The first in this year's HIStory series, Trapped, is sexy and sweet and fun as a romance but struggles as an action drama.

Meng Shao Fei (Jake Hsu) is a cop who has spent the last four years chasing gangster Tang Yi (Chris Wu). Tang Yi is trying to go straight to fulfil his late mentor/ father figure’s wishes. While he seems to be in charge of his organisation, there are rumours that not everybody is happy. However, Meng Shao Fei doesn’t seem that interested in Tang Yi’s criminal activities: he mostly wants to know what happened during an incident four years previously when his Sunbae was killed. After playing a cat and mouse game for four years, Meng Shao Fei and Tang Yi are probably too aware of each other for their own good. So when fate throws them together a few times, sparks fly.

As a BL premise, this a pretty good one. Meng Shao Fei’s dogged – almost obsessive – pursuit of Tang Yi translates pretty well as an analogy for a romantic pursuit. Whether Shao Fei wants justice, the truth, or Tang Yi’s hot bod is something even he seems confused about from early on. It shows a laudable kind of emotional honesty that, when Shao Fei finally realises his feelings, he pursues them with the same persistence with which he pursued the original case. He will get his man, it seems, even if he’s been in denial as to what he wants him for. After all, he’s a cop and Tang Yi is a gangster.

And therein, unfortunately, lies the show's problem. The writers simply don't understand the action genre and are not capable of grappling with the ethical issues at the heart of this relationship. From the beginning, the characters seem to be pasted in from a different show; one where cops are adorable and incompetent and nobody cares that one of them has completely compromised all their unit's ongoing investigations. The action elements are not used well or written well and the writers clearly struggle with a genre they don't know how to write.

It says something about the HIStory series that I stayed shipping the main couple even as it became clear that their relationship would not work (in the real world, this of course is a clear fiction). There is a lot of chemistry here - so much so the writers copped an unfortunate amount of flak over skipping a scene where that chemistry... culminated (and then quickly threw their audience a bone - literally as it turns out).

I can admire the writers' ambition as they try to write a much-longer series in a genre they're unfamiliar with. But, unfortunately, their execution has failed to match that ambition even if the series still produces consistently-good BL stories that are far above anything else on offer today.

By all means watch and enjoy but temper your expectations about the show's plotting. It does fall short.

Watch it for the romance instead.