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New Faces, But This Time They’re All Actors
On the evening of July 30, a sea squirt farm rose out of the water off Tongyeong, and four faces went stiff at the same time. Kang Yu-seok and Roh Yoon-seo, who’d shown up thinking they were there for a poster shoot, found themselves in work clothes on a boat before they knew what hit them. Yeom Jung-ah and Kim Sun-young, meanwhile, were learning how to separate and clean sea squirts for the first time. The opening scene of tvN’s “Fresh of the Sea 3” wasn’t the polished reaction shot you’d expect from seasoned variety regulars — it was closer to four actors genuinely thrown by labor they’d never done. And that awkwardness, it turns out, might be this season’s biggest casting decision.
Season 3 kept only Yeom Jung-ah from the original lineup and brought in Kim Sun-young, Kang Yu-seok, and Roh Yoon-seo as the new family. All four are actors best known for drama and film work, not variety television. The producers are calling them a “real family of four siblings,” but a label like that doesn’t complete itself just by being announced. These are people who don’t know each other’s habits, aren’t used to sea work, and haven’t calculated how to be funny on camera — and somehow they still have to sit down at the same table and slowly build something like a relationship. That first-day air might be exactly what variety producers are chasing when they cast actors these days.
The Show Kept Going, But It Didn’t Lean on the Familiar
“Fresh of the Sea” has run since its first season in 2024, built around the premise of pairing coastal village labor with seasonal ingredients. Across Season 2 and a spinoff, Yeom Jung-ah’s image as “Captain Yeom” — the one leading the cooking, the household chores, the on-site direction — became sharply defined for viewers. A long-running variety show needs an anchor like that. Swap out the entire cast and the show’s memory snaps along with it; keep everyone and the audience loses a reason to look forward to the next season.
That’s what makes Season 3’s choice interesting. It kept the familiar anchor in Yeom Jung-ah, then blew up the other three seats entirely. Instead of swapping members in gradually the way the previous season did, the show rebuilt the pace of these relationships completely from zero. Kim Sun-young was cast as the second sibling who holds nothing back, physically or verbally. Kang Yu-seok is the third sibling with too many things he wants to try. Roh Yoon-seo is the relentlessly positive youngest. But none of those character tags ended up pre-determining who they actually turned out to be on screen. What came through more in the premiere was each of them learning to handle sea squirts, getting tired, talking to each other, and finding their own footing in their own way.
The Charm of Casting Actors Is an Imperfect First Day
Cast members with heavy variety experience read a shoot’s rhythm fast. Ask them a question and they build a story on the spot; hit a quiet moment and they drop a joke; turn a strange situation into a broadcast-ready beat without missing a step. That skill is genuinely valuable. But when the audience already knows a star’s character inside and out, the reactions can start to feel a little predictable. Actors dropped into a long-running reality format go the opposite direction — you start to see the grain of their actual daily life pulling apart from the character they play on screen. A small habit sticks in memory before a well-written line does.
Kim Sun-young talking nonstop through exhausting physical work, with Yeom Jung-ah teasing her for sounding scripted, is exactly that kind of moment. Roh Yoon-seo made her first impression by picking up the cleaning technique fast; Kang Yu-seok made his by cranking his energy up on the boat. This isn’t really a contest over who’s funniest — it’s closer to watching how each person finds their own rhythm inside an uncomfortable environment. When actors who built their reputations on heavyweight drama scenes get clumsy in front of seasonal seafood, the gap itself is what the audience ends up enjoying.
Tongyeong’s Sea Squirts Aren’t Scenery — They’re What Moves the Relationships
This is also where the show separates itself from a typical travel variety format. The first order of business in Tongyeong wasn’t a vacation built around scenery and good restaurants — it was hands-on labor at a sea squirt farm. The cast rode a boat out to the farm, hauled up the loaded gear, separated and cleaned the sea squirts, then carried the catch to the table. Because they had to get through unfamiliar work together, the cast naturally ended up sizing up each other’s pace and stamina. That’s a much faster way to build trust than repeating “we’re family” out loud.
For international viewers, sea squirt might be a particularly unfamiliar ingredient. In Korea, it’s eaten as a strong-smelling seasonal seafood, but the process of cleaning it at the source, grilling it, or dropping it into doenjang stew can look pretty different from the more familiar image of Korean food. Rather than explaining that unfamiliarity through a long voiceover, “Fresh of the Sea 3” lets it come through in the cast’s reactions instead. The smell of the sea, the texture left on your hands, and the meal that finally arrives after a punishing shift all land together, so the connection between food, place, and people forms on its own.
This Summer, What Viewers Are Watching Is How Fast the New Cast Adjusts
Casting actors doesn’t automatically guarantee a hit. Bringing in someone with a lot of buzz is one thing; building a lived-in rhythm across dozens of episodes is another. In season-based variety shows specifically, new members can feel unfamiliar to existing fans, and producers can’t afford to just coast on an actor’s existing image from their film and drama work. So the real question for Season 3 probably isn’t who generates the most buzz — it’s how genuinely comfortable these four people actually get with each other. Kim Sun-young’s unfiltered talk, Kang Yu-seok’s restless energy, Roh Yoon-seo’s quiet focus, and Yeom Jung-ah holding the center — how those four things blend together over time is worth watching closely.
tvN has scheduled “Fresh of the Sea 3” for Thursdays at 8:40 p.m. The next episode previews the cast’s first night in Tongyeong, a rock-wall seaweed harvest in Geoje, and a surprise appearance from actor Park Hae-jun. Season 3 doesn’t hide the fact that it has no career variety performers in its lineup — instead, it’s using the actors’ genuine awkwardness in unfamiliar territory as the starting point for its story. Whether the clumsiness of that first day handling sea squirts turns into something that actually feels like family a few weeks from now is, this summer, the most entertaining thing to watch for.
Source: tvN “Fresh of the Sea 3” official site and Episodes 1–2 previews, July–August 2026; Yonhap News Agency, July 2, 2026; Newsis, July 2, 2026; OSEN, July 30, 2026.
