Heyhey, party people! Today’s the day! Love Alarm S2 is finally back on Netflix – ok, I have to admit that, while I’m not *the* biggest fan of the show (it’s not as nuanced or as critical as it can be), I have been waiting forever and a day for it to come back - An OTP cliffhanger is gonna keep me hanging no matter what, man. Though, I don’t think I’d be able to binge it today but the option is available and that's everything, my friends.
What is makjang?
Anyway! Today’s OTP dictionary entry is: Makjang. Korean slang for ‘ridiculous situation’, makjang refers to the whole genre of soap-operaesque dramas that are extreme, over-the-top and, sometimes, just plain bizarre. We’re talking birth secrets (eg. OTP finds out they’re actually siblings), long-lost twins and, my favourite, kimchi slaps.
(I’ve never seen this drama but this gif gives me life.)
My Pre-Makjang Life
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, talking about kdrama sometimes elicits eye-rolls and scoffs from the uninitiated. This is probably due to kdramas’ association with makjang elements. Yet, most of the dramas I watched were hardly *that* melodramatic. I mean, they were all as rom-commy as the Nora Ephron films I was raised on. A splash of melodrama? Yes. Kimchi slaps? No.
At some point, I realised that most makjang kdramas were the family dramas that usually aired on weekends. Now, drama schedules used to work like this: MBC, KBS and SBS were the three Korean mainstream broadcasters which aired dramas on weeknights and on weekends. Weeknight dramas would air on Mon-Tues and Wed-Thurs. Fridays were mostly for variety shows and Sat-Sun were reserved for weekend family dramas. Weeknight dramas tended to be more concise at 16-20 episodes while weekend dramas tended to be much longer (50-100 episodes). My hypothesis was that since weekend drama plots didn’t move as quickly, they tended to contain more makjang elements to retain their audience interest.
Were weeknight audience demands changing too?
Possibly! For instance, I remember watching Secret Garden back in 2011 where the male lead’s mother was, to a large extent, an antagonist in the story and had very strong views about how her son should not have been with a woman as poor as the female lead. She fulfilled the stereotypical horrible mother-in-law role of offering the female lead money to leave her son. But it felt so out of place. By then, I’d been devouring kdrama for about 5 years and this character just felt so dated. For a drama that involved a body swap between the male/female leads, the makjang elements were too jarring against the sci-fi aspects of the show.
Perhaps, the lower rates of makjang on weeknights could have been explained by an overall need for more socially/culturally authentic storylines to be reflected on screen.
Indeed, when the cable channels started to rise up, we saw different types of stories being told. In 2014, tvN aired Witch’s Romance, starring Uhm Jung Hwa (where IS she these days??) and Park Seo Joon (this was my 1st PSJ drama). It was a noona romance – where the female lead is older and considered a noona (noona is to men what oppa is to women) and the male lead was 14 years younger. I remember almost expecting the mother-in-law trope and Noble Idiocy to feature heavily in the narrative. But neither of them did.
Instead, the lead characters actually communicated about their misgivings, their hopes, their fears and this was the first drama in which I actually sat back and thought to myself, wow, I can *learn* from them. I really took away relationship lessons from this show. It dawned on me then that this was a show that was potentially going to ruin other dramas for me because oh my goodness, before that, so much was based on Noble Idiocy, on characters who gave in to social stereotypes, on characters who allowed toxic family members to derail the progress of their relationships. Thankfully, many kdrama OTPs, that came after, based their relationship on open communication which is now part of the yardstick by which I measure the epicness of an OTP.
The Last Empress
So, makjang was kinda sorta phased out of many of the weeknight kdramas. Not that I was complaining. I didn’t see much of it in Jang Nara’s One More Happy Ending, where a washed up celebrity falls in love with her former schoolmate. Nor did I see it in her time-travel drama, Go Back Couple, where a married couple go back in time only to realise why their present-day relationship was falling apart. And so, when I heard that *the* Jang Nara was going to be in The Last Empress (TLE), a drama about a fictionalised monarchy (the best monarchies are fictional – have you watched the Oprah interview yet??) in modern-day Korea and that Choi Jin Hyuk was going to be the 2nd lead, I was more than ready for it to air. What’s more, Choi was the 2nd lead in another one of Jang’s dramas – he didn’t win her heart then, was he gonna win her over this time?
Spoiler alert: he did not. It was confusing at first as to what exactly was going on in this show. Shin Sung Rok played the king, who married Jang’s character. When she found out that the king was not a good person, I’d expected the romance between her and the bodyguard (Choi) to kick off. But it didn’t. It transformed into this weird tale of revenge and desperation to abolish the monarchy. In the span of an episode you'd find out that the king was cheating on the queen. But he would also become this really sympathetic character which threw everything into confusion.
Whose side was I supposed to be on? Why was the bad guy from episode 3 not the bad guy anymore in episode 5? Why was he suddenly the bad guy again in episode 9? What was happening???
I couldn't follow the plot at all. Usually, twists in a narrative are mind-boggling because, even though I might not have seen it coming, looking back, I would be able to see how the writer had put things in place. But with this show, my mind was just boggling x 200 non-stop. No one could be trusted. The weird thing was…I didn’t even trust the writer anymore. Nothing made any sense. I was there to do my regular OTP Watch but…what the hell *was* the OTP???
And then, it hit me. This was it. This was *real* makjang. This was not some diet Coke, bubble tea with 0% sugar, milo kosong nonsense. This was coke with mentos, bubble tea with 300% sugar and milo Godzilla.
Post TLE Makjang
So here I was, on a weeknight (?!), I was knee-deep into the quicksand of makjang and it didn’t stop there. Jang Nara was in another makjang drama last year, VIP. It made much more sense than TLE but it was makjang nonetheless. Then, the world was swept up in the frenzy of World of the Married (by cable network, JTBC). I had nothing but contempt for most of the characters, even the main character who had newly discovered that her husband was cheating on her. None of the characters, unlike Jang’s role in TLE, were remotely likeable. But this show was too addictive. Each week, I’d tune in to double episodes of trash and debauchery and I couldn’t understand why. I thought this would be the end of it but then…towards the end of 2020, the makjang kdrama gods birthed their most formidable beast – Penthouse.
P.E.N.T.H.O.U.S.E.
First of all, I once again had no idea that this was going to be makjang. I mean, look at this cast – Lee Ji Ah (who was recently in My Mister), Kim So Yeon (of IRIS fame), Eugene (who hasn’t been seen on the small screen since 2015) and Uhm Ki Joon. Freakin Uhm Ki Joon! All actors who have been associated with more serious and less makjang roles. I thought Penthouse was going to be a riff off Sky Castle (that had some makjang elements too, come to think of it) and, in a way, it is.
But it so much more than that. You guys, Penthouse. Is. Actual. Fire.
Penthouse is the kind of drama where a character dies and comes back to life because they were secretly stashed in a private hospital. The kind of drama which opens on one main character literally slashing the throat of another with a school trophy. The kind of drama where *another* character dies and comes back to life – but you’re not sure if that’s actually her or her long-lost twin sister. The kind of drama I keep coming back to, week after week, even though it is completely absurd because the characters make these kinds of facial expressions when they’re about to do something revengey.
Penthouse did so well last year, that even before its 16-episode run was ep, the network had renewed it for an additional season (12 episodes only). What’s more, season 2 came out only weeks after the end of season 1, a turnaround so quick that it could only have been explained by intense audience demands and an intense need to meet that demand. And is Season 2 as epic? Hell yes.
In the latest episode I watched, a character got rid of evidence of her involvement in manslaughter by chewing (this was some legit ASMR) and swallowing a SIM card. Because trashcans are for the weak, dammit! (Many astute Twitter users were quick to point out that the evidence would have been stored on the internal memory and not the SIM but this is not the point).
The big question: Why *has* makjang come back in such a grand way?
Honestly, I think it’s because all of us are just tired. At least, I am? I mean, look, it’s great that we have dramas that depict the frustrations of everyday life. My Mister and its harrowing look at how toxic workplaces perpetuate social inequality? I’m all for that. Be Melodramatic and its insights into the mental health and the challenges of three women in their 30s in the 21st century? Sure, that’s brilliant.
But all that is ultimately a reminder that real life is bleak too. Makjang shows like Penthouse and TLE deal with social inequality and moral corruption too. Admittedly, their commentary on these issues is hardly as nuanced as it needs to be. And there is a need to ensure that audiences are critical enough to see that. But, in a way, there is also always some kind of poetic justice ultimately delivered to the whole host of horrible people on the show. Even the good guys who end up doing bad things get served consolation prize just desserts.
And that’s why it all feels so good. We don’t get poetic justice in real life. We have to be all prim and proper and good.
But being good, in real life, is difficult. When people put us down or abuse power to make employee lives hell or don’t apologise when they’re supposed to or when a white, privileged man runs his mouth off and spews disbelief about the suicide ideation of a mixed-race woman on international television, staying angry while also staying calm is hard. It takes a toll. Look, I once considered whether I should tape a bag of dog poop under my supervisor’s desk because he was making my life a living hell – I didn’t do it, of course, but did I want to? Yes. Yes, I really did.
Sometimes, all we want to is to tune in to a show where the facial contortions of the cast match the intensity and weight of our own emotions. Sometimes, all we want to do is sit back and laugh at a fictional world where only the most absurd of twists occur because they actually somehow manages to out-absurd real life. In makjang dramas, desires we didn’t even know we had come to life and we don’t need to do anything except sit there and live vicariously through women who eat SIM cards. *shrug*
Also, if you’re confused as to why there’s no OTP-specific commentary in this post…(whispers) welcome to makjang~~~
See you in two weeks, my friends. Xoxo.
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