Episode 376 of “Now on My Way to Meet You” aired in late February, three days after the second summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Labeled a “special feature,” it began on the streets of Hanoi, a rare on-location shoot. One of the show’s two hosts, the genial comedian Nam Hee-seok, stood behind a police barricade with 30-year-old Shin Eun-ha, perhaps the most well known of the South Korean variety show’s recurring personalities, waiting for the arrival of Kim in an armored limousine. They were surrounded by reporters and gawkers holding up cellphone cameras to the North Korean entourage. When Kim’s limo appeared, Shin loudly, tearfully called out a plea: “Sir, please help me get back home! Please help me get back home!”

Shin is no acolyte of Kim or his Workers’ Party. She is a talbukja — a defector to South Korea from the North — and what she longs for is to see her hometown again and to be able to occasionally cross the Demilitarized Zone. This vision of a comparatively open border and some freedom of travel is increasingly what is meant on the Korean Peninsula by “reunification.” There has been talk of normalized relations and corporate exchange, and Seoul has even floated the notion of a European Union-style confederation. Literal reunification, defined as the abrupt political merger of the two Koreas, has mostly passed into a prelapsarian dream of peace activists.

When it had its premiere in 2011, “Now on My Way to Meet You” was a tear-jerking reunion program featuring families separated by the Korean War, but before the show had a chance to reunite anyone, it underwent a transformation. The way the producers tell it, in their scramble to recruit separated families, they kept running into a new generation of defectors. So they made the rather canny decision to reorient their show around appealing young women, whom they took to calling “defector beauties.” The show’s on-location backdrops of humble homes and noodle restaurants gave way to a glitzy game-show-type set, and estranged septuagenarians were replaced with girlish defectors. Pretty soon, the only thing left of the original program was its name and the desire for reunion. A typical 90-minute episode might veer wildly from a report on rice shortages to a joke about face cream. The aesthetic is loud and frenetic, featuring sound effects and cartoon thought bubbles. At center stage sit a dozen guests, many of them women in short, colorful dresses, their legs all canted in the same direction. The two hosts engage the group in rapid-fire patter, while an all-male panel of B-list celebrities called the South 4 tosses out oohs, aahs and sexual innuendo.