m5m

I stumbled upon this drama almost by accident and I'm so glad I did. This drama is so under-the-radar but was a truly great show. It featured the two most important aspects of a great show: (1) Really solid, mature script that doesn't treat the viewers like idiots. And (2) two really truly amazing actors as leads. Peng Xiao Ran and Jin Han both absolutely nailed their respective roles and were absolutely compelling both as a couple and in their solo parts of the story. This story manages to avoid most of the major annoying drama plot tropes. No long contrived 'misunderstandings'. And no contrived love triangle. Yes, there are three other men interested in and professing to like the FL. But it's never in doubt for a second that Jiu Ling's only true love was Zhu Zan and you never have a doubt that he is the one she was going to be with eventually So not a lot of time is wasted on fluffing up any of the other relationships to try to fool the audience. Instead, while the story did use those other men as important plot elements, the story put its time and energy in simply telling a good story that had strong plot contributions from multiple characters but focused mainly on the two leads. And boy did the two leads deliver, as two characters who were so well matched and complementary.

If the show had a weakness, it was that it obviously could have used a bigger budget for production costs. A few parts of the story really cried out for bigger budget production. One scene was exemplary of this: In one episode there is a scene with some 10s of thousands of people and soldiers waiting outside the city walls when they all spontaneously kowtow in their appeal for the gates to be opened. This could have been a visually epic scene with a camera pull-back showing the wave of people dropping into kowtow. But unfortunately, the scene was implemented only in close shots with just a few dozen people. There were other scenes throughout that similarly could have been more visually impactful with a bigger budget for either more resources or more visual effects.

But that's nitpicking. The scenes still worked fine for story purposes. And the story overall was so strong that I almost feel guilty for quibbling. I'm really glad I stumbled into watching this show.