I see no problem with this policy…

Hey, you can edit your comment if you like, after you’ve posted it. (Or does that only work when you’re logged in? Can you see the bar of options at the bottom of your comment?) If you like I can fix the typo and delete the second comment.

Yeah, I remember my friend Ritu telling me about a similar thing that happened in Indian cinema: after one film used a lot of shots in, I think it was London, then suddenly Indian films were being set (in part) in other places all over the world.

She told me this after we watched the film Kal Ho Naa Ho, which is set in New York City, if I remember right. Like in the Korean film, all the major (memorable) characters in that film were Indian, but you actually saw a lot more normal Americans in passing. They were integrated into dance routines, they worked the till at coffeeshops, and so on. And most important, they were not (and did not reinforce) stock stereotypes like the Poor Beggar Child or the Witchy Brown Lady in the Korean clip:

While that film didn’t have shots that looked like they were shot by some local tourism bureau, they did show off the city in a number of ways. But they didn’t belabour it, for one thing; and the characters weren’t being dumb tourists, for another.

(I should note that there were shots that to me felt like they maybe did belabour the scenery or “foreignness” of Europe and England, in that earlier film I mentioned that sparked the trend, they didn’t do it any more than the shots in films set strictly in India belabour the beauty and picturesqueness of the Indian countryside. And of course, a massively choreographed dance scene on a moving train (featuring a pretty girl who came out of nowhere) simply can’t avoid showing off the scenery, and if the dance is pretty freaking cool, you can shrug and go with it:

But yeah, I don’t mean to be toooooo harsh. I think Western TV of equivalent “quality” is just beneath my notice, whereas when I see mediocre or bad Korean TV it simultaneously pushes so many “WTF?” and “yuck” buttons.

The way I imagine some Koreans might feel seeing Jerry Springer for the first time. Or, though I don’t think it’s bad TV at all, the way I imagine some Koreans would find nothing to grapple onto in a show like “In Living Color”:

… or, for that matter, the way a lot of my students reacted to a few clips from Monty Python’s Flying Circus that I showed them when we were discussing British culture, humor, media, and so on.