luckz

Having seen them numerous times, the actors are far more imposing & memorable in some of their other roles.
They're not bad ("pretty") actors.

The fight scenes earlier were better than the weirder ones in the last like 20%.
Some even got confused as to what genre they were filming.
And with the action scenes, it's a bit too obvious where it's Bai Lu and where it's not. Somehow less of a problem with the various (substantially) older men.

They don't really have romantic chemistry, so don't watch it for that.
The second couple is a bit better, but again, very few scenes that could as well have been cut out of the plot.

This isn't a romance drama. Cutting out the kisses wouldn't make it worse.

MDL picture changes always are the opposite of improvement :(

Seems to be free on Viki? https://www.viki.com/tv/39099c-when-i-see-your-face

What stood out to me was how the impoverished families commonly only had meat once in a million years, but once a guest was to be impressed, suddenly five different meats appeared.

And yes, I dunno about CN politics but I'd assume being substantially critical of Chairman Meow's wonderland is still not really en vogue?

Due to how manipulative and scheming she was, I kinda found Ling Yi worse than Feng Lin.

However, what really stood out was that only females got this sort of karma punishment in this show. Basically the opposite of how Glory or The Glory only go after male villains.

Lin Song in particular is all sorts of evil and horrible, and he gets some oh-but-now-he-is-less-hateful "redemption arc".

How come only episode 5 has a special bonus scene after the episode ends, pre-credits?

my rating is: LBL > TBT > SoM
that's in terms of actors, enjoyment, & overall

SoM has a bit better production and better-but-still-bad OST vs TBT

For me it's kind of the other way around: the first few episodes of this are great, then nothing happens for a solid ten+ eps, then once the leads get together it's a really nice show again.

I've been watching The Best Thing afterwards, and the cute cute scenes have a far higher incidence rate here.

It's also not *that* type of triangle that is just unpleasant to watch.

The SML himself is not Su Rongqing levels of unbearable/evil/annoying.
He just has too much screentime and too many reappearances.

Maybe I've watched too many other shows recently that have particular outstanding qualities not found here.
Maybe when I go into a drama with big expectations, I always get disappointed.
Or maybe when it's Gu Man, I see various Gu Man things that I'm not the biggest fan of (China #1: either China goes to Mars or develops leading hightech breakthroughs or whatever, patriotic Chinese researchers are leading the field in other countries but return to China to advance their homeland, the Chinese government has oh-so-many initiatives that are oh-so-perfect, and some snide remarks that white people food is inedible and inferior unless it's a sponsor in the show), or how she covers at least three industries... but that brings me to my actual complaint.

For me, Shine On Me has too much quantity over quality.

Recently I've felt a bit underwhelmed by how few songs My Page In The 90s makes do with (3-4). Meanwhile, Shine On Me has 17 songs (seventeen!!!). Of those, I like about... one and a half. Even the Liu Yu Ning song is in the bottom third of Liu Yu Ning songs. It's played exactly once, and then thrown in once more at the very end when the producers realize they paid for a lot of songs so they might as well use them all again. Chen Xue Ran this is not.

Character-wise, the quantity onslaught starts with her college roommates in the first episode. For some reason, she doesn't have the standard assignment of four girls in one room, but we instead get six. Then for an extra flimsy reason, they're 'paired' with a room of another six guys. At work, a female lead in a drama is guaranteed one best friend by law, but this one has at least three of them.

We have a mostly useless SML. After he served his purpose, he still gets a decent *quantity* of appearances. But not only that, he also gets a whole boatload of own side characters. They all have names, they all get scenes. But it's so low-effort that two girls with no differentiating features are called 'Min' and 'Mia'.

Even the (fortunately largely ineffective) villains come in groups. Typically they're delivered as a set of three. I find it a bit problematic how the show propagates the idea that the children of selfish and mean people are themselves bound to be bad human beings, but this is going too far off topic.

Other than the FL's cousin Jiang Rui, who stood out in some way in nearly all of his scenes, none of the side characters in SOM were consistently good / entertaining. A bunch had their moments, like particular small mini arcs or scenes in which they stood out, but ... I just came from rewatching another show after two years where all (!) the side characters had stayed somewhat memorable and felt much more like real people than random characters. It doesn't help that Gu Man or the other screenwriter sometimes override some random character's personality and literally just put words into their mouth to replace having a narrator.

I'm still not sure if I find Shine On Me a bit meh because my other recent shows just had *cuter* cute scenes of the leads being cute together, or all the other stuff in-between just wore me down.

My understanding was that she was actually introduced to him (and various other people) at the party, by the mutual friend character who calls ML Vincent.

But there's no scene for it in the show.

What he wants: Mostly to wallow in self-pity and blame others. It's what all the villains here do.

He feels he is owed some free pass where NXG has to try to win him over until the end of her days, no matter how poorly he treats her himself. The end.

Not mentioned in the comments above:

Also, he has to process that she never noticed him at that party, and thus his "commitment" to her in the time before they became workmates was entirely one-sided.

So he not only loses the connection to her that he got injured when he dropped everything to rush to see her in another city (since that was a lie), but also lost the let's say security from her being attracted to him at first sight.

You can easily just read some extra snippets after TTEOTM to see it as a "ok but later on it's all happy" thing. MDL has a lot of resources (links & writeups).

(I'm not really sure about the chemistry in that last example but the two leads are definitely comfortable with each other to a tongue-deep level.)

I wouldn't rate the chemistry beyond "okayish", it's not Speed and Love or Love between Lines or *cough* Affinity *cough*.