Lee Seo-jin wanting to retire in Dallas may be the funniest running premise on Netflix this month, partly because the show treats it with almost suspicious sincerity. Ready or Not: Texas sends Lee, producer Nah Yung-suk, and a camera-ready crew across Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin for six episodes of Korean variety tourism, cowboy cosplay, barbecue awe, and business-minded sightseeing.
The series sells itself as loosely planned, which is true only if “loosely planned” includes pre-cleared stadium tours, office visits, barbecue stops, and camera-friendly attractions waiting at the next exit. The trick is that the planning rarely kills the fun. Lee and Nah behave like men who know the itinerary exists and still expect Texas to surprise them every ten minutes. That is a useful skill in a travel show. So is a high tolerance for giant meat.
The Buddy Comedy Drives the Van
The series finds its rhythm before Texas really gets a chance. After landing at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, Lee realizes he has left a bag with his passport and other materials behind, right after pushing the van toward CVS for supplements. Nah does what any good friend and television producer would do: he helps, then never lets the moment die.
That friendship is the show’s safest engine. Lee and Nah tease each other through cowboy shopping, boot fittings, hat choices, and the kind of tourist embarrassment that becomes easier once a whole crew is laughing with you.
The Fort Worth sequence has them entering Wrangler and M.L. Leddy’s with the seriousness of men preparing for a role, then leaving in outfits that look like Texas filtered through airport gift-shop confidence. Lee’s Whataburger denim vest, covered in patches, is the kind of wardrobe decision that should require a waiver.
The production’s lo-fi style helps here. Phones, action cameras, crew chatter, and casual framing give the show a scruffy closeness. It does not always look good. Some shots have the flattened, overworked texture of footage stretched past its comfort zone. Yet the roughness keeps the trip from feeling too packaged. A cleaner version might have looked richer and felt poorer.
Beef Ribs, Beer Goblets, and Gravy Soup
Food gives Ready or Not: Texas its easiest cultural comedy because everyone understands hunger, and almost nobody understands Texas portion sizes until the plate arrives. The group’s stop at Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que works because it lets the show process Texas through pure sensory escalation: beef ribs, brisket, sausage, smoke, giant beer goblets, Shiner Bock, Modelo, and the quiet realization that barbecue here is less a meal than a livestock negotiation.
Nah getting tipsy after the oversized beer gives the editors an excuse to deploy the sound effects and on-screen graphics familiar from East Asian variety shows. Those flourishes can grate, especially when the joke is already clear. Still, the best moments need little help.
A takeout breakfast turns biscuits and gravy into accidental soup, and the mistake is funny because nobody is trying to win the culture exchange. They simply look at a container of gravy and make the most logical wrong choice.
The shooting range sequence is sharper than expected. Lee avoids turning himself into a visitor judging another country’s laws, then still compares gun access in Texas with South Korea’s much tighter restrictions. The show steps close to politics, peeks over the fence, and backs away before anyone has to change the tone music. Careful? Yes. Cowardly? Not quite. This is a vacation, not a congressional hearing.
Dallas Gets the Best Edit
Dallas and Fort Worth receive the most textured stretch because the show lets them be both myth and place. The Stockyards provide longhorns, cowboy gear, barbecue, and all the imagery international viewers expect. Then Carrollton gives the trip a different Texas, with Asian restaurants and communities that complicate the cowboy postcard without scolding it.
AT&T Stadium, naturally, arrives like a cathedral with a merch store. The crew walks the field, tours Cowboys history, and absorbs football as a civic language. The show is less interested in the Cowboys as a team than in the scale of the ritual around them. That makes sense. Texas football often looks absurd from the outside because it is absurd from fairly close up too.
Houston gets a thinner deal. NASA is a strong stop, and the Space Center material gives the city a clean identity marker, but the series shrinks Houston into “Space City” so efficiently that whole parts of the city vanish. Its rap history, immigrant communities, food range, and dense cultural map barely register. Smoothie King headquarters gets screen time; Houston’s pulse gets a postcard. There is probably a business lesson in there for Lee. There is definitely a pacing issue for the show.
Austin Arrives Late
Austin enters in the finale, and the shift is immediate. The series reads the city as younger, faster, and pulled toward the University of Texas, student life, and tech money. That impression is not wrong, but it is thin by nature because Austin gets the least room to breathe.
The Tex-Mex stop is the most obvious miss. Choosing a polished, tourist-friendly restaurant gives the crew a safe meal and the show a weak cultural read. Tex-Mex is treated too much like a menu category floating free from Tejano roots, which leaves a strange absence in a series trying to understand Texas through food and daily life.
That absence grows larger when San Antonio never arrives. A trip that wants Texas identity could have used the Spurs, Fiesta, Mexican-American history, and a food culture that would have corrected the Austin misstep in one plate. Ready or Not: Texas is warm, funny, and easy to like, but its map has a very visible blank space.
The show still proves its concept: put Lee Seo-jin and Nah Yung-suk in a van, give them beef ribs, boots, and one questionable office tour, and they will find a joke before the next exit.
The South Korean travel reality series Ready or Not: Texas premiered its complete first season globally for digital streaming on Netflix on March 24, 2026. Audiences looking for the unscripted show can find all six episodes available to watch exclusively on the platform. The lo-fi, adventurous production follows actor Lee Seo-jin, star producer Na Young-suk, and their crew as they embark on a spontaneous road trip across Texas, exploring the unique culture, diverse culinary scenes, local traditions, and humorous tourist mishaps completely without a script.
Where to Watch Ready or Not: Texas Online
Full Credits
Title: Ready or Not: Texas
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: March 24, 2026
Rating: TV-14
Running time: 32–37 minutes per episode
Director: Kim Ye-seul, Na Young-suk
Writers: Na Young-suk, Kim Dae-joo, Lee Woo-jung
Producers and Executive Producers: egg is coming
Cast: Lee Seo-jin, Na Young-suk
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Netflix Production Crew
Editors: Netflix Post-Production Team
Composer: Netflix Music Team
The Review
Ready or Not: Texas
Ready or Not: Texas works because Lee Seo-jin and Nah Yung-suk treat Texas like a theme park, a retirement plan, and a buddy-comedy set all at once. The show’s lo-fi look can feel flimsy, and Houston gets shortchanged badly, but the teasing, the barbecue shock, the cowboy cosplay, and the biscuits-and-gravy confusion give it an easy comic rhythm. It needed San Antonio. It still has enough charm to make six episodes feel like a vacation you accidentally joined.
PROS
- Easy lead chemistry
- Funny cultural mix-ups
- Strong Dallas and Fort Worth stretch
- Crew becomes part of the fun
- Warm tourist energy
CONS
- Houston feels thin
- Austin arrives too late
- Tex-Mex coverage misses Tejano roots
- Lo-fi visuals look cheap
- “Unplanned” label feels stretched
