“Koreans love to be No. 1, but No. 1 at the cost of kind of airing your dirty laundry is a somewhat different thing," said Professor CedarBough Saeji.
HONG KONG — Why are South Koreans watching “Squid Game”? Because everyone else is.
The nine-episode horror series on Netflix has hit No. 1 in 90 of the streaming service’s markets around the world, including South Korea, where it was made.
“I got to the point where I could not hold a conversation without watching the show,” said Jung Dunn, a security analyst in Seoul, the South Korean capital.
But the show also strikes a nerve because it unflinchingly addresses a problem that is particularly entrenched in South Korea: debt and the never-ending struggle to pay it off.
The cast of “Squid Game” features some of South Korea’s biggest stars, including Lee Jung-jae as the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, a hopelessly indebted father who receives a business card from a stranger offering him a way out. Along with 455 other contestants — from all walks of life but all deeply in debt too — he agrees to compete for a cash prize of 45.6 billion won (about $38 million) by playing a series of traditional Korean children’s games, only to discover that elimination from each round means death.
“There’s this dissonance between Korean pride that this Korean show is dominating Netflix all around the world, and the discomfort with what the show appears to expose about Korea,” said CedarBough Saeji, an assistant professor of Korean and East Asian studies at Pusan National University in Busan, South Korea. “Koreans love to be No. 1, but No. 1 at the cost of kind of airing your dirty laundry is a somewhat different thing.”
That South Korea also produced “Parasite,” the 2020 Oscar winner for best picture that also focused on themes of inequality, has probably accentuated this discomfort, Saeji said.
Still, “Squid Game” is wildly popular in its home country.
The show was released on Sept. 17 just before Chuseok, a Korean holiday similar to Thanksgiving when families gather, the perfect time for binge-watching. The surge in network traffic led one internet service provider to sue Netflix to cover its costs.
The fervor has also spilled over into real life. A street vendor in Seoul who provided the makers of “Squid Game” with dalgona, a brittle sugar candy at the center of one of the games, told Reuters that he had seen a boom in business.
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