Schools give birth to many ghost stories. Everyone’s heard the stories about the statue of the girl which cries blood every night, the ghost who walks on its hands toward the kid with the second-highest grades in the school who murdered the number-one student, and all the bodies buried under the playground. Returning for its second season on TVING, the original series Girls’ High School Mystery Class is a mystery-adventure variety show that revolves around stories set in the familiar but eerie setting of a school—more specifically, girls’ high schools, which have functioned again and again as the backdrop to so many horror movies. The show is directed by Jung Jong Yeon, who also directed The Genius and The Great Escape, and belongs to the DTCU (DaeTalChul Universe), meaning it takes place in the same fictional world as The Great Escape does.

Park Jiyoon, Jang Doyoun, Jaejae, BIBI and YENA—the five students who made up the Saera Girl’s High School mystery class in the first season of Girl’s High School Mystery Class—transfer to Taepyeong Girl’s High School after Saera High is closed down. The mystery class’ first job is to track down the culprit responsible for vandalizing the school founder’s portrait. It’s a much more involved process than in the previous season, requiring them to solve the mystery by analyzing a message written in calligraphy and the clues they discover in the library to retrace the perps’ steps. The mix of historical and contemporary issues is interesting as well: Given the school was established in 1931, ghost stories circulate about experiments that were performed on humans during the Japanese colonial era; the show also uses crimes that are frequently perpetrated against women in modern Korean society as a motif, such as in the backstory of the school administrator who was caught installing illegal cameras in the bathrooms but is still working at the school, including at night. The producers injected a heightened sense of realism into the series in the first season by creating YouTube and Instagram accounts ostensibly run by the Saera Girls’ High School students. In season two, they are going to great lengths to encourage viewers to engage with and immerse themselves in the show by fostering a community on Naver’s BAND service where anonymous users freely discuss the secrets of the Taepyong Girls’ High School students.

But the show’s best feature, and one even more important than the elaborate planning that goes into it, is that it provides women a space to vicariously experience safe and simultaneously thrilling adventures. Adventure is an opportunity rarely afforded young girls; they learn to avoid going out when it’s dark, sparsely populated spaces and strangers while at the same time grow up facing the reality that they’ll never be able to completely evade danger no matter how they try, and in the process they become further and further removed from any sense of adventure. Girls’ High School Mystery Class, however, is a world where they know no one has actually died even when a body is uncovered—one where they can believe these girls decipher codes at school late into the night and can still make it home safely. Unlike male-centric variety shows that commonly relegate their women into the marginalized role of the “single red spot,” or token woman, among an otherwise all-male cast, the show comfortably casts women with all kinds of careers and personalities, unconcerned with the fact they’re women, and those actors can in turn immerse themselves in the fictional story because they feel safe. When you’re with brave friends who are also curious jokesters, then even experiences like initiating a conversation with a scary/creepy older man or being interrogated by a detective after witnessing a murder can make for fun memories. The series leaves viewers longing to be in a club meeting, talking with their friends, the room warming up as it fills with the smell of ramyeon. BIBI’s words speak to the core of the series’ charm best: “Girls’ High School Mystery Class is the school experience I always dreamed of having.”