But with so many ingredients knocking around the cauldron it’s a potion that sometimes merely placates rather than pleases.
Thankfully, what does work is the element that most people are tuning in for: the show’s fantastical conceit of a young woman who suddenly turns into an older woman during the daylight hours.
Mi-jin spent eight years of her youth trying to land a position at a company, but after a fantastical run-in with a cat one evening, she begins turning into Sun during the day. As Sun, she quickly lands a job as a cleaner at the Seohan District Prosecutors’ Office.
Ji-ung is already acquainted with Mi-jin and through various coincidences is still entangled with her, but only at night. Little does he know that he is also spending his days with her as Sun.
The show needs to invent a number of unlikely scenarios to keep both versions of Mi-jin interacting with Ji-ung, some more successful than others.
Through suspension of disbelief, we can accept the necessity of this to some degree, but it doesn’t exactly do wonders for Ji-ung as a character, who is supposed to be particularly intelligent, yet never seems to sense that anything is awry.
Nevertheless, after quite a few run-ins, Mi-jin and Ji-ung do begin to generate some romantic sparks, but before anything can get too heated a new obstacle presents itself: Ko Won (Baek Seo-hoo), a top K-pop star working in the prosecutor’s office for his military service.
Having witnessed her transformation, Won is one of the few people who knows about Mi-jin’s condition. He grows close to Sun, which raises a few eyebrows at work, as well as Mi-jin, which steadily sows some seeds of jealousy in Ji-ung.
Thanks to this romantic triangle (quadrangle?) Miss Night and Day delivers plenty of high jinks, some fuelled by copious alcohol, and commensurate misunderstandings, thanks to the show’s constant night-and-day structure.
Where the show stumbles is in the long-winded investigation into a series of disappearances that has been slowly bubbling in the background. The piecemeal approach to the developments surrounding the mystery has made it difficult to generate any interest in what’s going on.
Around the halfway point of the show, the pace has picked up but this angle of the story remains stubbornly flat. However, since it has been hinted that Mi-jin’s longest aunt Lim Sun – she borrowed the name as her daytime alias – could be one of the missing victims, this is a mystery we have to see through to the bitter end.
The best thing about this cumbersome investigation so far has been an amusing investigative interlude involving a dating con artist, vividly played by acclaimed indie film actress Kim Ga-hee (Park Hwa-young), who lures men out for dates who are then forced to buy her fried chicken and beer.
Meanwhile, Mi-jin seems so preoccupied with her new worklife and romantic dalliances that she seems to have simply accepted the fact that she is living in two bodies, having made no effort whatsoever to change her situation.
Then again, Sun is the reason she has a job, and perhaps that is valuable enough to her for her to put up with her unusual predicament.
However, it’s hard to imagine that Mi-jin’s magical transformations will not come to an end during the show’s six remaining episodes.
Given the serial killer case happening in the background and the hints that Mi-jin’s daytime body is what her missing aunt would have looked like as a middle-aged woman, it seems prudent to assume that the spell will be broken when the serial killer is caught and perhaps the body of the real Lim Sun is found as well.
This would cue us up for a tearful finale, but hopefully the writers will save some space for a few more tears of laughter before all is said and done for Miss Night and Day.
Miss Night and Day is streaming on Netflix.