What is Drama

The global rise of the South Korean entertainment industry, commonly described as the Korean wave or hallyu, has been the subject of scholarly study because it presents a challenge to Western media hegemony. This chapter uses mixed methods to assess how hybridized genre conventions and familiar storytelling structures in South Korean television dramas create a media product that is accessible to a diverse fandom. The Korean drama fandom extends beyond Eastern Asia and the Asian diaspora, and there is a dearth of research on this larger global audience. Theories of cultural proximity are insufficient to explain a popularity that transcends culture and language. The importance of a media text's structure is also under-studied in research on fandom. By combining survey data from Korean drama fans living outside of South Korea with a critical assessment of the use of melodrama and other genre conventions in Korean dramas, this chapter argues that the shared symbolic language of genre plays an important role in building a global fanbase.