SQUID GAME ’S EMMY SUCCESS HAILED AS ‘NEW HISTORY IN K-DRAMA’
SEOUL, — First it was the movie Parasite. Then Yuh-Jung Youn, the star of Minari. Now, Squid Game.
The dystopian Netflix drama’s success at the Emmys — including the top acting prize for its star, Lee Jung Jae, a first for a foreignlanguage show — was greeted with cheers in South Korea and hailed as the latest example of the country’s rise as a cultural powerhouse.
Major Korean news outlets such as MBC and Yonhap made the news the lead story on their websites. Chosun Ilbo, one of the country’s largest newspapers, said Squid Game had written a “new history in K-drama.”
“It seems like South Korean productions are getting more and more recognized internationally, which makes me excited,” said Lee Jae, a commercial producer in Seoul, who bingewatched the series as soon as it came out last year.
Squid Game, a nineepisode survival drama by the South Korean director-writer Hwang Dong Hyuk, became a global phenomenon, thanks to its candycolored sets and searing critique of capitalist society. The show, which was produced by Netflix and released in September 2021, became its most-watched series ever.
The drama is centered on a competition in which 456 deeply indebted people are pitted against one another to the death for a cash prize of nearly $40 million. Players must advance through several rounds of supercharged children’s games, such as tug-of-war and red light green light, in order to win. Losers are instantly killed.
The show’s popularity set off a Halloween costume frenzy for green tracksuits, pink boiler suits and black masks to dress as the show’s players and guards.
The show’s blunt commentary on a deeply unequal society and moral bankruptcy found resonance beyond South Korea, tapping into a frustration over wealth disparities that is familiar to people around the world.
“It deals with the issue of this growing global trend of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and this phenomenon is not unique to Korea — it’s something that the international community is going through collectively,” Lee, the show’s star, said in July.
At the time, the series outperformed other popular non-English shows like Money Heist and Lupin, according to Ted Sarandos, a cochief executive officer and chief content officer for Netflix. At a business conference last year, he said that Squid Game was “blowing past all of them.”
The show’s success is the latest in a string of international accolades for South Korean productions that have explored themes of inequality and economic struggle.
In 2020, Parasite, the class satire directed by Bong Joon Ho, became the first foreignlanguage movie to win the Academy Award for Best Film. Last year, Youn, a veteran Korean star, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Minari, the film about a hard-luck family of Korean immigrants in rural Arkansas in the 1980s, when many poor Koreans headed to the United States for a better life.
Those earlier awards signaled a growing acceptance of foreign-language productions, said Daniel Martin, a film studies professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He said the success of Squid Game at the Emmys could be “a sign of hopefully a generational change.”
While audiences might “go back to not caring about non-English content, Squid Game’s win shows that viewers are receptive to Korean content, which is encouraging,” Martin said.
South Korea has emerged as an entertainment juggernaut in recent years, captivating international audiences with K-pop bands such as BTS, as well as hit TV shows and critically acclaimed movies.
Most recently, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a Korean feel-good show about a young autistic lawyer, has been the most watched non-English-language program on Netflix in the past several weeks.
Asia is an increasingly important market for Netflix. In the first three months of the year, as Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, Asia was the only region that showed growth, with Japan, India and the Philippines among the countries adding subscribers. In the second quarter, Netflix added 1.1 million subscribers in Asia.
For Squid Game, the Emmys are only its latest achievement. In February, the drama scooped up multiple prizes at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, including lead performer honors for Lee and Jung Ho-yeon.
Lee, one of the most successful actors in South Korea, began his career as a model before starring in a number of hit Korean films, playing characters including romantic leads and cutthroat gangsters. His directorial debut, Hunt, an espionage thriller, was released in South Korea last month.
On social media and online forums, his fans poured on the praise after his Emmy win. One fan said on Twitter: “To South Korea’s Lee Jung-jae! Congratulations on winning the best lead actor. You are an actor who gives his all into his work and to his fans. I applaud you, someone whose hard work deserves such accomplishments.”
Another tweeted: “Wow, Lee Jung-jae won the award for best actor. He really is amazing.”
In his acceptance speech, Lee acknowledged the support of his fans at home and their love for the show. “I’d like to share this honor with my family, friends and our precious fans watching from South Korea. Thank you!” he said.