KOREA Country Of Honour
THE K-PHENOMENON
Korea: a cultural superpower
dIturn’s Crazy Judges
Over the past two decades, the country’s cinema, pop music, fashion and TV dramas have swept around the globe, winning hearts, minds and fans on every continent. And the Korean entertainment wave has a lot more power yet, writes Andy Fry KOREA’s television business, like many others across Asia, is built around powerful broadcasters with strong in-house production capabilities. For decades, their top priority was to deliver quality content to domestic audiences. But in recent years, they have turned their attention to the international market, ensuring that Korean-originated scripted and non-scripted TV content has a dynamic role to play on the global stage, alongside K-pop and K-fashion.
Initiatives designed to support this agenda include FormatEast, a subsidiary of broadcaster SBS that was launched in December 2018. Kim Il Joong, senior director of entertainment at SBS, is part of the executive line-up at both SBS’ Global Contents biz Team and FormatEast. He explains that FormatEast was founded “to expand the market for Korean creators and to become a hub of format IP development and distribution”. FormatEast’s main project, Kim adds, is a govern-
Country Focus• 36 • OCTOBER 2020
ment-funded enterprise called FormatEast Creative Lab (FC Lab). Kim, who is also chair of the Korea Format Alliance, says that FC Lab’s first year was “very successful, with numerous fruitful outcomes”. He adds: “One ingenious format from the first edition of FC Lab is Lotto Singer [45 Singers], a new music concept from Park Won Woo, who we all know as the creator of The Masked Singer. Another is Boundary, which was created by Kim Miyeon, who achieved
