Same Story, Different Country: What Remakes Reveal About Korea
Left to my own devices, I would probably never have watched “Suits”. Lawyers in expensive suits trading lines in glass offices are not my genre. Then there was a Korean version, and curiosity beat reluctance.
I watched the Korean one first and only then the American original. The wrong order, fans say. For me it was the right one. That way, you do not see what is missing but what is different. And that is a surprising amount.
A remake is the same story in a different country. That is exactly why it reveals so much about the country.
Korea buys: “Suits” and “Money Heist”
The Korean “Suits” aired on KBS2 in 2018, starring Jang Dong-gun and Park Hyung-sik. Korea was the first country to remake the American series; Japan followed later. NBCUniversal International Television was among the producers.
The core idea stayed: a star lawyer takes a young man with a photographic memory but no law degree into his firm, and both hide the secret. Yet the details turn Korean at once. The American Mike Ross earns his money by sitting the law school admission test for other people. His Korean counterpart, Go Yeon-woo, parks cars and memorises the number plates.
And then there is the length. The original ran for nine seasons, from 2011 to 2019, and took five of them before the secret came out. The Korean version tells the whole story in sixteen episodes. Beginning, middle, end. As it should be.
“Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area”, the Korean version of the Spanish series “La Casa de Papel”, went further still. Here the robbers do not storm a Spanish mint but the mint of a Korea on the verge of reunification, where the new joint currency is to be printed. The gang comes from North and South, and the police negotiating team is mixed as well.
A heist becomes a story about a question that has accompanied Korea for decades. No Spanish original can supply that. It has to come from the country itself.
Korea sells: “Good Doctor” and “The Masked Singer”
It works the other way round just as well. “Good Doctor” aired on KBS2 in 2013 and tells of a young surgeon with autism and savant syndrome. The Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim discovered the series while he was still working on “Hawaii Five-0” and bought the rights through his company, 3AD.
The first American network, CBS, decided against a pilot. Kim bought the rights back, brought in David Shore, creator of “House”, together with Sony Pictures Television, and ended up at ABC. Twenty Korean episodes became seven American seasons with 126 episodes, from 2017 to 2024.
Kim once compared the industry to salmon swimming upstream: thousands set off, only a few arrive. He arrived. The salmon who do not make it give no interviews.
And then there is a Korean format that every Austrian knows without knowing it: “The Masked Singer”. It was developed by Park Won-woo; the original, “King of Mask Singer”, launched on MBC in 2015. The Austrian channel Puls 4 produced two seasons of “The Masked Singer Austria” in 2020 and 2021, with costumes such as a Lipizzaner horse, a ghost countess and a Germknödel, the Austrian sweet dumpling.
A Korean format, a Lipizzaner and a dumpling. Cultural transfer has rarely been so fluffy.
For us as a production company, one detail is more interesting than any costume: the Austrian edition was produced in Cologne. A dedicated set in Vienna, the Tiroler Tageszeitung wrote at the time, would probably have broken the budget.
| Title | Original | Remake | Original length | Remake length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suits | USA (2011) | Korea (2018) | 9 seasons | 16 episodes |
| Money Heist | Spain (2017) | Korea (2022) | 41 episodes | 12 episodes |
| Good Doctor | Korea (2013) | USA (2017) | 20 episodes | 7 seasons, 126 episodes |
| King of Mask Singer | Korea (2015) | Austria (2020) | since 2015 | 2 seasons |
Who does the deals
Behind such journeys there are rarely coincidences, but people and companies. One name appears twice: EnterMedia. The company is credited as a producer on both the Korean “Suits” and the American “The Good Doctor”, and the executive producers David Kim and Sebastian Lee appear in both sets of credits. The same people helped one series into Korea and another out of it.
And one more thread: Daniel Dae Kim, who took “Good Doctor” to America, and Kim Yunjin, who plays the lead negotiator in “Money Heist: Korea”, are both familiar from “Lost”. The world of remakes is an island. People keep running into each other.
What a remake reveals about a country
One can dismiss a remake as a copy. I see it more as a mirror. What a culture changes in translation shows what matters to it, and what it would rather not ask of its audience.
Length. American series run as long as they run. Korean series usually tell a complete story.
Details. Whether the hero forges exams or parks cars is no accident. It shifts how much guilt a character may carry before the audience stops liking him.
The big questions. “Money Heist: Korea” takes a Spanish story and turns it into one about division and reunification. The original supplies the frame. The country supplies the content.
When a remake is the wrong choice
Not every story travels. A remake works when the core of the character is understood everywhere: an outsider with a special gift, an impostor in a world of impostors. It becomes difficult when the story hinges on something specific to its country of origin that cannot be translated – a law, a history, a taboo.
Then all that is left of the original is the title. And nobody buys rights for a title alone.
For more on the Korean originals, “Good Doctor” and other series with their remakes are in our list 20 K-Dramas You Shouldn’t Miss.