Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Night Shift For Cuties’ On Netflix, Where Two Convenience Store Clerks Bond,Then Become Rivals, Over Their Love Of A K-Pop Group

Night Shift For Cuties is a new Netflix comedy from Indonesia where two convenience store clerks bond over their love of a K-pop group, but the opportunity to meet the group in Seoul might make them rivals.

Opening Shot: A neon-lit convenience store at night. A female clerk hides behind a shelf when four women come in with guns. Turns out those guns just light up, and she’s in the middle of a video for the K-pop group Purple Tea.

The Gist: Muti (Shenina Cinnamon) is the one imagining being in that video as she sees a report about the group on the TV behind the counter at that store. She’s applying for a job, and the clerk there, Jenar (Nadya Syarifa), is surprised she didn’t email her application in like everyone else.

Muti gets the job when she tells the store’s owner that she appreciated how clean, efficient, and innovative the store, part of a South Korean-based chain, is. When he asks if she speaks Korean, she recites lyrics from Purple Tea’s song “B-B-Believe It.”

It’s good that she got the job, because since her father’s sudden death, she is pretty much the only income earner in her family. The roof on their house keeps springing leaks during stormy days and her brother tries to “fix” it with tape.

Jenar also loves Purple Tea; in fact she looks almost exactly like BOKI (Gabrielle Novangeline), who is the only member of the band who is from Indonesia, where Jenar and Muti live. She loves how confident BOKI is with herself, and hates the fact that her mother thinks she won’t be able to be married off because of her weight. As it is, she does seem to find the water delivery guy at the store attractive, accidentally falling into his arms when she trips. He seems enamored with her, too, but hasn’t said anything yet.

On Muti’s first day working, she and Jenar bond over their love of Purple Tea, and they even do a dance video to “B-B-Believe It” after the owner leaves for the night. Jenar encourages Muti to join the “Cuties,” which is the group’s fan club, but Muti isn’t sure she can afford it. But she ends up joining, and sees that there’s a raffle to get a ticket and meet-and-greet with the group at their big concert in Seoul. Jenar tells her she needs to buy the album to be in the raffle. They start to hatch a plan, especially because the airfare to Seoul is going to be expensive.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The colorful, poppy vibe of Night Shift For Cuties reminds us of a live-action KPop Demon Hunters… without the demons, of course.

Our Take: Night Shift For Cuties is definitely supposed to be a funny, mostly lighthearted comedy about how Muti and Jenar bond over their love of the group Purple Tea and how they scheme to not only win the raffle to meet the group in Seoul but win a free trip there, as well. At a certain point, their friendship becomes a bit of a rivalry when it seems that only one of them will be able to go and that’ll be fun to watch when the show gets to that point.

What we enjoyed most about the first episode is the hope that the shared love of this K-pop group gave both Muti and Jenar, with that sunny outlook juxtaposed with their less-than-sunny home lives. Muti has to scrape together money to keep her family safe and (mostly) dry, and Jenar is constantly reminded that she doesn’t fit the mold of a dutiful wife. Purple Tea shows them that they can be someone else, and the presence of the group seems to motivate both of them to really reach for something special.

What we do hope is that Purple Tea has more than one song, because the number of times we heard “B-B-Believe It” boggled our minds. The girls’ fandom can’t just be based on that one song, can it? Sure, it’s catchy, but the number of times we heard it in one half-hour episode was maddening.

Performance Worth Watching: The show’s stars, Shenina Cinnamon and Nadya Syarifa, have great chemistry with each other and are pretty good dancers, too.

Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: The new friends see a stand-up display about a contest offering a trip to Korea as it’s brought into the store.

Sleeper Star: We really liked the set design of the store, especially contrasted with the girls’ home lives. Kudos to the design team for that.

Most Pilot-y Line: We swear, if the only song we hear the whole season is “B-B-Believe It,” we’ll scream.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Night Shift For Cuties is a fun show about friendship and colorful K-pop bands. It’s mostly cotton-candy-TV, but there’s nothing wrong with a little cotton candy, right?

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.