Every longtime fan of Korean dramas has a few favourite years of releases. The dramas in those years are rarely disappointing. Every show we pick up exceeds expectations. The characters sparkle, the dialogues speak to our souls, the plots seep into our dreams.
The last time I had a year like that was in 2021, when Happiness came out and ruined all other zombie apocalypses for me. If your allegory about classism during a global pandemic doesn’t have best friends in a contract marriage, fighting together to protect survivors while realising they love each other as the whole complex quickly falls to an invisible disease, don’t expect me to even look at it. That year also gave us Navillera, Beyond Evil, Yumi’s Cells, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, and a dozen more from which I still haven’t recovered.
Reader, 2023 was not such a year. From the very beginning, you could feel the industry’s exhaustion.
Well before the success of Squid Game (another 2021 release), a new Korean wave starting with Crash Landing On You (2019) brought fresh global interest and investment to the industry. Following the success of Crash Landing on You, Netflix signed a three-year deal in 2019 with Studio Dragon, in addition to licensing content from other production houses. According to CNBC, Netflix has spent over $700 million between 2015 and 2020 on Korean content. In May of this year, they announced another $2.5 billion to be invested over the next four years. The impact of this sudden inflow of cash was a massive shift in production practices. Many more dramas with higher budgets were greenlit quickly.
Initially this meant that some really excellent stories, which may never have otherwise seen the light of day, suddenly found themselves with a budget and proper production support. This is how an epic fantasy drama like Alchemy of Souls was considered a viable project instead of an impractical pipe dream. They had the money and it was the time to be ambitious.
The Battle for K-dramaland
But the industry grew and changed too quickly in too short a span of time. By 2022, local production companies were already trying to claw back their independence from international streaming giants. Korea Times reported that companies like CJ ENM — one of its subsidiaries is Studio Dragon — “have been moving big to break the years-long Netflix dominance through strategic partnerships and mergers”. Another report in the New York Times covered how AStory, the production company behind the Emmy Award nominated Extraordinary Attorney Woo, rejected Netflix’s offer to finance the entire second season, with their chief executive, Lee Sang-baek saying that despite the series becoming a mega hit globally, “our company couldn’t do anything with that.”
The battles being fought in boardrooms started to leave their scars on our screens. Broadcast companies which had previously stayed away from the international streaming race found themselves forced to participate because the economics of the industry had changed irreversibly.
That’s how, this year, drama watchers suddenly found themselves back in the days when second halves of dramas could be relied on to nose dive off a cliff. High concept stories with poor execution were supposed to be a relic of the mid 2010s, yet that’s the nostalgic throwback that 2023 decided to gift us.
This churn in the drama industry was inevitable and necessary for local productions to retain a sense of self and create sustainable growth. Unfortunately, for now, it seems the upshot is that viewers find themselves in a period when writers fall back on old tropes and producers are once again reluctant to greenlight less tested storylines.
Adapting to a Changing Scene
A substantial number of dramas released in 2023 were also adapted from popular webtoons. For production companies seeking scripts that are already market tested, the webtoon to dramaland pipeline has brought steady success in recent years. It’s an even better bet than adapting a popular foreign property, which sometimes doesn’t translate well into the Korean market.
This trend of adaptation is growing stronger and is something that worries me. More than half of the dramas I loved this year had original scripts. If instability and market stresses continue to plague the K-drama industry, we may see fewer scriptwriters getting a chance to showcase their original ideas next year. Let’s hope the churning ends soon, so I can find myself once again enjoying a favourite year of drama releases.
Fortunately, for all its drawbacks, I can’t write off 2023 in K-dramaland completely. As always, dramaland held back a few promising dramas for the very end of the year. Looking ahead, I have some hopes for Sam-dalri, Death’s Game, and Gyeongseong Creature. Of the large volume of dramas dumped on us this year, as of December, I’d picked up 51 and completed 22. While I have plenty of grouse against the dramas that I had to rage-drop half way through, I was also surprised by the dramas that managed to stick the landing.
Most of them were not stories I expected to win my heart. Some of them started awkwardly, some were built on concepts I’d seen fail before, while others relied heavily on trope subversions that could easily go wrong. But in the end, these were the shows which seeped into my conversations, which I pushed at my friends, and which I thought about at random hours of the day. So let me tell you about the 10 dramas I will remember 2023 by.
