In recent years, television products have become a powerful medium criticizing and analyzing the societal problems or various political issues even more boldly as in previous decades. Only the social media sites can rival, or even sometimes outdo, its power to influence the viewers. New modes of behavior and life models are shown through scripted characters to familiarize the audience with ideas previously either foreign or modified from the past ones. The societal changes researched here are only limited to the model of masculinity shown within the limits of the scripted television series, and the question whether it can or cannot affect the real-life behavior is tempting to answer. The main aim of this article is to show the connection between the changes in South Korea,1 however slow they might seem to be, with the changes propagated, or proposed by TV series. A narrative analysis was conducted on chosen popular series and the results show the shift in the proposed models of masculinity, creating new, soft masculinity models.

METHODOLOGICAL SCOPE

As many voices called the current era a “Golden Age of Television”, with this statement also comes a plethora of problems, mostly resulting from oversaturation of the market. In July of 2015, John Landgraf, Chairman of FX Network and FX Productions, coined the term ‘peak TV’ which has been used in countless news articles describing the state of 21st century television.