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Long Time Drama Watches, What are the differences between dramas from 90s/00s to dramas now??

nicole

Obviously the quality has changed but what about the stories? The chemistry? The characters? We've seen many tropes come and go, what have been your favourites, what do you miss, what do you not want around? What dramas do you prefer? Old or New? 


Let's discussssss!!! 

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kura2ninja

I'm generalizing, of course, but Japan used to make more romance drama of the "messy romance" type. As for South Korea, there used to be more authentically working-class characters (these days working-class characters still have a wardrobe of beautiful clothes and a tastefully decorated apartment).

I'm not picky, really, and what I prefer depends on my mood in a particular time. There were times when I marathoned multiple '90s Japanese dramas in a row, but there were also times when I couldn't even watch early 2000s shows simply because their production quality was so obviously lower than it is now :p

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Peephole

Oh, there's a lot that has changed... I would like to know about others' opinion as well!

Old for me is 2011-2012 and before. That is where you can clearly see the difference between the older and newer ones.

The problem with many new dramas is that they are no longer consistent. They try to match interests of different types in a single drama, as if to catch as much attentions as possible. Therefore, they fail in taking us with them to their consistent world. Mixing genres doesn’t always work (sometimes only though).

Also, the OST no longer feels like it was tailored to a drama like before, in most cases. Yes, the songs might be good, nice, and catchy, but not like it came naturally or born out of the drama like before. I don’t like  the OST only because they are good, I like  them because they remind me of the feelings I had while watching the drama

At first, I thought that it was because I am older,  I no longer felt like I did when I watched them back then. But I discovered that that wasn’t the reason, and I proved it when I recently watched older dramas that I never saw  and I felt like my old self did. 

It feels like they focus too much on visuals. It is overdone nowadays, and it affects the quality of the overall experience badly.

I have also done this using MDL's cool advanced search:

The ratio of fantasy/ supernatural dramas to non-fantasy dramas increased from 1:100 ( before 2012) to 20:100 (2013-2020)

Which is from a barely 1% to a whopping 16.6% 

that is if you compare the  number of fantasy/supernatural dramas with the non-fantasy/supernatural in the years before 2012  and 2013-2020

This makes newer dramas less realistic

I am not sure about this, but I think older dramas took their time, where new ones can be both slow-paced or fast-paced ones. 

Of course I am not criticizing all newer dramas, because you can actually find those that engulf you completely and make you unable to escape, but they keep decreasing every year, and they are very, very rare.

And there are some recent dramas that have gotten very creative and brought us to new worlds. Those are the dramas that managed to truly develop and not just look 'modern'.

I also think modern rom-coms are better than older ones and easier to find, but serious dramas were best back then.

edit:

I forgot about slice of life, one of the genres that I really like, it was almost non-existent in the past.

edit 2: forgot to mention I have only seen k-dramas so far

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pash

With the premise that I only watch Japanese dorama so my analysis will be limited to that particular area, I think the biggest difference is in terms of scripts/dialogues: older dramas - particularly those from the 90s until, like, early Aughts - were more likely to put a bigger emphasis on the script, the dialogues were more theatrical so the characters gave the impression that there was a lot of chemistry between them, 'cause their dialogues were wittier, more brilliant. This is not to say that current dorama are bad; personally, I have watched over 200 J-dramas ranging from 1994 till 2020, and imho there are good and bad dramas now as there were in the past. But the scripts from the "Golden Era" do have a peculiar flavor indeed.

Another possible difference may depend on PC, which was almost non-existent back then, and although not nearly as omnipresent in Japan as it is here in the West, still may have progressively limited the writers' freedom - and once again, I'm not saying that ALL PC is bad; I'm personally happy that, for example, borderline-racist characterizations of gaijin have slowly but surely been substituted by more realistic and less offensive portrayals; but the other side of the PC coin is, indeed, that its abuse tends to limit (and in the worst case scenario, simply kill) creativity.

Last but not least, there's another aspect which I usually refer to as to the "westernization" of the J-dramas scene. Over the last years, in fact, more and more emphasis is put on "coolness", editing, camera movements, and some of the recent productions gave me this "hollywoodian" feeling which personally I don't care for at all (on another site I actually use as a signature a picture of Zetsubou Sensei from the eponymous manga, shouting: "Netflix-dorama no sei de zetsuboushita!", LOL). What I mean is that some recent dorama feel like they're not Japanese dorama anymore, but rather Western tv series with a Japanese cast; they've lost those peculiar characteristics (positive messages, "ganbaru", the importance of community, etc.) which had made me choose J-drama over Western series in the first place. Of course ATM this regards only a tiny minority of J-dramas, but as far as I'm concerned that's an alarming trend indeed.

All this, as always, IMVHO.

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