*This article contains spoilers for Sweet Home.

Sweet Home, which premiered on Netflix on December 18, 2020, is a monster TV series that follows the lives of the residents of Green Home apartment as they fight against monsters that have appeared out of nowhere. For reasons unknown, some people turn into monsters embodying their inner desires, while the surviving residents doubt and fear one another and themselves. On the 25th, a week after its release, Sweet Home ranked third on both the Netflix world TV shows chart and the US shows chart on streaming analytics site FlixPatrol. This represents the first time that any Asian content has entered the US shows top ten since the chart began compiling data, and the second non-English show since Money Heist. However, this unprecedented popularity has begun to wane since the start of the new year, with the show dropping in the ranks or falling off the charts completely in many countries including the US.

The fluctuating popularity of Sweet Home hints at the status of Korean drama and, by extension, “K-content” as a whole in the global media market. With the recent rise of multinational OTT services and the continued pandemic, K-drama and K-movies, much like K-pop, are becoming recognized as genres. According to Vice, Netflix viewers in Asia consumed Korean content four times as much in 2020 as in the previous year, while Korean content viewership on Netflix was up 2.5 times in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Spain. Sweet Home’s brisk rise reflects the expectations set for viewers around the world by their experiences with the popular Netflix drama Kingdom and the movie #Alive. However, this established backdrop will not guarantee a strong reception for K-content. As expectations have risen overall, the quality of the releases has become much more important. Horror specialty site Bloody Disgusting lamented the crude visual effects in Sweet Home and the repeated use of the hackneyed song “Warriors” by Imagine Dragons, ultimately calling the show a “zombie apocalypse that we’ve seen many times before [that] just swaps out the zombies for monsters.” Meanwhile, film critic Pierce Conran wrote in the South China Morning Post that, “despite a breathless opening episode and some grisly fun throughout, Sweet Home does not provide much of a story for viewers to get hooked on.” As of January 6, Sweet Home held an above-average 7.4 rating on IMDb, but this could be seen as something of a disappointment next to Kingdom, which has four times as many reviews and holds an 8.5 as of January 7. The point stands all the more so considering Sweet Home cost three billion won per episode to produce—one and a half times that of Kingdom. This is all relative, however, and so it is too early to conclude whether Sweet Home should be seen as a success or failure. The show serves as an example confirming the recent trend of audience interest in the K-content genre, and shows the potential for a monster series—a genre previously difficult to test with Korean audiences—to find success.

Korean domestic content, once obligated to chase after stability, is expanding its range of possibilities as the media environment evolves: There exists the option to bring together renowned directors, writers and actors to fulfill the smash hit formula; alternatively, content creators can make bold attempts at uncovering the tastes of viewers around the world. The former can be seen with tvN’s Crash Landing on You, which was highlighted by major foreign press including The Washington Post and the BBC, while the latter is encapsulated by the exorcism hero series The Uncanny Counter from OCN, which has become popular in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, and ranked eighth on the Netflix world TV shows chart. In addition, shows of varying genres and subject matter are set to be released, including The Silent Sea, a sci-fi thriller set to the backdrop of space and a futuristic Earth, as well as the teen mystery series Glitch. In short, Sweet Home is not the outcome, but rather closer to a step in the process of K-content expanding out in new and diverse directions. What we should focus on now is what comes next after Sweet Home.

TRIVIA

​OTT
Short for “over-the-top,” a category of streaming services that provide movies, dramas, and other media via the Internet. OTT uses the readily available Internet rather than a private network maintained by a phone or broadcasting company and can therefore be accessed any time and on any device at the user’s convenience. Non-Korean services include Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and more. Among these, Netflix expanded into the Korean market in 2016, while the Korean launch of Disney+ is expected in mid-2021.