I’ll stick around dramaland in 2024 because…Kim Soo-hyun is making his comeback!

If 2023 wasn't the best year, there were still dramas that made me happy for some reasons. So I have hopes for 2024 even if I just commented in the last news that none of them was looking interesting for me...

But there will be Queen of Tears, Jeong Nyeon, Loverly Runner, The Son of Mother's Friend, Doctor Slump, etc. that I look forward to!

... because I want to see whether it reflects on its mistakes and improves or sinks even lower than in 2023^^

And to ogle some more hot guys in historical costumes. It's a freaking mid-December, I don't have any energy left in me to pretend I truly care for the crap that most dramas nowadays call their plot!

Well, first of all, I felt there were plenty of engaging dramas for me to watch this year--at some moments, I couldn't even imagine having the time in my week to watch any more!!--so I didn't feel the "mediocrity" so many others, including @missvictrix , are expressing. Perhaps it is that I am relatively new to this community though...

So...even if y'all are right, I'm sticking around in 2024 because there's apparently room for improvement, and I'm psyched to see all the new dramas that are even better!!

Also, Beanies. I'm absolutely right here in 2024 to discuss these amazing new (and older) shows with the Beanies.

In every single year, there will be gems, flops, masterpieces and forgettable productions, thats just the nature of dramaland.

Longtime fans will always be around, we will praise the good stuff, complain about the bad stuff and hope that our favourite writers/actors/PD's continue to give us great stories

Kdramas became such an integral part of my life that I can't imagine 2024 without them. I will be there. (And hope that Oppas will be there as well 🙂 - where are you Seo Kang Joon?)

My wish: after disappointment after disappointment I pray for a good weekender.

Kdramas and DB are part of my life, so no matter what I will be on this ride for 2024.
I don’t have any great expectations from dramas. I go with the flow and let shows surprise me. Even if they fall after Ep 8, I drop and move on. It doesn’t bother me.
I do occasionally miss dramas like My Ahjushi. As long as I get gems like that every few years I am ok.
With the amount of kdramas these days, I feel the good ones are far few in between. I just need to get better at picking them and dropping them (which I do).

My hope for dramaland in 2024 is that we will see better spaced out feel good dramas. So even if there is only one good drama each week it would prevent us from having tumbleweed for months and then a ridiculously busy last quarter of the year.

This is me and Kdramas
https://i.imgur.com/I05UvWl.jpg

2023 was a good drama year for me.
I have found new rewatchable shows, and found new young actors to cheer.
I'll be sticking around in 2024 like I have for the past 20 years.

Truthfully, it's the possible comeback of my favorite writers and PDs. I do have some hope that my favorite actors and actresses are going to be back with new projects that are actually worth watching (I was burned more times than I care to keep track of in the last few years exactly because of this hopeless hope), but the sheer number of offers made me even more pessimistic.

Specifically in 2024, I was waiting for writer Seo Sook-hyang's comeback with Ask the Stars. My persistent allergy of Lee Min-ho notwithstanding, I'm so excited for that. I need my dose of quirky romcom, and I sure hope that my fave writer will deliver with her brand of bizarre yet super entertaining convos.

I also realized at the end of this year that k-drama is still my safe place to go when I need my fix of emotional roller-coaster. Sometimes all you need is a high-stakes romance or fantastical life-and-death situation, no matter how improbable, to give you the adrenaline pump to go through your blessedly ordinary life. At the very least, dramaland is still good enough for that.

I’ll stick around dramaland in 2024 because… I'm waiting for the second season of Squid Game and even Gong Yoo, waiting for more second or more seasons of hit Kdramas (like Squid Games did), waiting for the fate/announcement of OCN (Orion Cinema Network) whether it will continue to do original Kdramas here since 2022 or not (if not, then this network would shut down due to low viewership) and waiting for the return of the Dramabeans interviews from real-life Kdrama stars, PDs, cinematographers, editors, musicians and writers.

I really enjoyed many of the dramas I watched in 2023 and already have a pretty long list of upcoming dramas I hope to watch in 2024! If I'm looking for something entertaining to watch, K-drama still beats most everything else out there. Plus it's really fun to talk about them with Beanies. I wish I hadn't lurked so long and just jumped in a long time ago!

Maybe because I'm a somewhat slow watcher, I still have a massive backlog of past shows I want to see, so even if a given year's output is less than great, I can usually find something interesting. Also, while I started out exclusively watching k-dramas, dramaland for me now includes Japan, China, Taiwan and Thailand, and could easily expand to other countries if their content becomes more widely available. If one country is having a down year, there are other options out there to explore. Also, the drama community is entertaining all on its own, and sharing a bad drama can be almost as much fun as sharing a good one.

I have more than 200 old dramas I want to watch 😅
And I'm happy in Dramaland, why would I want to leave it so soon?

I’ll stick around because I like this community (DB), Beanies, and the fact that if I wait long enough, there will come gems like Tell Me that You Love Me, 2521, Start-Up, HP, Romantic Doctor, etc.

In the current global landscape of entertainment, which is pretty glum, k-dramas do have a consistency in acting and craft making that makes one want to return. Yes, there appears to be less and less real plot "twists," more tropes per series than necessary, more webtoon adaptations than original content and creeping Western story influences from OTT deals, but those of us who like and want to Korean culture are in it for the long haul. And this community sharing helps a lot, too.

I will stick around because I have been into dramas since 2009. Each year there are always at least 2-3 dramas which capture my heart.

My life has drought in romance and I fill it through kdramas. And most of time, our leads don't disappoint.

I love hearing everyone’s highs and lows of dramas, but I don’t have as strong feelings about them it seems. I come to kdramas to be soothed away from real life, which is often dramatic, hard, and tragic. I teach a lot of students with very difficult circumstances. While I love it when dramas are great and am slightly disappointed when not, I don’t feel too badly about it. There’s always a new one starting. I also don’t watch a lot of dramas start to finish, if I’m bored or not feeling it. ( I realized I could only get 9 beans this year despite many watching hours.) I do like to know how drama story ends, and appreciate recaps to fill me in on endings.
As I still find kdramas filling this need for me more than other types of television. They are better written and more interesting than Hallmark movies and they have values I connect with more than most American shows.

Everything is relative. Even a mediocre kdrama year far surpasses a great drama year in USA.

Call me jaded. Prior to my fall down the kdrama rabbit hole in middle of 2022 - (thank you Park Eun Bin and Extraordinary Attorney Woo for converting me) - I was watching endless shallow, predictable and forgettable western dramas.
The last western drama I liked was Queens Gambit and that was in 2020. In a 2 year period between 2020 and 2022 there wasn’t a single western show I loved. Zero shows in 2 years. Nothing connected and I felt like I was losing brain cells every time I started a new western show.
Compare that to Kdramas. Even if it was filled with mediocrity - there were always a few that had us jumping up and down and clapping.
I’m continuing down my kdrama journey because the alternative is so much worse.

It's such a big part of my life and has been for 20+ years so I'm not going anywhere but here! Korean dramas as a whole are so much better than American trash they call entertainment. Korean dramas are not afraid to delve into emotions, uncomfortable situations, and just plain fun topics that catch your heart and make you think and help you heal and give you a break from life with its hard realities. Plus, this is the best community for sharing, giving, understanding, and making each other feel good or comforted! It is also a place to practice your writing skills for us who have lots to say but going from brain to transforming ideas into actual write it down format is such good practice! I love reading others' views on dramas and the subjects they explore for us to think about.

There are plenty of older dramas to watch and rewatch!

I'll stick around in dramaland in 2024 because I'm still a newbie to K-Dramas and there are so many great ones that I still need to catch up with.

Plus the ones I'm watching live this holiday season (MY DEMON, WELCOME TO SAMDAL-RI, GYEONGSEONG CREATURE) are all gonna spill into 2024 anyway.

And I live in hope that PERFECT MARRIAGE REVENGE and MY DEAREST will be picked up by one or more of the streaming services I subscribe to so I can finally watch them.

I'm sticking around in 2024 because for me the end of the year is the time when I get to look back and actually recognize that I enjoyed a lot of what I watched. Even though this year admittedly does feel undeniably mediocre, I still get to look back and say to myself:

Wait... Black Night was this year? Oh, and so was Taxi Driver 2? I enjoyed those.. Oh my gosh, Durian's Affair was such a hot mess, but somehow entrancing. Oh yeah, and Revenant! I liked the characters in that one a lot.

It may not have been the year that wowed me, but I look back and still think: I was entertained. Although not every drama is a masterpiece, I don't expect it to be. It was just fun.. and I'm hopeful for more fun next year.

And a drama by Lee Jong Suk please and thank you.

I'm rather fresh in Dramaland, I've only seen 120 kdramas and there are several gems (or generally acclaimed dramas) that I have yet to see. Even if the new dramas are not satisfactory, I have enough backlog to discover.

This year was not as disappointing for me as it was for lots of other Beanies - I still had just as much trouble stripping beans from some dramas to give to my favorites! And even when a drama disappoints me in some ways, it usually doesn’t negate the things it did well and that I really appreciated.

So I’ll stick around for 2024 because I still think dramaland is telling interesting stories, and at least sometimes doing it really well. They are telling them in a more interesting way than American tv by a long shot, and I love the way they can take an absolutely wild premise and turn it into a story I love. There is an earnestness about dramas, even when they are being sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek, that I can’t get enough of. And when they misstep as they inevitably will, I am still having fun in this community!

Besides what you all guys mentioned, I'll stick around so I can convince more people to watch The Guest 🫣

Son Seok ku will film a drama with Kim Dami soon!

I agree that there were medicore dramas but there were still good ones in between. I will still continue watching kdramas since i like the varied content. There are a few I am waiting to be released including the SSK and KDM drama.

Because I love kdramas. Because I'm obsessed with them? Because I love them more and more every year, not less... Basic girl, with basic answers.

We have lots of dramas these days. So it's just that all the extra dramas we're getting aren't that great. But in general, kdramas are still good to me.
And now that I've learned how to drop my viewing has become 99% all enjoyment.

13 years ago I was watching Stairway to Heaven, Sad Love Story, Tree of Heaven... So yeah, 2023 looks great. 😂 For me, dramas only get better and better.

I'm looking forward to Weak Hero Class 2 but I'm also scared because of what happened with The Uncanny Counter 2. There's no other shows I'm looking forward to.

This is the first year in my almost 13 years of drama watching where I've seen more Cdramas and Jdramas than Kdramas. I really hope I stick around kdramaland next year and beyond. I will because I'll definitely check out the reunion of Gong Hyo Jin with Jealousy Incarnate team in Ask the Stars. But I hope there are many more surprising gems. My tastes have changed but so have kdramas and I really want to feel the og excitement and emotions they have made me feel all these years in the 2024 batch.

Because kdrama is like ramen, still best funnest cheap mental escape ever!

I enjoy the bad dramas almost as much as the good ones because the bad ones generate the funniest comments here. Keep up the good work, everyone!

No matter what kind of year it is I will keep watching k dramas as Hollywood productions continue to be tired, agenda laden and uninspired.

There are plenty of good k dramas out there and I’ve found after watching well over 80 dramas that sometimes you have to ignore the hype…King the Land was all over my social media feed and was beyond mediocre. I hardly heard anything about My Perfect Stranger and it is such a gem.

They are TV shows. They aren't all going to ring my chimes. I'll keep watching the ones that I like and dropping the ones that don't please me. I can see that worked well for me this year, that I enjoyed a lot of what I watched, even some things I didn't finish.

It’s only been my 2nd year with KDramas.
I was also pretty disappointed with the year’s offerings but I’ve heard so much fanfare about KDramas that I really need to catch up on popular titles and see if this rises out of its 2023 slump.

Well, even if I wanted to watch something else (which happens, occasionally, with the odd BBC production, for example of a Jane Austen novel), my streaming profiles only offer kdramas nowadays. I’m doomed in the best way!

Just kidding (while it is true, though): I just love romance kdramas. I love the tropes. I love that stories are told without showing me literally everything, so that I can connect on an emotional level. I love the length of shows, and that there’s a definite ending. I love the Magic of the Eighth Episode. Most of the time, the humor is just up my alley, which is very important to let me enjoy a show. If it can make me laugh out loud when I’m sitting on the sofa all by myself, it’s the best thing. Why would I want to quit this in 2024?

Also I love this community and connecting with you beanies while watching a show. It makes the watching experience so much better! 👏🫰👏 So glad to have found like minded people! 🥳🎉

i'll stick around because after 11 years in drama land i know that some years are good and some are bad and kdramas are for life!!

This year was not disappointing to me at all, had a lot of fun watching 2023 dramas (many became my favs) and older dramas (many also became my favs). I think i got close to watching 50 kdramas this year? (both from 2023 and previous years) Quite a lot since last year i watched three lol. My watchlist has like 300+ dramas so i doubt i ever will run out of stuff to watch and i already have some eyes on many 2024 dramas.

Will also keep checking in here, it's a lot of fun reading and writing comments on here.. even if i don't like some opinions here at all...

Also, i think some here should watch this video: https://youtu.be/J2PZNp9SMXc?si=zXuPfrnz3K1XgyLs

I'll always come back to dramas simply because of their length. I whine every time I klick to start a 50-episode Cdrama. But 16 episodes can always be overcome, if the content is 'good enough'.
Also, all hail the ff-button. Without it, I'm not so sure I'd stand by this sentiment.

But I would really like to see a return to what Kdramas do best, the focus on family. No lawyers or serial killers, especially combined.

Give me rom-coms with actual romance. Smoldering romance! And comedy; not slapstick, awesome sidekicks with quick and wicked tongues clad in fashion that is not avant-garde but actually fitting.

My journey in KDramaland just started this year! I'm excited to continue on this road forever!

So this post got the statistical maniac in me going, and I decided to tally up all my Korean dramas I've ever watched and group them by the star ratings I gave on MDL. I just wanted to see how this year really shaped up against other years and if there are any interesting trends. Here's what I found:

The years 2017-2021 have been the best for me drama wise, with somewhere between 11-12 dramas per year rated at an 8 or above. Getting at least an 8 means it's a solid drama, if not jaw dropping.

2017 in particular was an interesting year in that I had a total of 7 dramas I rated at a jaw-dropping 9.5 or 10 - which I stand by even after looking back at the list. It was also an interesting year in that I had 12 I rated at a 6.5 or below. Basically, in 2017 I either LOVED the drama or didn't like it very much at all.

2018 was interesting because it's the only year from 2017 to 2023 with NO dramas in the 9.5-10 category. I still consider it a solid year because 12 dramas from an 8-9 rating isn't bad at all.

With the exception of 2012 and 2018 (which had none) and 2017 (which had 7) I've consistently had between 1-3 dramas I'd consider "jaw-dropping" each year, usually just 1.

This year I have fewer dramas in the 8-9 category but around the same as previous years in the 7-7.5 category. However, I'm hoping to bump up my 8-9 category with a few more before the end of the year (Hoping for an 8 from Matchmakers, My Demon which is currently a potential 7.5-8, and at least an 8 from Shadow Detective 2). We'll see how it goes! I'm excited to see where 2024 takes us.

I still have so many older kdramas I want to watch, and this year has at least taught me that I shouldn't waste time completing dramas that have lost my interest. I discovered older actresses (Kim Hye-soo, Kim Hee-sun etc.) that I want to see more of, and young actors that I want to follow (the casts of Twinkling Watermelon, Moving, Secret Romantic Guesthouse). I want the next Hong sisters fantasy, and action dramas from Jang Hyuk, Namgoon Min and Lee Jun-gi. I want to weep over ill-fated lovers in gorgeous hanboks and ridiculous hats. I want more sharp-witted heroines and gorgeously sculpted heroes (abs and cheekbones). I want sidekicks that make me laugh, and breathtaking scenery. I want it all, and there's a good chance I'll get it, so I'm not going anywhere.

Despite many 2023 Kdramas I preferred not to watched and many I dropped after a few episodes, there are a few wonderful ones that are a cut above the rest. Thanks you Beanies for your insights as they assisted me in deciding whether to watch a drama. So far I have no regrets when I do missed a drama which I think is not my cup of tea. I am so looking forward to 2024 with high expectations, and though there will be those that will bomb, still there will be good ones as usual. For those times there will be a drought of good Korean dramas, we still have the Thai and Chinese ones to watch. Otherwise I also read Manhwas and Web Novels to while my idle hours away while waiting.

I will stick around because 2023 was the year that made me fall in love with K-dramas. Even though I have been watching them on and off for years, I never truly was immersed in them as I am now. The endings still suck, the mid-episodes still get repetitive, and I have dropped a few, but K-dramas are still a head and shoulder above everything else that the television world has to offer. I realised that no matter what drama it is, it has an audience, three kinds to be exact - the ones who love it, the ones who hate it but complete it nevertheless, and the third who drop it. And I learnt that belonging to any three categories is all right. I have loved dramas that didn't work for others (Our Blooming Youth tops my 2023 list), I was not too fond of dramas that others mooned over (King the Land), and I was left unimpressed by a few despite the hype (Moving). Some made me angry (Strong woman). I was surprised by a few that made it to my rewatch list (Twinkling Watermelon, Behind My Touch) and disappointed by some I had high hopes for (Castaway diva). I still want to finish some in my kitty (My Demon, Perfect Mariage Revenge, The Matchmakers). My Dearest, with all its flaws, will remain one of the best things I have ever watched.
So yes, I am super excited for 2024 and what it will bring. So, cheers for another year of K-dramas that have changed my life in more ways than I can count.

I'll be sticking around because dramas currently interest me more than western tv does.

Plus, l'm looking forward to Although I'm Not a Hero and When the Stars Gossip. Fingers crossed neither lets me down.

I'll stick around because, like others have said, Western tv is 99% garbage and dramaland still gives us such gems.