If you haven’t heard of them, Asian dramas are probably best described as the soap opera meets the mini series. If you have seen them, you know they’re so much more. The suck you in and don’t let you leave until the end. The Asian drama meisters are the masters of ‘so good you can’t put it down.’

Very quickly rising in popularity, but still mostly obscure, (a year ago, it was almost impossible to find anything about them, you can get quite a few hits on google, these days, but not near enough), Asian television can sometimes be the best TV you’ve ever watched. They are made in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and (less spectacularly) mainland china. But the best come from Korea and Japan (but mostly Korea).

Since Asian dramas don’t have the popularity of their more famous cousin, anime, one is often left wondering where to find these hidden treasures. Your local video store probably won’t have them. Wikipedia, which generally has everything you ever wanted to know, is severely lacking in Asian drama information.

The information is out there. You just have to know where to look. If you’re wanting to know more about a particular drama series, go to the dramawiki. It’s run by the d-addicts community and is generally the best resource on the net for drama info. It’s wikipedia for Asian Dramas. Another good site is soompi.com. It’s a strange, comprehensive community dedicated to Korean culture (but also suffers from annoying lag times).

Where to Watch?

As to where to watch them if you’re video store doesn’t have them, try online. The legality of watching dramas online varies by region and particular series. Some Asian dramas are available online for free. Some can only be purchased without breaking copyright law.

If you’re looking to purchase your particular favourite series, the best and most popular pay site is yesasia.com. They have a comprehensive, (and multi-language translated selection) of pretty much every series created. They’re also a good resource for collectibles and Asian drama merchandise, if that’s what you’re into. I got my favourite television show of all time, there, “Dae Jang Geum.” Amazon also has a large selection of Asian Dramas available, but they don't have near the stock of YesAsia.

If a particular drama you want to watch isn’t currently in copyright violation, there are many options available to you.

The most popular place to watch them online, today, is mysoju.com. They host hundreds of dramas on their site and are available to watch anytime. There are a few downsides to mysoju.com however. Their videos are grainy and low quality and they are split into hundreds of parts, making the watching somewhat tedious. Crunchyroll.com is an alternate to mysoju.com and offers much the same service but you’re still left with low quality watching. You can also find dramas hosted on pretty much any video hosting site. Youtube has a few and I’ve heard you can find a lot on Veoh.com

An alternate to watching them online is downloading. The greatest resource for this is d-addicts. They are a large Asian drama forum community with an extensive listing of asian drama torrent downloads. You can find very high quality versions of your favourite shows here (sometimes too high and they take forever to download). The only thing about d-addicts, though, is that it’s going to take some work to get your show up and running. The video download often won’t come with the subtitle file. More often than not, you’ll have to go digging through the forums and hope that there was some nice fellow out there who’d gotten around to translating your show for you.

I, personally, like to use d-addicts to find my Asian drama series. It’s a lot less convenient that mysoju.com, but I prefer to go a little extra out of my way to take advantage of the higher quality their videos afford. Asian Dramas can sometimes be pretty spectacular programs. It’s a shame to watch a sprawling period piece on a throttled, video hosting connection.