In 2008, armed with US$50,000, Bak Seung and his business partner went to a Korean broadcaster’s outpost in Los Angeles to ask about licensing Korean television dramas for online streaming. They were met with quizzical stares. Who, outside the Korean diaspora, would watch K-dramas, much less pay for them? Would American viewers want to read subtitles? What even is streaming? (It would be several more years before Netflix took off in earnest and “binge-watching” became a couch sport.) It was a time before K-pop group BTS , Oscar-winning film Parasite and Netflix’s Squid Game – examples of a South Korean cultural output that has redefined entertainment that transcends borders. Bak and fellow Korean-American entrepreneur Park Suk, though, were already seeing a groundswell of demand for Korean content across the English-speaking world and they were ready to be at the forefront of it. Fans were downloading or streaming pirated shows. They were organising among themselves to subtitle hours of footage for non-Korean-speaking K-drama devotees. Something about the shows incited a fervour that cut across language and culture and spread virally – at a time when “going viral” had not yet entered the English lexicon. A ‘secret treat’: the volunteer translators who subtitle K-dramas “We were finding this raw demand that seemed to have existed organically,” says Bak, co-creator of the streaming site DramaFever, which was later sold to Japanese holding company SoftBank and then to Warner Bros in 2016 for “a nine-figure sum”. The site didn’t just dabble in K-dramas – it sampled and experimented with content from around the world, from Bollywood to Turkey to Eastern Europe. But none seemed to resonate with users the way Korean shows did. “How is it possible,” Bak says, “that this little country can create storylines that so many people want to consume?” They thought only the Korean diaspora liked it, and that wasn’t true; only the Asian diaspora would like it, and that wasn’t true Sarah Chung, founder of Dramabeans It happened with K-pop, when fans began devouring snazzily produced music videos and their imitable dance moves on YouTube. It happened with films, when Parasite won four Oscars and director Bong Joon-ho and other South Korean auteurs gained global recognition. It’s happening with K-dramas following the global hit Squid Game , as algorithms queue up one South Korean production after another. The global moment the nation’s cultural exports are enjoying is a confluence of social media and streaming services bringing down cultural borders and language barriers, at a time when Korean creative industries are expanding beyond its domestic market. In 2020, South Korea logged for the first time a trade surplus in intellectual property rights relating to arts and culture – a trend that continued in 2021, according to the Bank of Korea. Korean fried chicken isn’t Korean, most Koreans say. World disagrees “South Korea, because of this tradition of export-oriented industrialisation, intensified after the [1997 Asian financial] crisis, really designed everything to be exported,” says John Lie, a UC Berkeley sociologist who has written extensively about K-pop. “It’s meant to have universal appeal.” Behind each South Korean cultural phenomenon that’s swept the world in recent years is a unique set of cross-currents. In K-pop, concerted efforts from music labels targeted overseas markets from the early 2000s on. They recruited Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Asian-American trainees for bands, and released songs in multiple languages. Another crucial driving force was the highly organised fan bases the K-pop groups spawned . These fans would stream a preferred artist’s new releases and videos as part of all-out social media blitzes to build hype around their music. The success of movies came another way. Decades of protectionism that mandated Korean cinemas devote a certain quota to domestically produced movies merged with a film industry that flourished with the end of government censorship in 1995. That set the stage for a generation led by cinephiles steeped in Hollywood influence. Parasite director Bong Joon-ho and filmmaker Kim Jee-woon have each cited the impact of watching films on AFKN, the American Forces Korea Network, broadcast for US troops stationed in South Korea. Korean television series first got a foothold in Japan, then in China, before exploding in popularity across Asia, giving rise to what’s been termed the “Korean wave” . Initially based on melodramatic storylines and Cinderella-esque tropes, the shows have matured in production quality, diversified in genres and strengthened in plot as the industry has become more profitable and commanded more substantial budgets. From Kim Soo-hyun to Squid Game, how did South Korea get over its China break-up? With the arrival of streaming services, Korean scripted series have crossed over to Western audiences in a way that’s been surprising even to their creators. Particularly resonant has been an undercurrent of social critique among filmmakers that’s bled into shows, as seen in the less-than-subtle dark class commentary of Parasite and Squid Game . “It has a very high ‘travelability’ factor that was underestimated in the beginning,” says Sarah Chung, a K-drama devotee who estimates she’s watched several hundred South Korean shows. She’s made a career out of it, building the English-language recap site Dramabeans and creating fan content for Netflix in recent years. “They thought only the Korean diaspora liked it, and that wasn’t true; only the Asian diaspora would like it, and that wasn’t true. It kept defying expectations on how far it resonated.” Park Hyun, head of the global division for Studio Dragon, a production company behind some of the biggest Korean drama hits, says the recognition brought by the success of Parasite and Squid Game has opened up new horizons for the industry. Until the arrival of Netflix and other streaming services – Apple TV+ and Disney+ launched in South Korea late last year, in addition to a handful of home-grown providers – Korean writers and directors were limited in subject matter and tied to broadcast schedules, he says. “It’s a new chance for our creators to do everything they’ve wanted to … there’s a lot of pent-up creativity finding ways to manifest,” says Park, who was also a part of the early team at DramaFever. “We’re about to experience a renaissance of Korean dramas on a cinematic scale.” Recent breakthrough moments surrounding Korean films, music or shows have generated conversations akin to buzz surrounding events such as the World Cup or the Olympics, says Kim Yeon-jeong, Twitter’s head of K-pop and Korean content partnerships. The latest is All of Us Are Dead , a zombie series set at a South Korean high school, which rose to top global Netflix charts with 125 million viewing hours in the first week, 236 million in the second. It’s become only the second non-English-language show to top Netflix’s viewership in the US, after Squid Game . It’s the first of 25 South Korea-produced shows the service has announced it will be releasing in 2022. Twitter conversations about K-pop began increasing exponentially around 2017 and 2018, Kim says. Much like the way K-pop’s fandom expanded, viewers who tweet about one Korean show soon start watching and tweeting about other dramas, based on an analysis of associated terms on Twitter, she says. “The ‘buzz model’ of K-pop is expanding to Korean dramas,” she says. “There’s quality that’s been building up over a long time that’s found a channel of communication through social media … before, no matter how good the content was, it couldn’t get to the outside world.” Korean producers are now taking a more focused and aggressive approach to establishing themselves in the US market. Why are people still surprised that Korean pop culture is good? Two of the biggest K-pop agencies, Hybe – the architect behind BTS – and SM Entertainment, are partnering with American labels and holding auditions to launch K-pop groups in the US. In November 2021, CJ ENM, the producer behind Parasite and Studio Dragon’s parent company, acquired Endeavor Content’s scripted business for US$775 million. It’s an ironic reversal from decades prior, when South Korean filmmakers so feared being wiped out by an incursion of Hollywood films that, in protest, they released live snakes at cinemas showing the 1987 film Fatal Attraction . “Korea’s always been obsessed with soft power, with having a voice in the world,” says Park of Studio Dragon. “After Parasite , we thought, it’s our time.”