As a child, Jess would drive her mother crazy by watching Disney’s Alice In Wonderland again and again and again. Today, she drives everyone else crazy with her obsession for all things movies and Asian dramas.
On weeknights, you might find her catching up on a K-drama or telling her sister, “We can’t watch Romeo + Juliet again because we just watched it.” On the weekends, you might see her at the movies, possibly flinching at the stupid vibrating seats in the nearest Dolby theater.
How… When… Why K-dramas?
It went like this: It was summer 2011. I started by bingeing True Blood, that racy vampire show on HBO. Then I watched the French movie Heartbreaker and the BBC Robin Hood show before Netflix suggested I watch A Moment to Remember—the 2004 melodrama film starring Son Ye-jin and Jung Woo-sung.
It was strange and ridiculously sad. I adored it. Back then you could rate movies and shows out of 5 stars on Netflix, which gave you really good suggestions from their algorithm, and after I rated that movie high, Netflix suggested I watch Lie to Me—a 2011 K-drama starring Yoon Eun-hye and Kang Ji-hwan. I obviously loved it.
Soon after that, I watched Boys Over Flowers, which was strange and vile and addictive and tropey and toxic, and that was it. The rest is history.
How did you start podcasting?
I’ve been a podcaster since 2018 actually! Just not for K-dramas. Since I love movies, I cohosted the movie podcast Always the Critic with my good friend Rico from 2018 until 2024. How did that happen? Back in 2018, Rico invited me on his movie review podcast. It was originally called the I Have a Moviepass Podcast (as in the movie subscription service that crashed and burned). It was super fun and felt like an extension of conversations we were already having. Rico asked me back the next few reviews, until finally he just stopped asking, and I was his cohost.
I started the Daebak blog in 2017, directly as a result of how bad The Bride of Habaek was. I needed a place to vent, and I thought, why not just write down my thoughts and set up a blog as a sort of review diary. If someone reads it, then great, if not, this is for me. There was no review schedule or rhythm to what I watched or reviewed; it was all based on my mood or whims.
Come early 2021, I decided to look at the blog numbers for once, and I was kind of shocked at how well it was doing. So I pitched one season of a Daebak K-Rambles Podcast to my podcast partner Rico.
I quickly found that I loved it. I enjoy talking to people about what many would consider a guilty pleasure, something so odd—that is, watching television shows not from your culture, in a different language, reading subtitles. Thank you to each and every person who has listened to Daebak and the original Always the Critic movie podcast. Your love and support means more than you know.
