A Comparative Study of Medical Dramas in China, South Korea, and the United States

The medical drama first appeared in the 1960s and since then it has become one of the most popular television genres, and always gets a relatively high score and audience rating. Many scholars have conducted extensive research on the subject, but mostly, such research has been limited to American medical dramas. Thus, this study conducted a comparative analysis to examine how the image of the physician and physician-patient relationships are represented in American, Korean and Chinese medical dramas. It aims to establish which form the dominant physician-patient relationship models within each national context. By implementing a content analysis on The Good Doctor, Dr. Romantic and The Surgeon, this paper has found that American medical dramas represent more positive characteristics of physicians than Korean and Chinese medical dramas. Chinese and Korean medical dramas pay more attention to representing the negative characteristics of physicians, especially the “corrupt” characteristic. Besides, medical disputes are a common social problem in both Chinese and Korean medical dramas, and different physician-patient relationship models depend on different circumstances.