Linsanity and the Art of Escape

Starting a few years ago, I lost interest in keeping up with American television—high-budget prestige dramas, mindless sitcoms, guilty-pleasure reality shows, everything. As an alternative, I’ve found myself turning more and more to the television that, for me, has always been simultaneously the most comforting and the most escapist: K-dramas. When I was a kid, my grandmother used to borrow bootleg VHS tapes of never-ending historical sagas every week from our local Korean grocery store, an immigrant ritual that provided a tether to the home she had left behind for the culturally and linguistically alien landscape of Kansas. Now, in my adult life, watching Korean television offers something more like a temporary reprieve from the hellishness of everyday life in America. Of course, it helps that the genre conventions of the K-drama provide maximum narrative satisfaction: ridiculously good-looking people with tragic, strangely interconnected back-stories face terrible, often absurd problems that present themselves, crest, and resolve over a tidy sixteen episodes.