I wouldn’t call myself a big K-drama fan. I don’t wait for new releases, I don’t curate playlists of their sweeping OSTs, I barely even know the real names of cast members nor can I pronounce them well. But in the few times that I do indulge, I find myself floored, completely shattered, at the ingenuity of it all. It is impossible not to recognize that K-dramas have mastered something most TV dramas fail to achieve: the art of feeling. Few shows make you feel as deeply as a great K-drama does. Lighting, set design, dialogue, character positioning, pacing, every element is deliberately executed to immerse you in feeling. The industry has garnered a dedicated international following, not only for their intrigue or aesthetic appeal, but for their ability to evoke a profound emotional response. It operates within a certain emotional syntax, relying on visual symbolism, interpersonal dynamics, and the strategic use of both verbal and non verbal dialogues to construct deeply affective emotional experiences. Simply put, they have a way of making the ordinary, extraordinary. They take the subtleties of everyday moments to profoundly explore the human experience.

Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, describes love as existing in a state of perpetual delay, where the waiting itself becomes a site of emotional intensity. K-dramas employ this concept with remarkable precision as they rely on the prolonged anticipation of intimacy. Love is rarely immediate, materializing in moments and words that, to the untrained eye and ear, may seem insignificant. Every near-touch, every interrupted moment, extends the emotional tension, making even the smallest gestures feel weighted. To demonstrate this further, Melissa Forbes, in her research on emotional communication in film, argues that some of the most powerful emotional moments in storytelling come not from overt displays of feeling, but from the absence of them. Larissa Pham, also agrees with this in her essay, On Longing, which speaks of the emotional archaeology inherent in storytelling, the way narratives can serve as sites of excavation, unearthing forgotten or suppressed feelings. K-dramas function in much the same way. The relationships at the center of these stories develop gradually, typically often over the course of sixteen episodes, with each interaction contributing incrementally to an eventual emotional crescendo. In My Liberation Notes (2022), love is almost beside the point. The drama is more concerned with loneliness, with the way people carry exhaustion in their bodies, with the desperate need to be seen even when there are no words to express it. It barely even acknowledges romance until the very end, because it’s too busy lingering in the desperation of wanting something to change.

There’s no effusive profession of desire, just life, trudging along, and people learning how to exist within it.

The effect is cumulative and deeply satisfying as catharsis is generated through slow accrual, ensuring that when the moment of revelation finally arrives, it carries the full weight of everything that has come before it.

Apart from narrative patience being one of the defining characteristics of K-dramas, another important and simple quality is that K-dramas understand people. Not just love and romance, though, as established earlier, they’ve certainly perfected the art of a slow burn, but the entire, messy spectrum of human relationships — romantic, familial, platonic — and the ways they shape us.

In K-dramas, familial love is rarely simple. It is tangled in duty, expectation, and history. The mother-daughter dynamic, for instance, is often portrayed not as a relationship of overt affection but of friction. There is an inherent tension between love and control, between wanting the best for one’s child and failing to recognize that love should not be conditional. In Welcome to Samdal-ri (2023), a mother and daughter who have spent years estranged find reconciliation through small, almost imperceptible acts of care.

Moreover, father-daughter and father-son relationships are shadowed by societal expectations of stoicism; thus, they are rendered delicately, with a lot of vulnerability. The father figure is traditionally associated with strength and authority, and in many K-dramas, the fathers wrestle with their own emotional limitations. The silences, the hesitant gestures, speak volumes about the unspoken love and the barriers that prevent its full expression. In Because This Is My First Life (2017), a father who cannot bring himself to say “I love you” instead installs a new door lock for his daughter.

To me, the beauty of art is not in its subject alone, but its form. “Good” and “bad” art dissolve. Only masterful or flawed execution remains. Hence, I don’t believe in good films or bad films, only good filmmaking and bad filmmaking — just as there are no good or bad books, only good or bad writing. So it excites me that the potency of K-drama doesn’t rely solely to its writing alone. Its power is also embedded within the very composition of a scene; rooted in its visual and sonic language the way cinematography, sound design, and mise-en-scène conspire to create a moving scene, one that maps out different kinds of emotions: longing, regret, tenderness, sadness, distance. The color palettes, the gentle diffusion of light, the framing of characters against vast, empty spaces — all these elements work in concert to heighten the drama’s emotional resonance.

There is also an obsessive attention to visual motifs, a recurring symbolic language that builds meaning. In other words, symbolism plays a huge role, sometimes almost absurdly so, in small, seemingly ordinary things that take on enormous emotional weight. Even sound is wielded with great intentionality. Silence is never empty; it is always filled with meaning. Dialogue, when used, is equally deliberate. K-dramas almost never spoon-feed emotions through words. In the film, Nevertheless (2021), a short line, “Let’s fix this”, carries the weight of an entire relationship. Simply, let’s fix this: fix the broken pieces of the sculpture, the broken pieces of their hearts, their broken relationship (situationship), their broken spirit, but most importantly, themselves. The process of their working together to fix it, does fix them. When the sculpture is whole again, so are they, the anger, the hurt seeped out completely.

By the time they stand before the finished piece, reunited, the shift is in the visual language of the scene. No longer positioned on opposite sides of something broken, they now stand together, looking at what they have created, what they have salvaged. The scene is designed so that meaning does not rest solely in the words but in their placement, in the weight they carry after so much silence, in the tension that has built between these two people who have spent so much time avoiding the inevitable.

It saddens me that Korean dramas (K-dramas) are often pigeonholed as fluffy, lightweight, little more than indulgent romantic fantasies reduced to their supposedly most visible aesthetic marker: the swoon-worthy, attractive male leads. This, of course, is the predictable fate of any genre that majorly has a women fanbase. But this myopic perception fails to grasp the depth and range of emotions they explore. K-dramas delineate some of the most sophisticated portrayals of human relationships in contemporary television.