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A Study of Narrative in Streaming Platform Series: Narco-Saints and Big Bet

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2026, (87), pp.59~89
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : December 10, 2025
  • Accepted : January 10, 2026
  • Published : January 31, 2026

Taehyun Baek 1

1경희대학교 K-컬처·스토리콘텐츠연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study approaches the narrative structures of streaming platform series as norms produced within platform environments. Focusing on Narco-Saints and Big-Bet, it examines how platform-specific modes of access, interfaces, and surrounding industrial-discursive conditions shape and formalize narrative organization. The analysis proceeds from the premise that platforms do more than distribute content: they also generate rules that arrange audience attention and induce re-entry. Drawing on discussions of Quality TV and Cinematic TV, the article first considers how streaming series mobilize cinematic experience alongside genre formulas and conventions to produce and modulate genre expectations. In Narco-Saints, paratexts surrounding the work—markers such as the director and cast, the “based on a true story” label, and promotional copy—prime interpretive orientations prior to viewing. The text itself activates genre schemas through strategies of evocation. Within the series, the management of narration encourages viewers to form and continually revise hypotheses, extending the time of inference and verification and thereby producing pleasures specific to serial narrative experience. Big-Bet demonstrates a structure in which seasons and episodes operate according to developmental rules established at the planning stage: each episode advances events while simultaneously producing the conditions that propel movement to the next. In particular, the combination of bundled episode release and sequential release organizes both rapid entry and sustained access, while release intervals create time for interpretation and discursive circulation, expanding the space for external devices such as recap clips to intervene. As micro-level behaviors—pausing, rewatching, and skipping—accumulate at the episode level, the series narrative is continuously reconstituted, structuring both the conditions for the accumulation of narrative information and the rhythms of access. Taken together, Narco-Saints builds its narrative by continually renewing reading practices through evocation and informational modulation, whereas Big-Bet constructs its narrative by organizing cycles of access and return through episode design and release strategy. These dynamics reveal how streaming platforms function as both structuring environments and operational units. Future research should compare shifts in platform interfaces and market strategies, intertextual relations, interpretive approaches to viewing data, and pathways of user circulation in order to more precisely capture the contemporary narrative structures that streaming platforms produce.

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* References for papers published after 2024 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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