Constant Transformation of Web Dramas Leads ‘Short-form’ Era
Shin Jung-ah
Cultural Critic
“Short-form,” a Konglish term referring to short video content optimized for mobile phones, has become the favorite format of Generation Z given its easy accessibility via smartphone. “Zoomers” refers to digital natives born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s who grew up in an internet and mobile phone environment. MezzoMedia, a digital marketing solutions company that studies content trends, says teens and those in their 20s including zoomers like 15-minute videos the most. For teens, their favored video length for a single view is under 10 minutes. Web dramas are the most popular short-form content as they convey emotions and human relations through interesting stories lasting from eight to 15 minutes.
Debuting in 2013, Korean web dramas early on were mostly branded content for corporate publicity. The six-part series Love in Memory, sponsored by Kyobo Life Insurance and considered Korea’s first web drama, describes the reunion at a bookstore of a man and a woman who parted ways seven years earlier. It won accolades as quality content starring actors Jo Yoon-hee and Jung Gyu-woon, but with limitations as a light version of a TV series.
Another six-part series, Cravings, sponsored by food company Lee Kum Kee, attracted watchers by presenting the work life, love, and friendship of a woman in her 30s as close to real life as possible. The basic plot is that protagonist Jae-young comes home after work daily and cooks and eats something that suits her feelings and situations that day. As in this series, the purpose of most early web dramas was to promote brands or particular products through appealing stories.
The best example of the limitless expandability of web dramas was the six-part mobile movie Incomplete Life: Prequel (2013). An adaptation of Yoon Tae-ho’s hit webtoon of the same title that recorded over 100 million views, the work was expanded from the original comic’s worldview by adding many incidents and characters. Prequel, meaning a story that precedes the original work, is the leading genre of transmedia content, which uses a narrative technique to enhance content vitality and fan loyalty by expanding the storytelling of a work with a strong fan base. Incomplete Life: Prequel imagines the past of six characters in the original webtoon and provides an individual episode for each of them. The lengths and genres of the six stories vary. For instance, that of Ahn Yeong-yi is an eight-minute campus romance; Jang Baek-gi’s is a five-minute horror episode on campus; and the five-minute story on Han Seok-yul is a family drama set in his childhood. These were produced to raise the popularity of each character and elaborate on them. The success of Incomplete Life: Prequel was followed by a remarkable development in the domestic web drama ecosystem.
The heyday of web dramas began in 2015 with works starring celebrities such as Falling for Challenge, EXO Next Door, and I Order You exceeding a combined 10 million views. Omniscient Viewpoint on Crushes released by WHYNOT Media in October 2016 was a hit among teens and 20-somethings as the first web drama to reach 100 million views. WHYNOT Media set an industry benchmark through a web drama meeting a specific youth demand by analyzing their favorite genres, casts, and stories. Later, the game Best Mistake was made into a web novel and audio content through which a new IP business model emerged. This is how web dramas have created a new storytelling universe through branded content and diverse IP businesses.
Recently, web dramas characterized by “B-class sensibility” are enormously popular as evidenced by the short comic movies on the YouTube channel Nerdult. Shown as web dramas, these works make viewers laugh by amusingly depicting people and incidents in everyday life. The competitiveness of Nerdult episodes seem to lie in the instantaneous response and mobility shown in hyper-realistic sketches and expressions of what happens in real life. With an amazing 76.5 million views, the episode “Karrot?” has two men talk in person after their wives arrange buying and selling things on the online market named after a carrot but spelled with a “k.” Another similar episode, “Electricity Thieves in a Café,” earned 76.4 million views by showing down-and-out young men studying at a café.
Web dramas have the potential for infinite expandability given their lack of limits by traditional form, size, or genre. On metaverse platforms like ZEPETO and ifland, such avatar-using dramas are being produced vigorously. The genre is evolving as a medium that understands and sympathizes with contemporary life through easy accessibility anywhere and anytime and can be watched by episode or in its entirety.
Yet the commercial nature of web dramas produced for advertising and the excessive recommendations by algorithms are considered problematic for raising viewer fatigue. Another problem is the difficulty in controlling provocative, obnoxious, and violent subjects and expressions in web dramas as they are fairly free from regulations online. As web dramas are highly influential as a daily means of representing the sentiment and culture of modern life, the comprehension of cultural sensibility and diversity by their creators is an important subject for discourse.
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