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.



An early red-carpet sequence lays out the show’s intentions better than the dialogue ever does. Jeong-sin triggers total chaos, but Kim avoids the usual jittery satire grammar. Instead of shaky-cam frenzy, she shoots the whole mess in wider, more measured frames, with the timing of a screwball comedy. Hyeon-jun mostly watches from the side, and Lee lets his body do the joke: the shoulders sink, the face tightens, the exhaustion rolls off him. The South China Morning Post described the series as "an understated, easy-going romantic comedy" that sometimes "sticks a little too faithfully to formula," and that’s the exact bind. The breezy formula keeps it watchable, but whenever the script starts spelling out its themes about celebrity and authenticity, the show loses air. The actors’ faces were already telling us all of that.



I don’t think the series fully justifies 16 episodes. Around the middle stretch, the sharper edges of the premise get rounded down into a more standard TV romance, and you can feel the energy dip. Still, even when the writing starts reaching for familiar beats, the cast keeps it grounded. Jeon Sung-woo, as the frazzled director Byeong Gi, is especially good at stealing scenes with tiny reaction shots that feel more truthful than whole pages of banter. *Nice to Not Meet You* doesn’t reinvent anything, and maybe it doesn’t need to. Sometimes the pleasure is just watching two actors with heavy dramatic résumés lay down the burden for a while and spar in a bright room.