I could be watching Black Books or Mad Men but instead I’m watching K-dramas

A little over a month ago I jokingly put on the first episode of random k-dramas on Hulu when my brothers and I were bored on Thanksgiving and now we are stuck in the halyu wave without the will or desire to surf our way to shore.

I ended up watching Oh My Ghostess by my lonesome and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. The first thing that drew me into the show was its clear attention to the cinematography. The setting revolves around a restaurant and the show lovingly and respectfully spends a lot of time just to show the characters working with the food, gracefully panning across a filet as a knife slices though and emphasizing the change of texture as someone torches a desert. The direction felt surprisingly natural as well. It’s certainly funny and dramatic but the direction and acting did not revel in operatic excess or melodrama, instead feeling more like something I’d expect out of Western TV dramas. The main cast have an incredibly charming chemistry, even the side characters with no major character development or plot relevance, and I especially love the way the male lead acts when flustered- playing a character who values his pride and superiority, he does this thing where you can tell he’s trying really hard to maintain composure but has this huge urge to smile and laugh. It’s very charming.

While the basic plot premise is that a young woman working for a star chef is possessed by a ghost whose lasting grudge is that she died a virgin, it quickly becomes apparent that the story is more thoughtful than it initially sounds. The first episode, and in fact the first several episodes, treats the female lead really as a side character in the life of the star chef male lead whose life takes focus. As mentioned before, he’s prideful and arrogant, and the beginning of the show is really just about how his personality has affected his relationships with his workers, his family, and his friends. You don’t learn anything about the female leads but you learn a lot about his personal issues and see him develop as a person. The show eventually goes in directions I really did not expect but I honestly enjoyed the show a lot.

Curious after finishing Oh My Ghostess, on Christmas I made the mistake of putting on a couple of episodes of My Love From Another Star. This was another show we had initially watched the first episode of over Thanksgiving. I had heard of this show before and knew it was an absolute phenomena in Korea and especially China but none of us really liked the first episode. We persevered through the first several episodes, I so that I could figure out why it was popular and my brothers probably because they just didn’t have anything else to do, and it was just this absolute smorgasbord of interweaving plots and character relationships. Every character in the show was a horrible, broken person who was enabled by someone else in their life and they just kept pushing this on to every other character they met. The show would just keep on introducing more and more characters who all have unique, longtime relationships and backgrounds with most other characters that were just incredibly hard to keep track of. It didn’t even have any kind of forward momentum or main thrust aside from the viewer’s implicit understanding of where the main romance must go due to genre conventions. Every time a new character appeared we all audibly groaned because there was even more information to remember.

But when the main through line plot is established after several episodes we found that the show had actually created a large cast of characters who had layers depth thanks the complex web of relationships that revealed the different faces of them all. From then on the show rarely needs to establish or harp on any backstories since the viewer is able to understand and infer character motivations from then on. When characters are horrible to each other you’re able to follow layers of character development under it without the show needing to be explicit about the characters’ feelings or reactions.

It also helps that the show is about an alien with godlike powers who keeps pulling new abilities out of his pocket every other episode. There’s some silliness in there but there are actually some nicely dramatic ways his alieness is integrated into the romantic plot. We haven’t finished this one but I think my mother has gotten into it when we she saw the last couple of episodes we were watching.

Tell me why I’m wasting my life and what I should waste it on after My Love From Another Star.

At least it’s not anime.

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I pasted that post from a word document. Does the formatting look absolutely bizarre on mobile for anyone else?

yeah, you pasted the line breaks from word because word is the worst

Sounds like my kind of show

I’m disappointed in hearing that a show with the premise of “Woman gets possessed by virgin ghost” isn’t a full-on comedy like I want it to be. Anyway, now I’m going to have to get a sub to Dramafever like I didn’t want to and ruin myself with tons of dubious K and Chinese drama and maybe also watch that J-drama Netflix added for some reason.

Oh My Ghostess certainly gets much more comedic after the first several episodes once the ghost girl begins to get more focus. All of the ghosts eat dinner at funerals since that’s the only place you can find food offered to the dead and the main ghost girl is completely open about the fact that she just trying to sleep with Chef, much to his chagrin. (Everyone just calls the male lead “Chef” instead of a name since he’s the head chef. In fact I have taken to calling the show “Yes, Chef” since that phrase makes up a considerable amount of the show’s script.) This show also taught me that Koreans sing Cliff Richard whenever they congratulate someone. It would also be remiss to not mention that Oh My Ghostess’s english logo looks straight out of a PSX puzzle game.

I’ve been watching stuff on Hulu since I can use it on Chromecast and I have the ad-free subscription. Only a certain (large) selection of shows from Drama Fever are available on Hulu, kind of like an advertisement I guess, but the silly thing is that the shows have fades to black added to fit in Hulu’s commercial breaks which you still see even if you have the ad-free Hulu. This causes some very weird transitions because it’s obvious there was no commercial break at most of these parts since the scene or background music continues to play when the show fades back in. I think DramaFever requires a premium subscription for Chromecast support and I don’t know what other restrictions it has. I guess Viki also has a lot of stuff. I know Netflix has a lot of k-dramas since it keeps recommending them to me for some reason.

I’m sure live action adaptations of anime are the worst of both worlds. I will vouch for the k-drama version of City Hunter though. It is based on the manga City Hunter and has nothing to do with City Hunter while shoehorning in a reason for the protagonist to be called the “City Hunter”. It is half sappy romance and half legitimately intriguing crime thriller.

This is apparently based on a Korean comic titled A Man Called God and while I have no idea what it is the poster makes me really want to watch it. It looks like something I’d see in a Koike/Ikegami manga.

Most K-drama is trash, but do watch White Christmas. It’s somewhat of an anomaly in the K-drama scene.

Ended up re-watching Oh My Ghostess with my brothers and mom and they all liked it. It held up really well! It’s not just a good k-drama, I’d venture to say it’s also just a good show.

When browsing random videos across Drama Fever and Viki I was quite taken with what seemed to be the style for ads for dramas in Korea. Rather than making a montage of footage from the show many of them can feel like self-contained 15-30 second pieces that encapsulate a particular feeling or concept instead. They’re pretty neat.










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oh hey, just discovered this topic now.
if you are still cast away on that island, waiting for that never-ending wave to cease:

Give Signal a spin if you ever encounter that show. Might be a shameless copy of sth I never saw, so maybe that’s why I liked it so much/why it felt so good to watch it.