Hot guys from all over the world talking about global “politics” (not really), love, and cultural differences in near-fluent Korean. What more can you ask for?





Airs every Monday night at 11 p.m.

I’m probably the last person to review a TV show, but with this show – The Abnormal Summit (비정상회담) produced by JTBC – I felt the immediate urge to do so.

Yes, the name of the show is from the ever-so important (or arguably not) multi-nation discussion on various issues like the global financial system and so forth, “Summit.” Like the real summit, the Non Summit is a discussion held by representations from different countries, but instead of “politics” in a traditional sense, they talk about various issues that are brought forth by the guests of each episode.

The representatives are from Ghana, Canada, Germany (replaced England), Turkey, Belgium, Italy, China, USA, France, Japan, and Australia. There was once a similar show called 미녀들의 수다 (Beauties’ Chitchat? Commonly known as the Global Talk Show), but I would argue the nature of the talk is very different.

The Global Talk Show mainly talked about how different immigrants/expats in Korea felt about Korea [Them to us] , but at Non Summit, it’s more of a round-table discussion amongst different countries. They talk about courtship, food, sex-ed, corporate culture, all in completely fluent Korean. It’s interesting to see how different people have different perspective. One thing viewers need to be cautious of is not to capsulate the entire country into what that one representative is saying/representing. Nevertheless, this show is generally quite light-hearted and very, very entertaining.

Whenever the discussion overheats, the song “Koreana” (theme song of the ’88 Olympics) plays and everyone is forced to stand up, hold hands with each other, and sing along to the song – which every one is surprisingly able to do fluently!

My favorite representative is Sam from Ghana. Funny, honest, and just so energetic!

Here is the teaser of the show – unfortunately I wasn’t able to find clips with English subtitles but hopefully it’ll be available soon. But if you’re an intermediate+ Korean learner/speaker, make sure to check it out!