This paper attempts to delineate a poetics of K-drama. K-drama poetics inheres in two interlinked issues: mediality and the production of emotion. The paper introduces the concept of the “affective interlude,” which identifies moments that take place between the dialogue or narrative action and that show a character feeling something. Its effect is to showcase the expression of sincere emotion and the “vulnerability” of on-screen characters while soliciting viewers to sympathize with them. The paper then turns its focus on the hit K-drama from 2022, Twenty- Five Twenty-One, to elaborate on how it may be read to allegorize this solicitation of sympathy across physical distances through technological media.