K-style content on Netflix: assembling 'Korea' in the platform era

This article theorises the term ‘K-style content’ to describe Western produced televisual media that mobilises Korean popular culture as a resource to attract global streaming audiences. Focusing on XO, Kitty and KPop Demon Hunters, it defines K-style content as media texts that are not produced in, by, or for South Korea, but strategically assemble K-pop, K-drama, tourism, and lifestyle signifiers to read as “Korean” to global audiences. Building on scholarship on the Korean Wave, cultural appropriation, and platform studies, the article explores how these texts assemble stylised and affectively charged visions of ‘Korea’ that are both saturated with Korean Wave imagery and easily slotted into transnational Netflix genres. Using textual and paratextual analysis, it proposes that K-style content functions as a new form of cultural capital for global platforms by translating K-pop’s industrial practices and aesthetics into globally legible formats, while flattening local complexities and relocating symbolic and economic power away from South Korean media industries. The article argues that this platform era reconfiguration of Korean popular culture complicates existing accounts of Hallyu as national soft power, raising new questions about authenticity, ownership, and the future of K-content when “Korea” is produced outside South Korea’s media system.