Creative Genre Matters: Trendy Drama and the Rise of the East Asian Global Media Market

Abstract

The trendy drama, a new TV genre coined to signify contemporary trends, initially emerged in Japan in the 1980s and became popular with middle-class audiences across East Asia for portraying Western-like chic metropolitan lifestyles. This television genre typically consists of a 10 to 13 episode long miniseries with 60 to 90 minute episodes. Their narratives focus on love affairs between rich, attractive, hard-working elites as they question traditional Han Chinese values and consider whether women should be independent, allowed to work, have sex outside marriage, and divorce. While specifically Chinese, these values have influenced cultures across East Asia. While espousing liberal and feminist ideals, they roam from trendy stores, such as fashion clothing and cosmetic shops, to expensive restaurants, and back to their luxurious apartments. Quickly, these dramas became so associated with highlighting current global and local trends and countering tradition that they became known as “trendy dramas”.

This genre quickly took off and soon thereafter, South Korea and Taiwan partnered together to create their own versions of trendy dramas that helped generate much of contemporary East Asian popular culture, including the rise of K-Pop. Based on Mittell’s claim that genres function as a means of framing mass audiences’ taste, here I explore the role of this TV genre in the context of globalization and local culture in East Asia and its effect upon reshaping social meanings during the 1980s and the early 2010s. In particular, the Taiwanese trendy dramas played a key role in elevating this genre within the Asian TV market. In this article, I argue that in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the trendy drama became a way to debate Han cultural values and their role in the lives of liberal metropolitan Asians. In the process, this genre helped reshape the East Asian TV market along with popular culture around the globe. I will begin by describing the history of the trendy drama before focusing on how it debates traditional beliefs and considers the value and utility of feminism and individualism in contemporary urban Asia.