Warning: This post contains spoilers for the finale of Miss Night and Day.
How do you make serial murder charming? Netflix’s Miss Night and Day, which ended its 16-episode run Sunday, answers in the most typical of K-drama fashions. No Hannibals or Dexters here; simply pair brutal killings with a farcical romance, add some slice-of-life, and you’ve got a K-drama going. That’s not new. South Korean TV’s definition of genre has always felt more malleable—and interesting—than in the West. But thanks to how Miss Night and Day blends these ideas, the series feels new.
We’re given a crash course in this genre stew straight away as we learn of the eight years Lee Mi-jin (Jung Eun-ji), a woman in her thirties with absurdly strong sweater game, has spent searching for gainful employment. Her travails in the modern job market are undercut when a CGI cat turns her into a middle-aged woman during the day (played by Lee Jung-eun). Suddenly, work isn’t so hard to find as she’s snapped up by Seohan District Prosecutor’s Office’s pilot senior intern program. Now, rather than one in a sea of 30-year-olds competing for scant positions, she is—in her middle-aged form—a relatively young, exciting prospect. She is placed in the office of Gye Ji-ung (Choi Jin-hyuk), and embroiled in the search to find the killer of both his mother and her aunt.
This body-swap provides an overt pivot around which writer Park Ji-ha shifts from tragic thriller to charming romance on a dime. Mi-jin’s transformation provides a seamless separation between these two opposing genres—one bleak and the other irreverent—and builds drama from the friction that hard limit creates. As her older daylight persona, Lim Sun, Mi-jin investigates with Gye. At night, she dates him, with Gye none the wiser about his paramour’s secret identity. The threat of her transformation being revealed informs much of the drama in the foreground, while the brooding murder mystery develops in parallel.
To laud Korean TV for its genre blending is not to say we don’t do it in the West. Rather, we tend to see well-worn combinations of ideas that often feel close to one another to begin with. Series, instead, lean much harder in one direction, diluting one genre to lift another. Just looking at the past six months, we’ve seen Mr. and Mrs. Smith follow the tracks of countless action-comedies before it, Sunny struggling to blend its darker elements with its comic leanings, and Fallout feeling inhuman in its mix of bleak world-building and comedy. With a more fluid recognition of genre, South Korean series have long proven adept at gelling disparate concepts, combining genres that feel inapposite until they become not just functional but fresher in their sometimes strange combinations.
The resulting entertainment often defies the idea of target audiences or, as in the West, chasing algorithmic keywords. Tired of superheroes? Moving uses superpowers to examine the fringes of Korean society. Don’t like sports? Like Flowers in Sand pairs its wrestling with a tight police procedural and commentary on struggling coastal towns. Dislike murder mysteries? You’re in luck: Miss Night and Day, which spent its entire run on Netflix’s list of top 10 non-English TV shows, offsets its surprisingly robust whodunnit with generous helpings of romance.
This is true up until the series’ end. The romance plot continues to bleed into Miss Night and Day’s finale even as the series gives over fully to its grim thriller as, after a bunch of red herrings, the murderer is finally revealed to be the snooty, though seemingly harmless, intern Na Ok-hui (Bae Hae-sun) aka Gong Eum-sim.
When she drugs and kidnaps Mi-jin and her father, cinnamon roll Hak-chan (Jung Suk-young), Miss Night and Day shifts for the next two hours into full dark thriller mode. It’s a good twist, one that brings the comfort of previous episodes crashing down. By that point, the show has laid enough groundwork in developing these characters to convincingly pull it off.
It’s a K-drama, of course, so Hak-chan is fine, Mi-jin escapes and subdues Gong, and everyone ends up together (in heterosexual pairs—it’s not that cool of a show). Gong is ultimately brought to justice—and then sentenced to death, yikes—and Gye and Mi-jin put their grief to rest. Though Mi-jin has assumed this was the key to becoming young again, it’s as the series ties its threads in a neat bow that we see how even Miss Night and Day doesn’t navigate the tightrope over genre stew perfectly.
Mi-jin’s transformation remains an outlier. We know why it’s here. It’s a gimmick, something K-romances use to set themselves apart from similar love stories. The resolution we get, however, is far from satisfying. In a final episode that is mostly mopping up what’s already been solved in Episode 15, Mi-jin’s alter ego is revealed to be the spirit of her aunt who supernaturally takes over Mi-jin’s body before randomly peacing out.
Much as her transformation never feels as embedded as the rest of the narrative, its end feels just as detached—even the CGI cat disappears. Instead, it remains a writerly artifice that lets Mi-jin be in two places at once. Even if one half of that is dependent on constant jokes about how a younger man could never be attracted to a woman in her fifties—even as Mi-jin’s best friend Ga-yeong (Kim A-young) falls for an older man. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet, throughout, even as Miss Night and Day pairs dismemberment with frequent jokes about Mi-jin and Ga-yeong pooping, these opposing ideas never create a detachment from the fiction. Instead, Miss Night and Day feels less an amalgam of genres than a snapshot of our own complexities which, like genre, aren’t so easily categorized.
If a hallmark of South Korean TV is that it offers an idealized, almost hyper-real, view of our modern lives, it also captures the chaos that haunts them. Indeed, bringing order to that chaos—tied to the happy endings that makes K-dramas so satisfying—is part of what makes them so gratifying to watch.
In the face of the franchising of everything (including, ironically, Squid Game) in the West, this willingness to experiment and play with genre feels like a bright spot of artistic expression. Not least in a year that’s so far seen the tepid The Acolyte and Masters of the Air aligned next to a string of sequels and reboots. The best South Korean shows to release alongside these have been made to feel fresher and more original than their ostensibly well-worn parts might suggest.
All of which gives less weight to the nitpicks one can make about Miss Night and Day. In truth, they don’t come close to derailing what makes the show’s experimentation with genre so thrilling and refreshing. Miss Night and Day is a compelling, if imperfect example of how K-drama blends genres, but it’s also a timely reminder to watch rather than consume; that this is a medium to be enjoyed for its artistry rather than content built on efficiency. It slips up in places, but Miss Night and Day ultimately achieves some of the highest praise in an oversaturated global streaming landscape: it’s extremely, breezily, compellingly watchable.
The post The Brilliant Genre Stew of K-Drama Miss Night and Day appeared first on TIME.
