Lee Seo-jin wants to retire in Texas. Netflix is making sure the whole world watches him try

Ready or Not: Texas is a Season 1 unscripted travel series premiering March 24, 2026, on Netflix, co-directed by Na Young-suk (Nah Yung-suk) and Kim Ye-seul, produced by Egg is Coming. Part of Netflix’s 33-title 2026 Korean content slate, it arrives as Korean-language programming has become the second most-consumed content category on the platform worldwide — and it may be the most intimate entry the genre has produced.

Somewhere between Dallas and Fort Worth, two Korean men in brand-new cowboy boots are discovering something that most travel television has forgotten how to find: a place loved for purely personal reasons, unmediated by algorithm, itinerary, or editorial agenda. The boots go on and the energy, by all accounts, spikes. That image — awkward, joyful, cross-cultural, and oddly moving — is the emotional key to understanding what Ready or Not: Texas actually is.

The show’s premise is deceptively simple. South Korean actor Lee Seo-jin and his longtime creative partner, the legendary producer Nah Yung-suk (universally known as Na PD), set off for Dallas with no fixed plan and a group of friends who have joined on impulse, trusting Seo-jin completely. There are no itineraries. No cultural briefings. No scripted encounters designed to illuminate the gap between East and West. What there is instead is something rarer: one man’s private love for a city, and a camera crew skilled enough to catch what that love looks like when it is finally shown in public.

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Lee Seo-jin is 55 years old and has been famous in South Korea for the better part of three decades. He built his reputation in period dramas — playing kings, generals, and historical icons in shows like Yi San and Gyebaek — before Nah Yung-suk cast him in 2013’s Grandpas Over Flowers and revealed a comic persona the acting career had never fully excavated. He is grumpy in the way that only deeply caring people can afford to be. He is composed in the way of someone who has learned, through years of variety television, that real emotion lands harder when the face stays still. His variety nickname, “Mr. Lee,” captures the dignified-but-exasperated performance he has perfected across a decade of unscripted work.

But in Ready or Not: Texas, something shifts. When Lee Seo-jin says — on camera, with characteristic understatement — that Dallas is the city he dreams of retiring in, it reframes everything. This is not a celebrity visiting a country for professional purposes. This is a man returning to a place he loves, with friends he trusts, through a medium he has mastered. That combination produces a kind of transparency that most travel television never achieves.

Dallas is a city that carries more cultural mythology than perhaps any other in America. It is the city of the Kennedy assassination, of the oil-boom television dynasty that exported a particular image of American ambition to the world in the 1980s, and of a contemporary urban identity being rapidly reshaped by economic migration, demographic change, and the relentless pressure of a state that has decided, loudly, what it thinks of itself. It is emphatically not the America that Korean pop culture typically engages with. No beaches, no neon, no cultural cool of the coastal variety. What Dallas offers instead is scale, directness, and an almost defiant pride in a very specific version of the good life.

The Fort Worth Stockyards sequence — teased in the trailer and likely to become the season’s most-discussed episode — puts that cultural specificity in sharpest relief. Longhorns, saddle leather, the smell of livestock, and two Korean television personalities navigating a world that has barely registered the existence of K-pop: this is not a polished cultural encounter. It is a genuine collision, and Na PD’s production style is precisely calibrated for this kind of moment. His shows are built on the comedy of the gap between expectation and reality, and few gaps in contemporary television are wider than the one between Seoul and the Fort Worth Stockyards.

Texan food culture is another of the show’s richest veins. For Lee Seo-jin specifically — a man who spent several seasons running Korean restaurants in Mexico and Spain for Nah Yung-suk’s overseas restaurant shows — arriving in Texas as a consumer rather than a culinary ambassador is a structural reversal with genuine dramatic implications. Texas’s food identity is every bit as proud, particular, and resistant to outside interpretation as Korea’s own. Slow-smoked brisket, Tex-Mex, the unironic fervor of Whataburger devotion: these are not just meals. They are cultural positions. The show, by placing Lee Seo-jin in the position of appreciative newcomer rather than knowing guide, allows a new kind of humility to enter the frame.

Nah Yung-suk’s production philosophy has always privileged the unmanufactured moment over the constructed one — or at least, has constructed frameworks sophisticated enough to generate moments that feel genuinely unmanufactured. His most celebrated sequences across his career involve not scenic beauty or celebrity access, but the simple human awkwardness of people encountering something they did not expect. In a show built around a man’s personal dream, the unscripted format carries extra weight: if the dream turns out to be real — if Dallas is genuinely as good as Lee Seo-jin believes it is — the camera will catch it. And if the reality of the place bumps against the romance of the idea, the camera will catch that too.

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The question every travel show must eventually answer is whether it earns its moments or manufactures them. Ready or Not: Texas has structural advantages that most shows in the genre lack. The personal stakes — a celebrity’s retirement dream, exposed to global scrutiny — are real. The friendship between Lee Seo-jin and Nah Yung-suk, built over more than a decade and tested across multiple continents, is real. The cultural distance between Seoul and Dallas is real. What remains to be seen is whether the show finds in Texas the same quality of human encounter that Na PD’s best work has always delivered: the moment when the production falls away, the persona drops, and what the camera finds is simply a person, somewhere they wanted to be.

Ready or Not: Texas premieres at a moment when Korean-language content has become a genuine global mainstream — not a niche, not a wave, but a permanent feature of how the world watches television. Within that context, a show built on one Korean man’s love for the most iconically American place imaginable is not a soft cultural footnote. It is a provocation. It asks what happens to a country’s self-image when it is seen through eyes that have every reason to be indifferent and choose instead to be devoted.

The cowboy boots go on. The energy spikes. The world, it turns out, is larger and stranger and more generous than any itinerary can contain.

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