Nice to Not Meet You

The Burden of the Punchline

There’s something faintly disorienting about watching Lee Jung-jae, who has made such a career out of carrying terror and pressure in his face, suddenly get thrown into the fluffy anxiety of a romantic comedy. We’re used to seeing him cornered, burdened, or bloodied—especially after Squid Game. In Nice to Not Meet You, director Kim Ga Ram asks him to play Lim Hyeon-jun, a TV detective actor desperate to escape typecasting and pivot into melodrama. The setup is familiar enough, and Kim seems fully aware of that. What she really builds is a roomy little playground for performers who seem relieved to stop glowering for a while.



The show gets its charge from smashing two professional worlds together. Lim Ji-yeon plays Wi Jeong-sin, a respected political journalist dumped onto the entertainment beat after a corruption story gets too close to power. Lim spent the last few years weaponizing stillness in The Glory, and there’s real pleasure in watching her aim that same intense focus at the glossy nonsense of celebrity coverage. She doesn’t move like someone who belongs in press junkets. She enters those spaces rigid, wary, almost combative, holding her recorder like it might double as a knife. In the ecosystem of modern entertainment media, that’s not the worst instinct.