Because of these dramas, KBS 2TV’s weekend dramas have lost face.
“Three Bold Siblings”, which recently entered the final stage of its run, failed to break through the 30% viewership rating following its previous drama, “It’s Beautiful Now”. This is the first time that KBS weekend dramas, which have built up a large fixed audience since the 1980s, failed to exceed the 30% rating. Analysts say that such a decline in weekend dramas’ ratings shows changes in the broadcasting environment and viewing flow due to the expansion of OTT (online video service).
Last-minute over-the-top material
“Three Bold Siblings”, which first aired in September of last year, barely maintains a viewership rating of 27% while depicting the process of three siblings, Lee Ha Na, Kim So Eun, and Lee Yu Jin, each looking for their dreams and love. In the beginning, the production team portrayed the struggles of the first sibling through the romance between Lee Ha Na and Lim Ju Hwan. Then, when the calm story did not attract viewers’ attention, elements such as late deaths and out-of-wedlock children were brought out. The ex-wife of Kim Seung Soo, the CEO of a cosmetic company, plays a terminally ill patient to interfere with the relationship between the second sibling Kim So Eun and Kim Seung Soo. Lim Ju Hwan’s cousin Min Seong Wook pulls out a fraud by claiming that Lim Ju Hwan has a child out of wedlock.
Most of the viewers are saying that the main characters frustrate them. By the afternoon of February 23rd, the real-time comment window was filled with critical comments such as “The story is gradually getting worse due to unreasonable development.” Pop culture critic Kim Hun Sik criticized, “The drama failed to find a point of contact with the middle-aged generation, its main audience, while featuring three siblings in their 20s and 30s as the main characters, and failed to properly utilize the features of weekend dramas by repeating cliché family materials.”
Weekend dramas no longer have fixed viewers
Some predict that “Three Bold Siblings”, which has a total of 51 episodes, will not exceed or slightly exceed 30% viewer ratings within the remaining 8 episodes. Previously, “It’s Beautiful Now”, which ended in September last year, also ended with 29.4%, bringing the disgrace of being a weekend drama that failed to pass the 30% mark for the first time in 7 years since 2015. The two dramas were also pushed out of the top 50 in the drama’s weekly average popularity category of the “2022 Annual Settlement of TV Popularity” recently announced by Good Data Corporation.
On February 23rd, pop culture critic Ha Jae Geun analyzed, “The phenomenon that weekend dramas are gradually losing interest from viewers is in line with the crisis of broadcasters due to the rapid growth of OTT and changes in viewing habits centered on OTT.” He added, “This is evidence that the fixed audience for weekend dramas, which was strong enough to be called the ‘concrete audience’, has collapsed.”
In order to escape the crisis of weekend dramas, Kim Hun Shik, a popular culture critic, said, “Broadcasting companies and production companies should not be trapped in preconceptions about weekend dramas. They should actively produce formats and materials that broadly reflect viewers’ tastes.”
Source: Nate.
