'Modern Farmer,' a Korean Drama, Is Coming Your Way

According to Soompi, a Korean pop culture site, the network has announced three of their male leads, who will play members of a rock band that decide to take up farming as an escape. Korean television industry is one of the country’s most profitable and fastest-growing industries, thanks largely to the insane demand for K-Dramas. In 2011, the country exported about $155 million in “TV dramas,” a $147 million increase over ten years, according to “The Financial Times”.

‘Modern Farmer will draw out a plot of the ironic situations that occur when a rock band returns to the farm, and the stories of love and laughter that follow.

Surely, the network is hoping to duplicate its recent smash hit, “My Love from the Star”, which spread like wildfire across nearly all of Asia ”“ on iqiyi, a Chinese video site, it was reportedly streamed about 14.5 billion times in just three months. The show was so popular that Nongshim, a Korean instant noodle company, reported record profits in China after a bowl of noodles appeared in one scene, and a somewhat obscure children’s novel quoted in the series, “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” by Kate DiCamillo, became a bestseller in Korea.

As shared by Soompi, an SBS official had this to say: “Modern Farmer will draw out a plot of the ironic situations that occur when a rock band returns to the farm, and the stories of love and laughter that follow.” The drama will fall in line with the network’s overarching goal to share “stories of humanism.”

SBS isn’t the first network to stumble across contemporary farming as entertainment, though. A show that has been lost in the sands of time, “The Modern Farmer” aired on Saturday mornings in the 1950s. Not much information remains, but one helpful “Farmer” fan wrote this review on the Piano World piano forums (don’t ask):

[mf_blockquote layout=”left”]”Every Saturday morning, I’d get up at 6:00 a.m. and watch episodes of The Modern Farmer on television… There would be amber fields of grain (on my black-and-white ten-inch television screen), with six or eight industrious combines doing whatever it is industrious combines do while winding their industrious ways across the rolling prairies of Iowa or Indiana or New Jersey or some such place (I wouldn’t have known the difference); row after row of happy chickens (boy, were we innocent!) triumphantly laying their eggs which rolled victoriously down onto long conveyor belts, packed into cartons by cheery-eyed matrons in white hair nets and shipped on refrigerated trucks to the four corners of this great and bounteous land… ” [/mf_blockquote]

As for music, there was a Modern Farmer band in Boston that released a self-titled album in the early 90s. Its members included Reeves Gabrels, a guitarist and collaborator with David Bowie, and David Hull, a bassist who has played with Aerosmith. Naturally, we can assume that the upcoming K-Drama will combine these two creations to produce a magnificent show, and you can bet that we at Modern Farmer will be the first to tell you all about it. The first episode is scheduled to air on October 18, so stay tuned.

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