You should try watching cable dramas.

I highly recommend Answer me 1997/ Reply 1997 and I live in Cheongdam-dong. Cable programs seem to be of better quality than those offered by the big broadcast stations.

Whoops! I meant to say: while the material shown is not entirely new, it feels like it. Sorry for the typos!

i love her.. One of my favourite korean moms, even when she's supposed to be evil/fierce. Unfortunately I cant say the same to some other senior actresses..

Yeah I thought I was the only one who noticed this. This incessant focus on 'womenz must marry rich menz' in KDramas is really starting to make me uncomfortable.

I lived in Korea for three years myself, and noticed how watching all these marriage-themed dramas was making me, a very liberal European, slowly start to put it onto a similar pedestal as my Korean friends. It really is akin to brainwashing to see women wanting to get married, marriage being put on a pedestal, marriage being portrayed as the only real desire a woman is supposed to have everywhere everywhere you look. It's quite sickening, and I've started to get seriously squicked by pushy Korean mothers on TV who want to marry off their daughters, doubly so if they are actually career-minded and don't WANT to.

I Do, I Do is the most feminist drama I've seen in a while in that it's made pretty clear that the female lead does not want to marry despite her parents' lamentations, and ends up staying true to that.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say. If your argument is that these dramas aren't sexist because it was written by women, then I don't agree -- women are perfectly capable of being sexist and writing things with unfortunate implications.

And you're right in that not every drama that deals with marriage or mothers forcing their daughters are sexist. There is a difference between endorsement and depiction, which is why we have a lot of literature set in openly racist or sexist environments that few people would ever call racist/sexist in and of themselves because they merely depict, not endorse.

Some dramas merely depict and not endorse (like IDID, for the most part), but most do not. Of the dramas I've seen, the women more often than not end up realizing that marriage was the right path after all and 'a man with money is the way to go' as a tacitly held widespread belief is rarely changed. Most dramas do overly romanticize marriage and portray it as extremely important while rarely casting a really critical eye on the institution as a whole, and inadvertendly further propagating the current state of South Korea in which many women are still made to quit their jobs once they married or pregnant, female economic participations rates are among the lowest in the OECD countries, and where alternatives to the traditional Korean family life are rarely acknowledged as viable.

But we all know that Korean dramas aren't the bastion of feminism and that the country is very traditional, which will be reflected in their media. I still watch KDramas and like them, on the whole, and I have watched them for.... oh, like 8 years now. So it's pretty safe to say that I do still get enjoyment out of them, and my love for Korea even motivated me enough to pack my bags and go live there for three years. Doesn't mean I can't view some aspects of these dramas critically, though.

Admittedly a lot of this is colored by a type of personal bias -- a big reason why I am squicked by these 'well-meaning mother wants to marry off her daughters' stories is because I've met more Korean women my age than I can count while living there who were actually being pressured by their mothers to marry some rich guy as soon as they hit 25, and often without their consent. Many had career-related aspirations that never came to fruition because their mothers insisted on marrying them off to some rich guy, in the full conviction that they were in the right and doing their daughters a huge favor. I am just squicked by this slavish devotion to marriage as the be-all-and-end-all of societal acceptance.

That all said, maybe this new drama will be cool. It's on JTBC, which has good dramas overall. Maybe it will take this story and use it to discuss marriage, the people who want it, the people who don't, and the parents who mess with it in an intelligent and critical fashion. It could happen.

I'm just not betting on it, is all.