MyLangyaList

Frivolities at Qingming Festival

--Summary--
If you like costume CDramas, this may be a unique gem worth checking out, especially since it will deliver much better production and acting compared to idol costume dramas. If you are pretty frustrated with costume dramas already, this may not be the canary in the coalmine, but still worth checking out for at least a few episodes to make your mind.

‒Review‒
After so many highly anticipated costume drama disappointments and derivative offerings, I was really looking forward to this one to save the costume dramas in 2024. Alas, it's not the case. Maybe with the exception of Strange Tales 2, which I'm not that confident about since Strange Tales 1 was a drudgery, 2024 costume drama lineup may end up suffering total annihilation, 全军覆没. The Great Nobody is great, but that's really a modern workplace comedy. Heroes would be the other one, but that's late Qing, I mean, they have guns.

To be fair, this show is serviceable, hence the 7.0 rating. The sets, costumes, and production is gorgeous and meticulously shot. The veteran cast are so much better than the typical idols you see, even if some of the dialogs and lines can feel a little too modern. I'm liking it a bit more than Strange Tales, which produced more frustrations. Maybe I would have watched this to the end at the beginning of the year, when other terrific shows are not beckoning. But after 9 episodes, it's giving a clear signal on what level it's aiming for, and its target is just not ambitious, original, or engaging enough. There's no clearer indication than sprinkling some frivolities into the show for cheap laughs and entertainment. I'm sure quite a lot of people enjoy this, and that's why the writers keep doing it. But so much of the chore-like 家长里短 humor deliver neither insightful observations nor laughs. Had the setting been changed to modern day, I'm sure such boring and antiquated plots would be fervently lambasted. This is the Chinese version of Marvel movies humor / heart, that after seeing a few, you've basically seen it all. No matter what kind of new coloring, flavoring, or molding they use to sell it to you, it's still the same regurgitation that's been puked out many times over.

There's been too many dramas this year taking this route (furiously glaring at you Joy of Life 2) and this hasn't been a recent phenomenon (Advisors Alliance and GTRD). This race to the common denominator may get viewership, but is never going to produce outstanding, memorable works. Who knew CDramas would get me quoting Coco Chanel: elegance is refusal. Unless you refuse to serve slop, you are just telling me your max target is just above average quality, regardless of how good the production looks and how strong the cast lineup is. And as bad as I feel about giving it a 7 despite the expensive production, I'm still left wondering if 7 is too generous.

Most people should still check this out though, as a lot of the criticisms will not be relevant for international audiences. And I'm quite a harsh rater by MDL standards.

‒Category Ratings‒

- Overall - 7
- Plot - 7
- Theme / Concept / Impact - 7
- Acting - 8.5
- Visuals - 8.8
- Audio / Music - 8
- Rewatch - 6
- Cultural/Topical Accessibility - 7.5
- Subtitle quality - 8

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Too Buggy to Swallow

‒Overview‒

Lost in the Shadows is a crime/suspense drama featuring quality production and acting that one has come to love about the iQiyi's 'Light On' series and similar lineups of crime thrillers from Youku and Tencent. However, despite featuring one of the best actors in Zhang Songwen and an interesting setup about missing children, the buggy script became increasingly untenable, just like the lies told by criminals.

On the positive side, the aforementioned production, acting, and pacing from short episode count is a major upgrade from idol dramas. The show also features a reunion of The Bad Kids stars in Zhang Songwen and Rong Zishan. There's also enough twists and turns to create interest, so long as it's not examined closely. And unfortunately for Zhang Songwen, this is probably his best drama since his career-defining performance in The Knockout, besting other mediocrities like 'A Lonely Hero's Journey' and 'The Hunter'. Let's stop wasting this man's career.

‒Critical Review (spoilers)‒

LITS became increasingly frustrating because of the increasing amount of bugs and lack of nourishment to sustain interest. Bugs is a popular and catchy Chinglish term commonly used in China to refer to plot holes. The expression was likely born out of wordplay related to software programmers, as they often have to wrangle with buggy scripts. LITS suffered from bugs ranging from small to huge, and most critically, it didn't deliver enough sustenance to make the bugs more palatable. It's like walking into a restaurant where each dish contains increasingly bigger bugs, then some artificial tasting dish that you suspect is just to cover up the bug flavor, but never the delicious course that will mollify your insect encounters (yes if the food is delicious enough, Chinese people will delulu themselves over the questionable sanitation, and even not fret too much about a bug or two).

For appetizers, let's start with the small bugs, which are more prevalent than usual. These consist of convenient occurrences and puzzling oversight that nonetheless are not the core of the story. Most shows have some of those, and I can easily overlook them if the story is engaging and the major plot lines does not revolve around it. Some examples include: people bumping into people or overhearing conversation at the most opportune time, people out and about doing things undetected especially if they are under surveillance, people divulging way too much info at convenient times, and the good guys showing up just in time to save people. There are too many to list the specific examples. *No problem, all restaurants have some bugs, some just hide it better than others.

Now for the main course‒big glaring bugs that really arouses your gag reflex, the types of bugs that significantly degrade the viewing experience. First are the big bugs of characterization. Bian Jie (Xiao Qi) is the most important character in the story, yet often times he's as hollow as a plot tool (工具人). Other than a few flashbacks, XQ's first 18 years is essentially empty. And it's difficult to construct a coherent character for XQ that satisfies his life experiences and his actions and emotions as the fake son of the Bian family. If he's so sweet and innocent as portrayed, how does he survive all those years under human trafficker Uncle Qing. Moreover, he should have exhibited much greater and different emotional reaction once taken in. Other characters, including other members of the Bian family, exhibit similar incongruencies.

The second major bug is the bug of nonsensical decision making on key plot points. It makes no sense for XQ to stay to protect his fake Mom from JMF, when he already thinks JMF might try to kill him, when he should go to the police. Neither is making it a priority to take down Uncle Qing, when he just escaped as a fugitive, and only for it to go nowhere. Or the numerous other similar plot sins committed by him and other characters. The police not directly tracking down Uncle Qing's gang to prove XQ's innocence, but having it occur incidentally. Yanzi thinking her younger bro could be alive even though he 'ran away' from Dad despite collapsing in a pool of blood of a hole to the back of his head, and returning without remembering any details. The boys going murderous over shower pics. The ridiculous ways Jin Manfu went about the murder, coverups, kidnapping, blackmail, and trying to rescue Yanzi. The story was already a hazmat level roach infestation even before the bug-out finale that was a fetid corpse of cop-out, fake-out, and proper-ganda. *Seems like you vomited quite a bit, did you at least have something nutritious to puke out?

Unfortunately no. While the acting, production, and faint hint of something promising kept me engaged for half of the show, the later episodes became an increasingly frustrating 3X watch as it became apparent the script was beyond saving. But even before the show turned rancid, I was experiencing a glaring disconnect with the characters. The problem was the show didn't give you anyone fully fleshed out, didn't show you why their relationships were so important, and didn't give you anyone to fully care about. All the main characters were hollow shells barely held together by scarce flashbacks, and summarizing instead of showing. At the same time, you are fed plenty of clues to potentially doubt the story and sincerity of all the characters, ensuring full-on social distancing. When some more flashbacks are shown in the later parts of the story, it was way too little, and way too late. The way you are supposed to do it is to build up the characters first, make the protagonists/villains sympathetic, and then create compelling twists by subverting or overturning expectations. 'Interlaced Scenes' and 'The First Shot' are dramas where it's much better executed Since LITS never established the characters before playing around with them, all their motivations felt hollow and perfunctory, making all the aforementioned bugs even more intolerable.

So the good parts amounted to a cryptic restaurant advertisement for alternative organic delicacies, that turned out to be plates of bugs. At least it was a quick meal 🙂. Overall I rate it a 6, because at least it has good acting and production unlike idol drama triple threats. It started out an 8 before I figured out the mystery dish had bugs, then held at 7 for about half the show. Then the later episodes were a 6. That's not taking into account the ending, as I was already fully passed out from all the puking.

--Category Ratings--

- Overall - 6
- Plot - 5.5
- Theme / Concept / Impact - 7.5
- Acting - 8.5
- Visuals - 8
- Audio / Music - 7.5 (mostly live recording)
- Rewatch - 5
- Accessibility - 7.5
- Subtitle quality - 8.5

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Never Give Laugh

‒Exec Summary‒
Couldn't muster more than 3 seconds of cumulative laughter for the 6 episodes I tried. But the episodes are short, and you don't need to pay attention to plot for sitcom, so if you find the humor, more power to you.

--Short Review--
This is an office sitcom modeled after the hit kdrama Gauss Electronics. The story revolves around the various employees at a Chinese conglomerate Gaofa and reflects some of common complaints and peculiarities of the urban Chinese office. I haven't watched the kdrama so I couldn't make a comparison between the two. Unfortunately, by failing to deliver even a charitable chuckle, I suspect that this drama failed the only comparison that matters.

Other than the comedy part of the sitcom, the drama provided your standard idol web drama quality in cinematography and production value. The acting was adequate, with Dylan Wang and Yukee Chen as the main leads. Perhaps I'm being too harsh or too divorced from the Chinese workplace culture since the drama did receive an perplexingly high 8.1 score on Douban. But it's not like the show was layering the dialog with frequent word plays or internet memes. Rather, it was just an endless assembly line of haphazard setups, milquetoast punchlines, and tepid characters. While the show misfires with its jokes about workplace drudgery, it nevertheless achieves mastery for atmospheric immersion‒by creating a viewing experience that feels like a marathon day of pointless meetings. Perhaps the experience is especially underwhelming for me as sitcoms are what American TV excels at and for whatever reasons, China produces very few. But my goodness, this show feels like a hatchet script from the dysfunctional Planning Department of Gaofa.

‒Why Watch‒
1) You want to cure your unhealthy obsession with Dylan Wang and Yukee Chen (assuming she has fans)‒this show might just do the trick.
2) You want something quick and easy. Only 25m episodes of concentrated boredom in sitcom format.
3) You need some guinea pigs to hone your review writing, so you end up writing a mediocre review for a mediocre show.

--Rating Subscores--
- Overall - 5
- Plot - 5
- Theme / Message / Impact - 5
- Acting - 6
- Visual & Production - 6.5
- Audio - 6
- Rewatch - 5
- Accessibility - 8 (yay at least crappy shows generally are more accessible)
- Subtitle quality - 7

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