Ten rules to making a K-Drama.

Like your favourite kimchi, the following rules are quite spicy and should be taken with more than a pinch of salt.

Designed by the author in Microsoft Image Creator

1. Make your protagonists deeply sexually repressed and yet simultaneously, utterly naïve, despite being gobsmackingly gorgeous and completely oblivious to the looks they would normally receive in their day jobs as cover models for Vogue, Cosmo, Elle, etc.
2. Don’t have characters that are merely poor or orphaned. Make them suffer. Set them in a completely different country with a horrendous backstory that would otherwise mentally scar anyone for life. With no access to funds of any kind and an obvious language barrier. This works best with amnesia.
3. Don’t worry about offending anyone, living or dead. No-one will care. Better still, use the dead as much as possible. You won’t have to worry about expensive make-up artists and it will give the deceased a brand new lease of… publicity. It’s what they would have wanted.
4. When your two lead players inevitably fall in love in Episodes 2, 10, and 15, let them literally fall: into water — and be rescued. Fall over — and being caught (or not). Alternatively, why not combine rules 4 and 5, and have them fall off a bridge and turn up as an amorous zombie. What’s not to love?
5. Give your drama a terrible title. Preferably as vague as possible, entirely without wit or wordplay . If completely stuck, try encompassing a ten second trivial occurrence that happens in the opening scene, that will then have zero relevance for the next 42 episodes. For inspiration, see: “I Fell Over and Landed On You,” or my very favourite, “A Zombie Fell For Me, Big Time©.”
6. Always, whenever your hero or heroine is in a life threatening situation, have the person they need the most, unavailable by phone. This always happens in real life and it gives the ‘voice-actor’ friend you hired something cheap and easy to do in post-production.
7. Get an AI suite to knock up a catchy theme tune. Filter in some English words at random, and play it as many times as is humanly possible to get one’s money’s worth. This rule also applies to any songs that your singer-turned-actor needs to promote, in his or her’s ‘spontaneous’ karaoke scene, because their contract will demand it.
8. Make sure all actors over 150 pounds are given roles of abject ridicule. Over-enthusiastic eunuchs, overlooked employees or basically any demeaning job or position where they can be bullied mercilessly for having a piss-poor metabolism. That’s always good for a laugh.
9. Parents. Make the ‘mothers’ either extremely frumpy with a curly home perm or, just shy of Cruella DeVille, complete with a freshly slaughtered puppy-fur coat and liver-spotted fuck-me shoes. Dads will have either to be long suffering or drunks. Or long-suffering drunks.

Finally, and probably the most important.

10. Why settle for ten episodes when you can have twenty? Extend your series past all understanding, with extra episodes that no-one needs or cares for. Also, take care to waste at least twenty seconds of the end-credits previewing all the upcoming action, so you can then repeat it in the “previously” section of the next episode.

Clear? Excellent.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my super handy guide to making K-Dramas. I’ve spent literally tens of hours researching this subject so you don’t have to. Ever.

Reading guides can be tiring, y’know. Sometimes I need something of a pick-me-up, like my usual cup of coffee but sweeter…

Oh, what’s this? Coffee and candy all in one? Mmmmm… It’s sooooo good.

Credit: Gregory Lloyd.