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

Evan Barringer was 14 years old when he stumbled upon Full House, a South Korean romantic comedy in which two strangers are forced to share a house.

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

This random choice changed his life. Twelve years later, he's an English teacher in South Korea and says he likes it here: “I got to try all the food I've seen in K-dramas, and I got to see a few of the K-pop artists in concert, whose texts I used while studying Korean.”

When Evan discovered Full House in 2012, South Korean entertainment was a breakthrough in the eyes of the world. Psy's Gangnam Style was the most famous Korean pop export at the time.

Today, there are more than an estimated 220 million fans of Korean entertainment worldwide – that's four times the population of South Korea. Squid Game, Netflix's most popular show to date, has just returned for its highly anticipated second season.

How did we get here?

Experts say the so-called Korean Wave swept the world when streaming success met American-inspired production values. And Korean entertainment—from pop music and slow dramas to blockbuster hits built around universal themes—was ready for it.

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

Last month, after poet and writer Han Kang, 53, won the Nobel Prize for literature, online message boards were filled with memes celebrating South Korea's “Victory of Culture” – a reference to the popular video game series Civilisation.

There were also jokes about how the country had achieved the dream of founding father Kim Koo, who famously wrote that he wanted Korea to be a nation of culture, not power.

As it turned out, this moment had been years in the making.

After the end of the military dictatorship in South Korea in 1987, censorship was loosened and numerous television channels were launched. Soon there was a generation of artists 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 became rich quickly, benefiting from a boom in auto and electronics exports. And money from conglomerates, or chaebols as they are known, poured into film and television production, giving it Hollywood sheen.

They became the owners of much of the industry, from production to cinemas. So they were willing to spend money on making movies without worrying too much about losses, says Prof. Chung.

K-pop, meanwhile, became a domestic rage in the mid-1990s, driving the success of groups like HOT and Shinhwa.

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

Scout young talent, often in their teens, and sign them to long-term contracts that turn them into “perfect” idols, with squeaky-clean images and hyper-manageable public personas. As the system took hold, it transformed K-pop, creating more and more idols.

Until 2000 Korean TV shows and K-pop were a hit in East and Southeast Asia. But streaming took them out into the world and into the lives of everyone with a smartphone.

Then the recommended mechanism took over – it was the key to initiating fans of Korean culture, taking them from one show to the next, spanning different genres and even platforms.

Evan says he binged 16 hours of Full House episodes. He loved the way it took time to build the romance, from bickering to attraction, unlike the American shows he knew.

“I was fascinated by every cultural difference I saw – I noticed they didn't wear shoes at home,” he recalls. So he accepted Netflix's offers for more Korean romcoms. He soon found himself humming along to the shows' soundtracks and was drawn to K-pop.

Now he has started watching variety shows, a reality TV genre where comedians go through a series of challenges together.

As they work their way through the recommendations, fans are immersed in a world that seems foreign yet familiar—one that eventually includes kimchi jigge, a spicy kimchi and kalguksu stew, seafood broth, and seaweed noodles.

When Mary Geda first visited South Korea, she went in search of a bowl of kimchi jigae, as she had seen the stars do on screen many times.

“I cried (while eating). It was so spicy,” she says. “I thought why did I order this? They eat it up so easily in every show.”

Mary, an aspiring French actress, now lives in Seoul. Originally a K-pop fan, she discovered K-dramas and learned Korean. She also appeared in several cameo roles. “I've been lucky and I really like it,” she says.

For Mary, food was a big part of the appeal because she saw such a variety of it in K-dramas. Seeing characters build relationships over food was familiar to her, she says, because she grew up in the French countryside in Burgundy.

But there's also the promise of romance that drew 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 “largely attracted to all those handsome Korean men.”

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

But Korean women are the ones who write most of these shows – so it's 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,” which hasn't happened “in a very long time,” but her “dating experience wasn't exactly what I expected it to be.”

“I don't want to be a housewife. I want to keep working. I want to be free. I want to go clubbing with my girlfriends if I want, even though I'm married or in a relationship, and a lot of guys here don't want that.

International fans often seek an alternative world out of disillusionment with their own society, says Prof. Chung.

Primal romances with handsome, caring, chivalrous characters appeal to female audiences who turn away from what they see as hypersexualized American entertainment. And when social inequality became a stronger theme in Korean movies and shows — like Parasite and Squid Game — it attracted global viewers disenchanted with capitalism and the gaping wealth divide in their countries.

The pursuit of a global audience also brought challenges. The increasing use of English lyrics in K-pop has led to some criticism.

And now there's a greater focus on the less glamorous side of the industry. The immense pressure stars face to be perfect, for example, and the demands of an ultra-competitive industry. The creators behind the blockbuster shows claim they have been exploited and complain they have not been fairly compensated.

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

When Parasite played at the cinema in the small American town where she lives, she saw on the faces of other moviegoers the same awe she felt as a child watching Hollywood films: “It feels so great that our love is reciprocated.”