Korean Television

TV is here is really... something. I watched a fair amount of it while I was staying with my boss my first two weeks here, and I still sometimes watch short spurts of it. It's pretty entertaining.

The channels are set up in a pretty user friendly way in that they're grouped by category. So if you want to watch cartoons or movies or sports or whatever, you don't have to flip all over the dial to find them. It makes channel surfing a lot easier, I've noticed.

They don't just have the "normal" cartoon, movie, sports, drama, sitcom, news channels, though. They also have channels where you watch people play video games, channels where you watch people play Korean chess (the rules which I haven't figured out yet by watching), channels that teach English, channels that teach math, and infomercial channels. At I'Park, the apartment series that my boss lives in, there's even a channel that's connected to four video cameras over the playground, so parents can watch their kids from home. Creepy.

One of the oddest things I've noticed about Korean television is the commercial breaks. Some breaks are three commercials long, and some are five minutes long, and some are ten minutes long. When they end a program, but can't start the next one until twenty minutes later, they play twenty minutes of commercials. If an American show is playing and it clearly states "now it is time for a commercial break," they don't go to commercial. They just play the outro and intro to the show back to back. Then they cut away in some awkward place. Or they don't have any commercials at all. I don't get it.

Another weird thing about Korean television that I've noticed is that they don't have the same schedule adherence that we have. Each channel seems to have its own schedule, but things don't always start on the hour or half hour. At first I thought shows just started... whenever, but I've come to realize that there's a little more order than I thought. It's very inconvenient, I gotta tell ya. If you sit down at 8 or 9 o'clock, you expect there to be a number of shows and movies starting, since that's prime time. But no matter what time I turn on my tv, there's almost never something starting right then. You have no idea how many half movies I've seen since I got here.

Luckily for me, my cable package has a few movie channels that play a fair lot of American movies (with Korean subtitles). They also play a lot of CSI. They really must love that show here. At first I was getting really frustrated by the whole scheduling thing, but I've managed to find the websites of four of the channels I watch, so I can check to see which movies are on in advance. Yea.

The movie channels put the title of what's playing in the upper corner of the screen, so if I'm just channel surfing, that helps me figure out what it is. It's not in English, though, it's in Korean. But it's not translated, which I find hilarious. They just transfer the sounds from the English words into Korean letters. So if the channel is showing The Matrix, the title is "meh-ee-teu-ri-jeu' (they don't have an "x" or "ks" sound). If the movie is The Bourne Identity, the title is "bone ah-ee-den-tee-tee." It's pretty funny, and makes for a fun game. Sometimes I have to say it out loud because they've mutilated the words so badly. The only movie I've seen them actually translate is The Mummy. It took me a minute to realize they had done that when I saw it, since I wasn't expecting it.