In 2020 a Korean film won Best Picture at the Academy Awards — the first non-English-language movie ever to do so. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite turned out not to be a one-time surprise. It was the announcement of a new era. Two years later Squid Game became the first non-English series ever nominated, and then to win, in the Drama categories at the Emmys, with 14 nominations and 6 wins. Lee Jung-jae became the first Asian actor to win Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Squid Game season one is the most-watched season of any series in any language in Netflix's history. Season two, released over the 2024 winter holidays, drew over 1.24 billion hours of viewing in a matter of weeks — the third most-watched season ever. Netflix's 2025 Korean slate alone includes twenty-nine new dramas and films. Korean content is no longer the niche corner of a streaming menu. It is the front page.
Something quiet has changed inside American homes because of this. Subtitles, once seen as work, are now ordinary. Parents and kids together follow a story in a language neither of them speaks fluently. Reading speed goes up. Ears adjust. The texture of Korean — the rhythm of its sentences, the warmth of its honorifics — becomes familiar even before vocabulary does.
For our students this is a remarkable advantage. They are watching the same drama their non-Korean friends are talking about at school on Monday — but they are catching things their friends miss. The joke in the dialect. The way a daughter speaks differently to her mother than to her older brother. The exact word a character chose, and what a softer alternative would have meant.
Korean film and series are doing the work great art has always done — opening a door for people to step through. What we do at our school is help our students walk farther into that doorway, with the language and the cultural fluency to feel at home on the other side. Watch the show on Friday. Come to class on Saturday. The two are part of the same gift.