Watching television has apparently not improved my listening ability much, but it has provided an interesting window into certain aspects of contemporary Korean culture.
The most common TV shows seem to be "dramas" (the term used for soap operas, which are broadcast in prime time), talk shows, game shows, and sketch humor shows. Talk shows and game shows apparently must always have celebrity guests, and many of them seem to be celebrities by virtue of appearing on a lot of TV shows. Being a television star looks like hard work in Korea. These folks are under contract and have to work a lot of shows each week.
Two of the shows we've watched a lot are Minyeodeur-ui Suda 미녀들의 수다 ("Beautiful Women Chatting") and Muhan Dojeon 무한 도전 (無限挑戰) ("Limitless Challenge"). The former is an extremely popular program that is rebroadcast so often throughout the week on various channels that it is virtually impossible to turn on the TV and not find it on.
The premise of the show is simple: Put 16 young women from foreign countries, all of whom speak Korean well, into a room together and ask them what they think about Korea.
Korea is now a significant enough world player that many foreigners are learning Korean. As I've mentioned before, the Yonsei Korean Language Institute has about 1000 students right now. So it's possible to find young women of various nationalities with good enough Korean to be on a television talk show. At the same time, foreigners who speak Korean well are still enough of a novelty that the studio audience (and presumably the audience at home) is fascinated by them.
Nearly all the discussion topics are about how these foreign women perceive aspects of Korean society. There is some comparison with their home countries, but for the most part the show is more interested in exploring the image of Korea in the minds of foreigners than in examining other cultures. Perhaps this is because for decades Koreans have been intimately aware of Western culture, while their own country has been largely ignored by the outside world. Koreans now seem intensely interested in how they are perceived by others.
In contrast, Americans are woefully ignorant of other countries and societies, and generally completely uninterested in learning more. It's impossible to conceive of an American equivalent of this show. (Foreigners who speak English well! Talking about their perceptions of America!)
Here's what the show looks like. The sixteen women (they vary somewhat from show to show, but most seem to be regulars) are arrayed in rows of four, their seats labeled with their names and countries of origin. They generally dress in similar colors: yellow one day, red the next, but they almost always show a lot of leg. Here, they are in black and white.
There's a host, who dresses in bizarre outfits, and directs the conversation. A small group of male celebrities asks questions of the women. Like this guy:
The women pictured here are from Canada, Russia, England, and Malaysia.
The person speaking is sometimes broadcast on a big screen behind the studio audience. Throughout the show written messages appear on the screen, sometimes summarizing or quoting what is being said, sometimes listing the topic of conversation, sometimes poking fun at Korean-language errors.
In this picture, the Mongolian woman is talking about how Mongolian men in Korea often do part-time work as extras in historical dramas because of their skill at riding horses.
This kind of rapid-fire presentation of written messages on the screen is common to all of the talk and comedy shows. (Unfortunately, they usually flash by too quickly for me to read more than a word or two.)
The second show we really enjoy, Limitless Challenge, features six comedian celebrities. On each show the producers give them some kind of ridiculous challenge, and they are then filmed trying to meet it. On a lot of the shows they travel around in an old van. Often they are bored. Through clever editing and the addition of humorous text, the results are woven into an hour of hilarious comedy.
On this particular episode, the comedians were dressed up as super-heroes and sent out into Seoul to do good deeds.
There's Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, and two characters I don't recognize. (Brownie points to anyone who can identify them!)
They spent a lot of time sitting in their van looking bored and trying to figure out what to do.
Wonder Woman has fallen asleep here.
Eventually they decided to go out into one of the parks and clean up gum stuck to the ground. The guy playing Spider-Man kept striking these hilarious Spider-Man like poses as he scraped gum off with a putty knife.
The caption here says, ridiculously: "When you attack the enemy, don't let him get wind of your intentions!"
Another episode simply followed the guys around as they prepared to put on a live concert for Yonsei college students. Here they are backstage, wearing outrageous wigs and costumes, practicing their dance moves.
The concert was held in the same amphitheater where Erma and I participated in the Korean writing contest.
The performance was pure goofiness.
The Yonsei students were thrilled. They were all wearing blue, just like at the Yeon-Go Jeon.
In the most recent episode we saw, the comedians were dressed up in schoolboy outfits and sent into an English-speaking Potemkin Village. Their task was to mail a letter. In this village, however, speaking Korean is illegal, and if you do it two times you go to jail. Confronted with various stressful situations (like a hold-up at the post office), their desperate attempts to speak only in broken English (every one of which was hilarious) eventually failed, and the police carted them off to jail one by one. (The caption here says "We're going to get another roommate ...")
One of the weirder talk shows we've seen is called Museoun Seupeonji 무서운 스펀지 "Frightening Sponge". Each episode presents tales of the weird and inexplicable. (Exactly what the English word "sponge" in the show's title is supposed to mean is unclear.) On one episode there were very low-budget dramatic reenactments of bizarre events in history (like the guy who got a metal pipe through his head and lived). On another, a magician performed a card trick. On a third the program attempted to make you afraid to ride in your elevator by showing how easily you could be knifed to death by a madman riding with you. In all of these cases professors were guests on the show, explaining or elucidating these events, tricks, and warnings.
The function of the celebrity guests (one of whom is also a regular on "Beautiful Women") is mainly to gasp in awe, look terrified, and then slowly come to an understanding.
One day there was a special episode of "SPONGE 2.0":
For some reason it was called "Love Sponge" (as written in the lower left-hand corner):
We didn't watch long enough to figure out what was going on.
On one of the game shows we watched, one of the celebrity contestants struck Erma as looking remarkably like her friend King of Thompson:
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