The Paradox of a Single Tangerine —A Bountiful Screen, a Withering Field
In the first quarter of 2025, Korean dramas shone brightest just as they festered most deeply. That spring, while the world wept over a single Jeju-set narrative, the very soil that had nurtured that story was rapidly drying up.
In March 2025, a drama erased borders. The 16‑episode series *Jeju Narrative*, released from March 7 to 28, logged roughly 22 million global views in Netflix’s first‑half tally, becoming the face of Korean content that year. An American news weekly named it “the best Korean drama of the year,” and the title itself turned into a cultural catchphrase on the streets. The spring of K‑drama seemed to arrive in all its splendor.
Yet, within the industry during that same quarter, the prevailing term was not “golden age” but “lean season.” A bountiful harvest on screen and a failed crop in the fields coexisted precisely at the same moment. This article poses a simple question: Can a single, perfectly ripened tangerine truly conceal an orchard rapidly emptying of fruit?
The production budget of approximately 60 billion KRW for a single flagship drama, in itself, encapsulates the arithmetic of an entire era. Just a few years ago, the average per-episode production cost stood at around 300–400 million KRW; today, 2 billion KRW per episode has become the “baseline,” while tentpole dramas now exceed 3 billion KRW per episode. The real issue lies in where this money flows. According to industry analysis, actor fees account for over 30% of total production budgets, and top-tier actors command per-episode fees ranging from 500 million to 1 billion KRW. When the Korea Drama Production Association lamented early this year during a crisis discussion that “the lead actor’s fee is no longer 100 million KRW—but rather 1 billion KRW—per episode,” it wasn’t exaggeration; it was a cold, hard profit-and-loss statement.
The cheers for a hit are real—but they don’t tell the whole truth. Success is not the norm; it’s the exception. A single global box-office triumph does not erase, from the accounting books, the dozens of films that fail to break even. On the contrary, that one blockbuster resets the benchmark for “massive success,” driving up the price tag and expectations for the next project—and weighing even more heavily on the shoulders of the average filmmaker. The moment a single photo of an abundant harvest obscures the statistics of crop failure, what we’re witnessing is not an industry—but a myth.
Setting aside emotions and counting the number of episodes reveals a colder reality. According to data from the Korea Drama Production Association, the number of dramas released domestically via broadcast and OTT platforms peaked at 141 titles in 2022, then plummeted by over 30% to around 100 titles in 2024. The contraction is even steeper for terrestrial broadcasters: episode counts dropped from approximately 75 in 2018 to just 32 in 2023—a near halving—and in 2025, SBS’s Thursday drama time slot will disappear entirely, while even irregular slots on cable channels have gone vacant.
The reason is brutally simple. Each episode generates 300–400 million won in advertising revenue, but costs 1–2 billion won to produce. In a system where the deficit widens with every episode, it isn’t cowardice for broadcasters to fill the gaps with cheap variety shows and patch schedules with reruns—instead, it’s basic arithmetic. Production companies aren’t any better off. As reliance on global OTT platforms has grown, producers have been pushed into the role of “suppliers,” handing over intellectual property and receiving only a modest margin on production costs, while the revenues and operating profits of major studios have dropped by double‑digit percentages year over year. The visuals have become flashier, but the balance sheets of the companies that create them have grown paler.
A counterargument is possible—that the reduction in the number of titles is not a crisis but a healthy normalization following the bursting of a bubble, and merely a structural adjustment shifting focus from quantity to quality. This argument holds merit. The consolidation of previously proliferating projects and the concentration of resources on works with genuine potential may indeed signal maturity.
However, there is a flaw in that optimism. If restructuring were a selective pruning toward “quality,” that would be fortunate, but the contraction in Q1 2025 was driven not by artistic merit but by capital power. The survival criterion was not “how good the story is” but “how much capital and star power one can bring.” As a result, the diverse experiments of small and medium‑sized studios were the first to be cut. When the industry begins to call the extinction of diversity “efficiency,” it carries the seed that will one day produce the next generation’s hit. Even the Jeju saga of this spring should not be forgotten as a crop that grew in the soil that once allowed adventure.
The lesson of Q1 2025 lies in the fact that cheers and cries rang out simultaneously. It was the quarter in which the world was most enthusiastic about Korean dramas—yet the people who make Korean dramas were feeling the coldest chill. On a landscape where actors’ fees consume one-third of production budgets, advertising revenue fails to cover even one-quarter of those budgets, and the number of episodes has shrunk by one-third in three years, a single perfectly ripened tangerine may offer comfort—but it cannot serve as a cure.
The real question is not “Which works broke out this year?” but rather “Can this soil nurture the next work?” Guidelines for actor fees, a redesign of revenue-sharing structures, and models that return intellectual property rights to creators—these unglamorous structural reforms, not fleeting buzz, will determine the industry’s spring. Applaud the bountiful harvest on screen, but keep your gaze fixed on the parching fields. Don’t count the tangerines; look at the orchard.