Miss Night and Day: A Guide to the JTBC Body-Swap Rom-Com on Netflix

The conceit is gloriously absurd and the show knows it: a 29-year-old who can’t land a job wakes up one morning aged 20 years overnight, and is stuck cycling between two completely different bodies every sunrise and sunset. By daylight she’s a woman in her late forties; come dusk she’s back to her twenties. The trick of Miss Night and Day (낮과 밤이 다른 그녀) is that this isn’t played as tragedy. It’s a workplace comedy first, where the joke is that nobody at the office can know her two selves are the same person, and she has to hold down an internship under each one.

The premise

Lee Mi-jin is a job seeker whose luck is already terrible when an unexplained incident leaves her with a daily transformation: at sunrise she becomes a woman in her late forties, and at sunset she reverts to her younger self. To survive, she lives a double life. By day, in her older form, she takes an internship at the Seohan District Prosecutors’ Office. By night, as her twenty-something self, she keeps chasing the rest of her life.

What pulls the plot forward is the mystery underneath the comedy. There’s a reason this happened to her, and the show parcels out clues while she juggles the day job, a romance she didn’t plan on, and the constant danger of being found out. It runs as a fantasy rom-com with a procedural backbone, so expect the prosecutor’s-office cases to braid into her secret rather than sit beside it.

Where to watch

One correction worth flagging up front, because it gets misreported: Miss Night and Day aired on JTBC in South Korea, not SBS. It ran Saturdays and Sundays from June 15 to August 4, 2024, with the finale pulling the series’ best rating of around 11.7 percent. Internationally it streams on Netflix, though availability is region-by-region rather than everywhere.

• South Korea: originally broadcast on JTBC (16 episodes, completed)
• International: Netflix, in selected regions

The cast

The casting is the smartest decision the show makes. Mi-jin’s two selves are split across two actors. Jung Eun-ji (정은지) plays the nighttime, twenty-something Lee Mi-jin, while Lee Jung-eun (이정은) plays the daytime, late-forties version, who goes by Lim Soon at the office. Lee Jung-eun, one of the most reliable character actors working in Korea, gets to carry the bulk of the comedic heavy lifting as the older self bluffing her way through an internship she’s technically too inexperienced for.

Choi Jin-hyuk (최진혁) is the male lead, Gye Ji-woong, a workaholic prosecutor whose rigid focus runs straight into Mi-jin’s chaos. Baek Seo-hoo (백서후) rounds out the principals as Ko-won. The romance threads through the older-self storyline, which is part of what makes the show feel different from the usual rom-com geometry.

Filming locations

Production centered on Cheongju in North Chungcheong Province, and that part is well reported. The exterior of the fictional Seohan District Prosecutors’ Office is the Chungcheongbuk-do Provincial Government Office in the city. Beyond that, most of the granular spots circulating online (the local market, neighborhood parks, the earthen fortress walls, specific cafes and a hotel in Gwangmyeong) trace back to a single fan location guide rather than an official production list. Treat those as likely but unconfirmed. If you’re planning a trip, the Cheongju concentration and the Provincial Government building are the safe bets; the rest is worth a look but not gospel.

Worth your time?

This is one for viewers who like a rom-com with a real engine under the hood, where the high-concept gimmick actually shapes the relationships instead of being window dressing. The pleasure is watching Lee Jung-eun and Jung Eun-ji build a single person out of two performances, and watching that person try to keep an impossible secret while falling for someone she can only half let in. If you came out of lighter fantasy comedies wishing they’d commit harder to the premise, this commits.