2024 Manga Adaptations (January - June)
South Korean network MBC announced on January 5 that there won't be any new dramas airing for the next month and a half. The only dramas to continue airing will be the weekend ones: Money Flower and Man in the Kitchen.
The reason? The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics will be covered during the week until the middle of March. Sports fans will definitely enjoy that! The network announced:
Instead of rushing to meet our schedule by hurriedly introducing our dramas, we preferred to make our preparations slowly and present our works when they are polished and fully complete. As a result, we had no choice but to push back the programming for our new dramas.
Even though the latest MBC drama I'm Not a Robot received positive feedback at MDL, its ratings were pretty low in South Korea. It seems that this is also one of the reasons why the company wants to slow down and regroup.
Choi Won Suk, the director of MBC’s drama division, announced:
We have decided to resume airing our weekday miniseries on March 12. The strike lasted for about two months, which is how long it takes to air one miniseries. We need approximately that amount of time to produce a new drama, and we tried to shorten that [preparation] time as much as possible. The drama division was not able to conduct business as usual during the strike. A drama is not something that can be created quickly, which is why, after a lot of deliberation, we came to this decision. Instead of hastily rushing to air a new drama, we want to do a good job and present a drama that is well-made. However, it’s not easy to produce a drama in-house right away, and we didn’t want to purchase and air a drama produced by an outside company. Therefore, we had no choice but to go on hiatus. First of all, I am most sorry to the viewers, and I am also sorry to the drama producer who will be first up at bat after the hiatus. Dramas need to be aired continuously [in order to maintain viewership ratings]. So if a problem arises and there is an extended break, the situation becomes extremely disadvantageous for the next drama in terms of competing with [other dramas in its time-slot].
If you wonder what strike he is talking about, MBC’s labor union went on strike on September 4, 2017, read more about it here.
MBC announced that it plans to air its first new weekday drama of 2018 on March 12.
Great Seducer and Let's Hold Hands Tightly and Watch The Sunset are supposed to start airing at that time.
Will you miss MBC dramas for the rest of the winter?
Source (1)
