In the new Netflix romantic dramedy My Royal Nemesis, a “vixen” from the Joseon era wakes up in modern-day Korea after thinking she was executed. She tries to remake her image with the help of a business shark who rebels from his chaebol family.
Opening Shot: A Joseon-era royal compound. We hear a death sentence being read for Kang Dan-shim (Lim Ji-yeon), a royal consort.
The Gist: Dan-shim is being sentenced to death for disrupting the court’s hierarchy, for adultery, and for attempted murder. She’s supposed to drink a bowl with poisoned liquid, but she refuses and knocks it aside. She keeps knocking them aside until she’s held down by other consorts and forced to drink the poison. She coughs up blood and loses consciousness.
When she wakes up, she’s in the same courtyard, but she is bewildered by seeing people in different clothes, and cameras and microphones around. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s in Seoul in 2026, in the body of an actress named Shin Seo-ri, who is a stand-in on a movie shoot. Still thinking she’s supposed to drink poison, she fights all the actors on set, and the director keeps rolling, thinking that she’s improvising.
In the meantime, Cha Se-gye (Heo Nam-jun) is a third-generation chaebol heir who quit his grandfather’s corporation to start his own, with mergers and acquisitions being his biggest business. He’s ruthless, as we see in a negotiation, but he’s also being protested for how he treats subcontractors, including a deepfake video showing him being verbally abusive on a job site.
As Dan-shim dazedly walks out of the compound and into the city — after cursing out Seo-ri’s manager and the actor she’s standing in for — she passes out in front of the car Se-gye is in. When she comes to, the two of them start yelling at each other and hitting each other with flowers and tree fronds. But we also see cherry blossom petals fluttering down, so something is up. He gives her his card in case she needs to pay for medical care.
She continues to fumble around the city, but then finds out from a shaman peddling her wares on the street that she’s occupying someone else’s body; even though she looks the same, she thinks she’s aged terribly. A visit to a museum, where she sees the painting she was working on before her execution, shows her that it’s not only 300 years in the future, but that her existence has been erased from the annals of Joseon history. In fact, in unofficial texts, she’s considered a villain.
Determined to remake her image, she appears at the headquarters of Se-gye’s corporation, right as an audition for a Joseon-style face for one of his companies’ cosmetic lines is starting. That’s when she runs into him again and proposes a deal.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Time travel is a well-used theme in Korean romantic dramedies, and My Royal Nemesis reminds us of a recent show like Bon Appetit, Your Majesty, even though that one is about a modern-day time traveler going back to Joseon times instead of the other way around.
Our Take: It’s not a stretch to think that, in the early going of My Royal Nemesis, Dan-shim and Se-gye are going to hate each other. It’s evident during their first encounter, given how brash he is and how fierce she is. She certainly doesn’t take any crap from anyone, and that isn’t going to go away now that she’s no longer a royal consort. Despite being a glorified concubine, Dan-shim always took pride in how she got to where she was, despite her low-status upbringing.
Se-gye is similar, always fighting the notion that he is not fully a part of the chaebol family run by his grandfather, Nam Ok-soon (Kim Hae-sook), due to his mother’s lower-class status. As the two of them do business together, and Dan-shim navigates the modern world, the two of them should grow closer together.
The show is mostly chuckleworthy, especially during scenes where Dan-shim has no idea what in the world she’s looking at and interacting with; she speaks in more formal Joseon syntax, which makes everyone around her think that she’s just preparing for a role. Se-gye seems to be a little more irredeemable, but there are hints that he is vicious in his negotiations because he has more to prove due to his background, and that he actually is being tough to exact a pound of flesh for the very subcontractors he’s accused of mistreating.
Performance Worth Watching: Lim Ji-yeon is a lot of fun as Dan-shim, playing as about an extreme fish out of water as we’ve seen in one of these time-traveling K-dramas.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Right as a solar eclipse happens, Dan-shim pulls Se-gye away from his car, just as a mannequin that was tossed from the building lands on the car.
Sleeper Star: Yoon Byung-hee plays Son Jae-chan, Se-gye’s chief of staff and seemingly the only one who can be honest with Se-gye. He also tells Se-gye about the notion that a woman who slaps a chaebol heir wants to date him — just like Dan-shim did.
Most Pilot-y Line: The cherry blossom petals falling during the main characters’ meet-cute is such a standard trope of romantic K-dramas that it’s almost weird not to see it. But we were wondering where the cherry blossom tree was when Se-gye and Dan-shim were hitting each other with vegetation as the petals fell.
Our Call: STREAM IT. For the most part, My Royal Nemesis works as a time-traveling, fish-out-of-water romantic comedy. But it leans heavily on K-drama tropes, to the point where the first episode dragged because it had to fit all of those tropes in.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.