a national rage in the mid-’90s, fueling the success of groups like HOT and Shinhwa.

This inspired agencies to replicate the grueling Japanese artist management system.

Scouting young talents, often in their teens, and signing them to years-long contracts through which they become “perfect” idols, with absolutely clean images and hyper-managed public personas. As the system took hold, it transformed K-pop, creating more and more idols.

In the 2000s, Korean television shows and K-pop were a hit in East and Southeast Asia. But it was streaming that brought them into the world and into the lives of anyone with a smartphone.

That’s when the recommendation engine took over: it’s been key in initiating fans of Korean culture, taking them from show to show, spanning different genres and even platforms.

Evan says he binged the 16-hour episodes of Full House. She loved the way it took its time to build the romance, from banter to attraction, unlike the American shows she knew.

“I was fascinated by every cultural difference I saw; I noticed that they don’t wear shoes at home,” he remembers. So he accepted Netflix’s suggestions for more Korean romantic comedies. Soon, he found himself humming show soundtracks and became drawn to K-pop.

Now he has started watching variety shows, a genre of reality television in which comedians overcome a series of challenges together.

As they follow the recommendations, fans are immersed in a world that feels strange but familiar, one that eventually includes kimchi jiggae, a spicy kimchi stew, and kalguksu, a noodle broth with seafood and seaweed.

When Mary Gedda visited South Korea for the first time, she went for a bowl of kimchi jjigae, as she had seen stars do on screen on numerous occasions.

“I was crying (while eating it). “It was very spicy,” he says. “I thought, why did I ask for this? They eat it up very easily in every show.”

Mary, an aspiring French actress, now lives in Seoul. Originally a K-pop fan, she later discovered K-dramas and learned Korean. He has also starred in some cameos. “I was lucky and I love it,” he says.

For Mary, food was a big part of the appeal because she saw so much variety in K-dramas. Watching characters build relationships through food was familiar to him, he says, because he grew up in the French countryside of Burgundy.

But there is also the promise of romance, which attracted Marie Namur to South Korea from her native Belgium. She started watching K-dramas on a whim after visiting South Korea, but says she continued because she was “quite attracted to all those beautiful Korean men.”

“(They) are impossible love stories between a super rich guy and a girl who is normally poor, and, you know, the guy is there to save her and that really sells you a dream.”

But it is Korean women who write most of these shows, so it is their imagination or fantasy that captures the interest (and hearts) of other women around the world.

In Seoul, Marie said she was “treated like a lady,” something that hasn’t happened “in a long time,” but that her “dating experience is not exactly what I expected it to be.”

“I don’t want to be a housewife. I want to continue working. I want to be free. “I want to go clubbing with my friends if I want, even if I’m married or in a relationship, and a lot of guys here don’t want that.”

International fans often seek an alternative world due to disappointment with their own society, says Professor Chung.

Prissy romances, with handsome, loving and chivalrous heroes, are attracting a female audience away from what they see as hypersexual American entertainment. And when social inequality became a stronger theme in Korean films and shows, such as Parasite and Squid Game, it attracted global viewers disillusioned with capitalism and a huge wealth divide in their countries.

The search for a global audience has also brought challenges. The increasing use of English lyrics in K-pop has drawn some criticism.

And now there is greater attention on the less glamorous side of the industry. The immense pressure stars face to be perfect, for example, and the demands of a hyper-competitive industry. Creators behind hit shows have reported exploitation and complained about not being fairly compensated.

Still, it’s great to see the world paying attention to Korea, says Professor Chung. He grew up in repressive South Korea, where critics of the government were regularly threatened or even killed. She escaped to American cinema.

When Parasite screened in the movie theater in the small American town where she lives, she saw in the faces of other moviegoers the same amazement she felt when she was a child watching Hollywood movies: “It feels so good that our love is reciprocated.”