TheUnhinged
so-called Australia
Took me FIVE YEARS to slog through this drama
In the time it has taken me to scrape and crawl through this drama I have:
– Lived through 5 Covid lockdowns
– Changed jobs 4 times
– Moved house 3 times
– Learnt 2 semesters of Mandarin, and
– Breathed the 1 biggest sigh of relief when I reached the credits of the final episode.
Class dynamics, who even is she? I'm a hard agree with Graeme Smith who describes this version of Meteor Garden as "unwatchable". In his article for The Interpreter, he says, "A drama about class divisions set in present-day China – where class divisions aren’t up for discussion – was never going to work."
It's true. Everyone in the series looks like they're acting in a laundry commercial. The sets are sparkly clean, all the actors have amazing teeth, and there is no way Shancai would be able to survive off the occasional shift she does at the bubble tea store.
By removing the class tensions that drove the Taiwanese version (and that was still relatively sanitised – it is a soap opera, after all), the creators gutted the life out of the drama.
It's also just hella boring. I felt no chemistry in any of the romantic relationships. I didn't particularly care about anyone's fate. And I say this as someone who *loves* championing an underdog. But because the class divisions "aren't up for discussion", Shancai isn't really an underdog. And so I found it hard to care much about her so-called struggles.
It got to the point where I was using diversions to keep myself watching. One fun game was tracking the disappearances and re-appearances of Daoming Si's earring/s. It was like playing Spotto with continuity errors.
For the sake of pushing through the last dozen episodes, I put the playback on 1.5x speed (as fast as Netflix would let me), which added an unintended comedic element. It also demonstrated how much screen time went to waste.
However, I'm going to be reeeeeally nice and end on a couple of (backhanded) positives. I did appreciate the music covers and the cameos from the Taiwanese version (but this is nostalgia and should be attributed to the 2001 series). I did also enjoy bits of Darren Chen's performance as Huaze Lei. He made the character seem almost complex, particularly in comparison to the cardboard cutouts that accompanied him on screen.
– Lived through 5 Covid lockdowns
– Changed jobs 4 times
– Moved house 3 times
– Learnt 2 semesters of Mandarin, and
– Breathed the 1 biggest sigh of relief when I reached the credits of the final episode.
Class dynamics, who even is she? I'm a hard agree with Graeme Smith who describes this version of Meteor Garden as "unwatchable". In his article for The Interpreter, he says, "A drama about class divisions set in present-day China – where class divisions aren’t up for discussion – was never going to work."
It's true. Everyone in the series looks like they're acting in a laundry commercial. The sets are sparkly clean, all the actors have amazing teeth, and there is no way Shancai would be able to survive off the occasional shift she does at the bubble tea store.
By removing the class tensions that drove the Taiwanese version (and that was still relatively sanitised – it is a soap opera, after all), the creators gutted the life out of the drama.
It's also just hella boring. I felt no chemistry in any of the romantic relationships. I didn't particularly care about anyone's fate. And I say this as someone who *loves* championing an underdog. But because the class divisions "aren't up for discussion", Shancai isn't really an underdog. And so I found it hard to care much about her so-called struggles.
It got to the point where I was using diversions to keep myself watching. One fun game was tracking the disappearances and re-appearances of Daoming Si's earring/s. It was like playing Spotto with continuity errors.
For the sake of pushing through the last dozen episodes, I put the playback on 1.5x speed (as fast as Netflix would let me), which added an unintended comedic element. It also demonstrated how much screen time went to waste.
However, I'm going to be reeeeeally nice and end on a couple of (backhanded) positives. I did appreciate the music covers and the cameos from the Taiwanese version (but this is nostalgia and should be attributed to the 2001 series). I did also enjoy bits of Darren Chen's performance as Huaze Lei. He made the character seem almost complex, particularly in comparison to the cardboard cutouts that accompanied him on screen.
Was this review helpful to you?
