core response 04_jacqueline maldonado

It’s a little bit funny we were asked to watch Kingdom for the Global TV week as it was the first major K-Drama I watched. Coaxed by a friend, in broad daylight because I am excessively afraid of horror in any capacity and especially when zombified, she tried to sell the show as a Game of Thrones-type from Netflix’s global department. I don’t think I believed her, and even after watching a majority of the first season I still don’t feel that way, but it’s interesting to consider that this series had to be framed against a ‘serialized western epic’ for a watch rather than stand on its own. 

While this reflects Curtin’s initial points on the continued American contexts when studying global media, I’m also attached to Park and companies’ interview results noting that the change with Netflix leadership brought a change in content. Where series were originally made for broader and broadcast audiences, working ‘globally’ with Netflix afforded opportunities to work in new niches like Kingdom’s zombie period piece as they are “known to prefer unconventional genres (e.g., horror and thriller) and innovative approaches to storytelling” (Park, 81). Yet we can still give Kingdom’s niche a name that summons titles like it as, save for the period piece bit, I’m sure we can list at least four other zombie series between 2014 and 2019. While the piece takes larger attention to the platform imperialism that Netflix partakes in their ownership of Korean studios rather than just distribution, there remains the fact that content is approached from the Netflix home base interests and needs. Just because what they ask for differs from traditional series and tropes doesn’t necessarily mean they are absent in these acquisitions; Park even immediately quotes a House of Cards writer to support the platforms further flexibility in series runtime compared to broadcast that, while different from ninety-minute episodes for a sixteen-episode season abroad, comes from the same heart of serving Netflix as an American think-tank of a platform.

Kingdom does well to stand on its own, but this cannot be done without the content adjacent to it on a given Netflix category. Whether they intended for audiences like my friend to equate it to other big-budget American series I cannot personally say, but if it is our reflex to identify global content in familiar bounds it is not out of the question the hands that made it had that in mind. Though I suppose this entire post only justifies our American faults Curtain opened with. Rats.