Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Military becomes blue-chip cultural item
MBC’s primetime show ‘Real Men’
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Some Korean men talk as if they would rather die than serve their compulsory military duty again. A cliche about women is that they hate to hear men talk about their army days as much as about football, and hate it most when men talk about the memories of playing football in camo pants and boots.
Despite this, it seems Koreans can’t get enough of military-inspired shows on television. MBC television is enjoying impressive audience numbers for its weekend primetime show, “Real Men,” which puts a group of male entertainers through a military boot camp.
The biggest star of the show is Sam Hammington, an Australian funnyman with a fluent command of Korean. Putting this goofy foreigner into the thick of Korea’s macho military nonsense has proved to be primetime entertainment.
Men and women are equally digging the show, pollsters here say. According to one report, “Real Men” has a share of 5.9 percent of female television viewers among the shows airing in the same time frame and 5 percent of male viewers.
“Women don’t get enlisted, so the experience feels kind of fresh. Although most of the celebrities on Real Men, aside from Hammington, already completed their military duty, so watching them doing a fake version of it again is funny in itself,” said Choi Jung-won, a 31-year-old woman, who says she watches the show every Sunday.
“Particularly, Hammington’s clumsy actions bring the most laughs. Lots of men talked about how the food was terrible during their military days and, while the celebrities on Real Men are given a similar kind of food that isn’t exactly gourmet, I could understand why they were gobbling it down quickly after all the grueling physical stuff they had to go through.”
There are people who are disturbed by the success of shows like Real Men, which they believe softens criticism about Korean military life that could be more modern than it is.
While the situation has improved over the past years, Korean soldiers still experience unnecessary verbal and physical abuse and are tightly restricted from leaving their camps during free time or using mobile phones.
“There are some exaggerated scenes on the show, but I still consider the portrayal as somewhat realistic. I empathize with the trouble they go through,” said Roh Ji-hoon, a 30-year-old who did his military service about a decade ago.
“All the impressions I received from my military life including the anxiety I felt when I entered training camp, a sensation of fear when I grabbed a rifle for the first time in my life, and the heart-thumping when I saw my superiors all there.”