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Dine with Love chinese drama review
Dropped 10/16
Dine with Love
1 people found this review helpful
by ctechperson
Jul 4, 2022
10 of 16 episodes seen
Dropped
Overall 4.0
Story 4.0
Acting/Cast 6.0
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 1.0

Great start that crashed and burned

I love both Gao HanYu and Jade Cheng. I love food flicks, and the focus on food as a heart-of-the-family was amazing; Recipes that could be repeated.

Episode one was everything I could have hoped for. ML notices all the social cues he should. FL is competent and capable at work, while also showing her care for work colleagues and awareness of work/life balance. ML promotes FL to director clearly through a show of her skill. We see ML as isolated and lonely, hiding his warmth and caring nature. The recipe was completely at-home repeatable. FL+ML have perfect chemistry. Second couple is a wonderful pair, and teases/supports main couple beautifully.

The next few episodes you have the usual tropes that come with lonely CEO who only has work to accompany him, and FL trying to balance it all. Some of the tropes are pleasantly flipped, like when the CEO is the one who trips and accidentally kisses the girl.

Somewhere around episode 8 I realized that I had been fast-forwarding through a lot of scenes. Repeatable recipes had vanished. Second couple stereotypical but supportive of first couple; waste of time to watch them. Third couple weirdly supporting each other's stalker behaviour; just irritating.

Main couple finally get together episode 9, at which point I realized that both ML's competence at work, and social awareness has been completely written out of the script. He does stupid stuff at the office that's completely out of character. But first dinner with mother-in-law he's completely out of it, for example literally grabbing soup-poured-for-mom and drinking it himself.

Why do script writers feel that they can have such completely implausible behaviour? I know the story is good when I want to yell at the characters. I know that the story is bad when I want to yell at the script writers.

I skipped ahead to the last episode, and watched as much of it as I could. The timing is seriously weird, both the relationship, and the show. In the relationship, they go from barely speaking to each other to marriage proposal ("I've changed") in only a few days time. In the drama, he proposes and The End.
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