Warning: This post contains spoilers from the end of Miss Night and Day.
How to make serial murder charming? Netflix Miss Night and Day, which ended its 16-episode season on Sunday, responds in the most K-dramatic way. There are no Hannibals or Dexters here; simply combine brutal murders with ridiculous romance, add some life and you’ve got a K-drama going on. This is not new. South Korean TV’s definition of gender has always seemed more malleable – and interesting – than in the West. But thanks to how Miss Night and Day combines these ideas, the series feelings new.
We’re immediately given a crash course in this genre when we learn about the eight years that Lee Mi-jin (Jung Eun-ji), a thirtysomething woman with an absurdly strong sweater game, spent looking for gainful employment. Her difficulties in the modern job market are jeopardized when a CGI cat transforms her into a middle-aged woman during the day (played by Lee Jung-eun). Suddenly work isn’t so hard to find, as she is snapped up by the Seohan District Prosecutor’s Office’s senior internship pilot program. Now, rather than one in a sea of 30-year-olds competing for scarce jobs, she is – in her middle-aged form – a relatively young and exciting prospect. She is placed in Gye Ji-ung’s (Choi Jin-hyuk) office and involved in the quest to find her mother and aunt’s killer.
This body swap provides an evident pivot around which writer Park Ji-ha switches from tragic thriller to charming romance on a dime. Mi-jin’s transformation provides a perfect separation between these two opposing genres – one dark and the other irreverent – and builds drama from the friction that the rigid boundary creates. Like her older character Lim Sun, Mi-jin investigates with Gye. At night, she goes out with him, and Gye is unaware of his lover’s secret identity. The threat of her transformation being revealed informs much of the foreground drama, while the mysterious murder mystery unfolds in parallel.
Praising Korean TV for its genre mixing doesn’t mean we don’t do that in the West. Instead, we tend to see combinations of tired ideas that often seem close to each other. The series instead lean much more in one direction, diluting one genre to elevate another. Just looking at the last six months, we saw Mr. AND MRS. SMITH follow in the footsteps of countless previous action comedies, Sunny struggling to mix his darker elements with his comedic leanings, and To fall feeling inhuman in its mix of dark world-building and comedy. With a more fluid recognition of genre, South Korean series have long proven adept at consolidating disparate concepts, combining genres that seem inappropriate until they become not only functional but also fresher in their sometimes strange combinations.
The resulting entertainment often challenges the idea of targeting 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 the sand combines his struggle with strict police procedures and commentary on struggling coastal towns. Don’t like murder mysteries? You are lucky: Miss Night and Daywhich spent its entire run on Netflix’s Top 10 Non-English TV Shows list, it offsets its surprisingly robust whodunit with generous helpings of romance.
This is true until the end of the series. The plot of the novel continues to bleed Miss Night and DayThe series finale even as the series fully indulges in its dark thriller, as, after a bunch of red herrings, the killer is finally revealed to be the snobbish, yet seemingly harmless, intern Na Ok-hui (Bae Hae- sun), also known as Gong Eum-sim.
When she drugs and kidnaps Mi-jin and her cinnamon roll father Hak-chan (Jung Suk-young), Miss Night and Day shifts for the next two hours into full-on dark thriller mode. It’s a good twist, which upends the comfort of previous episodes. At this point, the series has laid enough groundwork in the development of these characters to succeed convincingly.
It’s a K-drama, of course, so Hak-chan is fine, Mi-jin escapes and subdues Gong, and they all end up together (in heterosexual pairs – it’s not what cool of a show). Gong is finally brought to justice – and then sentenced to death, damn-e Gye and Mi-jin put their pain aside. Although Mi-jin assumed this was the key to becoming young again, it’s as the series ties her threads into an elegant bow that we see how even Miss Night and Day doesn’t perfectly navigate the tightrope over gender stew.
Mi-jin’s transformation remains an exception. We know why this one. It’s a trick, something K romances use to differentiate themselves from similar love stories. The resolution we obtain, however, is far from satisfactory. In a final episode that’s basically cleaning up what was already resolved 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 leaving in peace.
Even though her transformation never feels as embedded as the rest of the narrative, her ending seems so far away – even the CGI cat disappears. Instead, it remains a writer’s device that allows Mi-jin to be in two places at once. Even though half of it relies on constant jokes about how a younger man could never be attracted to a woman in her fifties – even when Mi-jin’s best friend, Ga-yeong (Kim A-young), falls in love with an older man. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
However, all the time, even when Miss Night and Day combines dismemberment with frequent poop jokes from Mi-jin and Ga-yeong, these opposing ideas never create a detachment from the fiction. Instead of, Miss Night and Day it feels less like an amalgamation of genres than a snapshot of our own complexities that, like gender, are not so easily categorized.
If a hallmark of South Korean TV is offering an idealized, almost hyperreal vision of our modern lives, it also captures the chaos that haunts them. In fact, bringing order to this chaos – linked to the happy endings that make K-dramas so satisfying – is part of what makes them so rewarding to watch.
Given the franchise of everything (including, ironically, squid game) in the West, this willingness to experiment and play with gender seems like a bright spot of artistic expression. No less important, in a year that has so far seen tepid The Acolyte It is Masters of the Air lined up alongside a series of sequels and reboots. The best South Korean shows released alongside these were made to feel fresher and more original than their seemingly worn-out parts might suggest.
All of this gives less weight to the criticisms that can be made about Miss Night and Day. In fact, they don’t come close to detracting from what makes the show’s genre experimentation so exciting and invigorating. 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 appreciated for its artistry rather than content based on efficiency. It slips in some places, but Miss Night and Day It ultimately achieves some of the highest praise in an oversaturated global streaming landscape: it’s extremely, joyfully, engaging to watch.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
