Imagine this: you just got home after a long day at work. It’s dinnertime, but you’re too tired to make proper food—you’d rather pop a frozen pizza in the oven and save yourself the time and effort of preparing a healthy and, frankly, fairly tasteless meal. While enjoying your fresh-out-of-the-oven greasy delicacy, you’re considering watching that movie that recently got an Oscar—but your brain is too tired to comprehend a proper cinematic experience, so you opt for a soap opera, as cheesy as your pizza. Once in bed, you spend an extra half an hour falling down the rabbit hole of an obscure TikTok trend that you knew absolutely nothing about a mere hour ago. And later, as your mind is drifting slowly towards Morpheus’ gentle embrace, instead of feeling relaxed and satisfied, you cannot shake the feeling of having done something shameful, something worthy of condemnation and reproach.

Sounds relatable? Well, it sure does to many of us. What you’ve just had here is an evening full of guilty pleasures—a widespread phenomenon that most of us have encountered plenty of times.

Although probably as old as time, in the modern age guilty pleasures have arguably become an inherent part of our existence: in a world where everyone seems to know (and to be very eager to tell you) how to live your life properly—what to do, eat, watch, and read, and what to believe to be happy, healthy, and successful—stepping aside from these imperious recommendations can feel emotionally challenging. The feeling of joy from partaking in certain activities can be bound with the feeling of guilt for enjoying them, thus creating the phenomenon of a ‘guilty pleasure.’. The options here are limitless: from unhealthy food to unproductive activities, from unintelligent TV shows to unrefined pop bangers. One classic example of a guilty pleasure (that lies particularly close, I must admit, to my own heart) is watching K-dramas.

Although K-dramas as a movement cannot boast such a long history as Hollywood, their popularity in the last decades has escalated so dramatically that even Netflix decided to get involved. With their initial rise in the 1990s, Korean dramas have continued their steady climb to fame, attracting more and more admirers with each new hit show; the phenomenon has grown so significant that nowadays K-dramas, alongside K-pop and a few other aspects of Korean culture, are considered key components of South Korean soft power and one of the country’s main sources of revenue.

And yet K-dramas are still often seen as “uncool” and face accusations of being too predictable, unrealistic, and cheesy; admitting that you’re a fan is more likely to earn you a smirk and a slightly condescending look from your peers than make you look like a cinema connoisseur with an incredibly refined taste. Although times are changing, K-dramas remain largely a guilty pleasure—but why do we enjoy them so much nevertheless?

One can undoubtedly find dozens of reasons for that, but here I would like to talk about the ones that seem particularly plausible to me. The main reason, in my humble opinion, that drove K-dramas to their unprecedented success is hidden right in their main flaw: their predictability. Sure, a storyline full of clichés can feel incredibly dull—but that depends on how exactly those clichés are used, distributed, and played out. The very existence of cliché as a concept means that repetition itself is not necessarily bad: there is something in human nature that draws us to familiar things—after all, much of our aesthetic sense and, conversely, our art and culture is based on the pleasing effect of rhythms and patterns, which are, in essence, repetitive iterations.

The law of conservation of energy applies not only to fundamental physics but also to the human psyche: we are drawn to familiar things because their familiarity gives us a sense of comfort, a feeling of safety that soothes our primary instincts, and therefore saves us the energy of exploring something new and potentially harmful. In a time when everything can change within a split second, when new information is always hovering at the tips of our fingers, ready to reveal itself with one click, this category of “new and potentially harmful” expands beyond people, foods, and routes of travel: the constant overstimulation that comes with the technological age causes our brains to exist in a state of perpetual moderated stress. Naturally, repetitive patterns can then bring relief—and with it, a sense of pleasure.

When it comes to K-dramas, this repetition can be seen on two levels. Firstly, there are the easily recognizable tropes and plot devices that often appear in K-dramas, both old and new. They include, for example, the setting of a rich male main character and a poor female main character, or the enemies-to-lovers trope in which the two leads start on the wrong foot but eventually fall in love with one another despite their initial animosity. The other level is that of classic K-drama moments that repeat in many shows with only minor variations. Notable examples could include the umbrella moment, in which one character (typically the male lead) is covering the other (typically the female lead) with their umbrella while getting soaked under the rain themselves, or the piggyback ride, in which the guy carries the injured girl on his back, and, of course, the avalanche of slow-motion multi-angle instant replays that follow any emotionally loaded scene.

These familiar elements that can be found in probably any K-drama are, in my opinion, one of the keys to the genre’s extreme popularity. Watching yet another onscreen couple suddenly recover memories of a shared childhood or exchange an unexpected kiss as the female lead trips on the stairs and falls right into the arms of her male colleague can feel cringe, but it also feels weirdly satisfying. Amidst the chaos of reality, in which every minor decision can lead to unanticipated consequences, plunging back into the world where situations repeat themselves and lovers always end up together gives one the feeling of comfort and reassurance. Here predictability ceases to be boring and instead fosters the tension of anticipation for expected scenes and plot movements—the anticipation that is filled with excitement and followed by the satisfaction of recognition, as opposed to the nervous suspense or utter shock associated with many other more esteemed genres.

In a sense, K-dramas are one of the purer forms of escapism: they provide us with a world where life is filled with thrill and emotion, but everything (well, almost everything) always ends well. Be it the magic land of Alchemy of Souls or the utopian Koreas of Crash Landing on You, some laws remain the same regardless of any drama’s specific setting, and that creates a sense of reliability, stability, and—yes, predictability—that so many of us long for in our real lives. Add to that the idealized, theatrically hyperbolized, and, for the most part, unbearably attractive characters; sprinkle it with the ever-colorful, vivid imagery; and heartrending soundtrack that you won’t be able to get out of your head for the next two weeks—and voila, you have a perfect show to dive into.

That being said, I would still like to add a few words to K-drama’s defense. I am not asserting that K-dramas are only good as a guilty pleasure for those who desperately need to get away for an hour or two from their real, sorry lives. What I am trying to say instead is that this genre possesses a unique capability to both soothe and inspire. K-dramas paint life often better than it is, and in doing so, they return us, in a way, to our childhood, to that time when we still dreamed of a kind and just world that awaits at our doorstep.

We grew up, and we no longer believe in fairytales; most of us understand that it is highly unlikely that our oblivious crush will appear out of nowhere to shield us from the rain with their brightly colored umbrella. But seeing someone else’s crush do that on the screen still makes us happy—it teaches us empathy, and it gives us hope. And if K-dramas are a guilty pleasure because they are cheesy and unrealistic—that is, romantic and safe—then shouldn’t we all reconsider the reasons why we might feel guilty about something we like?