In China, watching foreign television dramas is not only an important means to know about the outside world but also a trendy lifestyle. With the images of modern lives and exotic flavors, foreign TV dramas satisfy the increasing tastes of petit bourgeois in China, who yearn for prosperity, comfort, fashion, and hedonism (Chan & Ma, 1996; Jiang & Leung, 2012; Xu, 2007). The popularity of foreign TV dramas reflects the cultural logic of media globalization, which is shaped in two competing processes-globalized demand of media industry and localized demand of indigenous cultures (Waisbord, 2004). Thus, Chinese viewers' consumption of foreign TV dramas is simultaneously global and regional (Chan & Ma, 1996). American and Korean dramas are, respectively, characterized with global and regional features and become the most popular in the Chinese market. To study local reception of foreign media products, prior research usually adopted a number of characteristics of media content and audience to predict local viewers' choices. They rarely came down to the actual viewing process in which viewers obtain enjoyment through their involvement with media content. This article, therefore, aimed to examine this transnational viewing process, in which Chinese audience watch American and Korean TV dramas. Specifically, cultural proximity and genre proximity were adopted to predict media involvement and enjoyment. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to study Chinese viewers' comments and ratings for American and Korean dramas at Douban.com, one of the largest social networking platforms in China. A cluster sampling method was used to obtain a sample of 16,440 comments from 411 TV dramas. Enjoyment Staying at the heart of media entertainment, enjoyment was used to describe the outcome of viewing experiences (Vorderer, Klimmt, & Ritterfeld, 2004). It was often defined as "a general positive disposition towards and liking of media content" (Nabi & Krcmar, 2004, p. 290). A number of theoretical approaches were adopted to conceptualize enjoyment. From the perspective of audience, for example, Nabi and Krcmar (2004) saw enjoyment as attitude. Their model introduced three dimensions of enjoyment-cognitive, affective, and behavioral, which influence one another. Besides audience, the model developed by Vorderer et al. (2004) took media content into consideration and summarized a number of prerequisites affecting enjoyment, which are listed under three major categories-users, motives, and media. The prerequisites include suspension, empathy, parasocial interaction, presence, interest, escapism, mood management, 825027S GOXXX10.
