I know I said I was going to write part 2 of my afterthoughts on my trip to Beijing but that'll have to wait as I now feel like writing a comment on the latest TVB series that I'm currently watching.
As usual, I won't go into details with the sypnosis of the series as you can read about it here in English and here in Chinese.
I must say that this really isn't a very good series at all and if I ever wondered just how little tolerance I have for fluffy romances, I think I've no doubts now that I have very little tolerance for TVB series that are light on drama and story. This series seems like a vehicle to promote the younger TVB fadans and I guess qualifies more like a typical idol series packed full of good looking people and virtually no story.
Bernice Liu dancing, unfortunately, the story is less about dancing and more about herbal tea... grrrr.
The series did start of well enough and I enjoyed the first two episodes and the series did setup most of the relationships and the potential conflicts well and I was genuinely interested in how some of it was going to play out. The English title isn't very elegant but unlike many of TVB's English title, this title actually makes some sense, although sadly not much else makes sense in this series. The series' Chinese title "舞動全城" can be loosely translated as "the whole city dances", hence "steps", as in dance steps. The opening MTV sequence is also entirely about dance, so forgive me if I sound somewhat annoyed when I say that the series is more about $&%*#@&*#@# herbal tea and dumb generic romances than it is about dancing of any kind at all. While I admit that I've not yet finished the series but I'm at ep13 which is more than half-way through the series and the dance portions are quite peripheral to the main story.
The characters are mostly stereotypical and painted in broad strokes of good and bad. The good guys are very good, forgiving, nice and gracious. The bad guys or the characters which aren't the main characters are spoilt, bratty, petty etc. and have few redeeming qualities. But that's not the worst of it. Aside from being shallow, these characters' basic nature seem to change whenever the script needs them to change.
Stephen Hyunh and Chen Fala
What made me mad enough to write this entry is what they did to Chen Fala's character, Ching Ka-man. Strangely enough, I actually found this minor character to be the most interesting of all the characters in this series and I think that's because all the main characters were so damn bland. The main characters, Ching Ka-tsun (Steven Ma), Li Sum-ying (Bernice Liu) and Yeung Sze-man (Kate Tsui) are nice, smart and almost flawless and therefore often boring and sometimes worse, good to the point of nauseating. In contrast, Ka-man is spoilt, angry and self-destructive. Her backstory also gives her even more depth. When she was rather young, her father died and her mother found herself unable to grief, work and care for her two young children all by herself. So she placed Ka-man in the care of the child's grand-mother and sent her son Ka-tsun to boarding school and the family barely saw each other, if at all, and certainly didn't live as a family till Ka-man was in high school. As a result she's deeply insecure, highly emotional, needy and resentful. She's a time-bomb, filled with anger, a sense of abandonment and a desperate need to feel loved, especially from her mother. Her brother, Ka-tsun, is apparently and unrealistically unaffected by this childhood trauma because he's not only older but also because he chose and forced his mother to send him away, unlike Ka-man who didn't have a choice.
At the beginning of the series, it seemed as though they were going to make Ka-man Sum-ying's main adversary. Ka-man takes an instant dislike to her and exhibits fits of jealous rage because she thinks that her mother likes Sum-ying more than herself and Ka-man would go out of her way to set Sum-ying up. While I wished that the script had made Ka-man's antics more intelligent, since the character didn't seem to be set up to be a stupid one, still I was glad that there was some conflict in the dance arena instead of in the herbal tea company.
Then suddenly, in the middle of the series, Ka-man in one of her drunken rages accidentally hurts someone and everyone rallies around her to try and help her out. Suddenly, in a blink of an eye, Ka-man becomes a docile, understanding, loving daughter and sister.
Oh boy.... I was sooooooo pissed. This was by far the most interesting character in the series till ep13 at least. I was hoping that they would develope her and her family a lot more because they have an unsusal and relationship which seemed always in danger of breaking up. But nooooooo..... because Chen Fala isn't one of the more important actresses in this series, they abruptly change her character so that they can drop her storyline midway and give us all the inane, boring and generic romantic blah-blah crap between Ka-tsun and Sum-ying, Sze-man and Dickson (Matthew Ko), Li Lik-keung (Sum-ying's brother, played by Wayne Lai) and Yao Lum-lum (Claire Yiu). Dancing was also abandoned and the herbal tea company's business conflicts took centre-stage.
Pix 1: Wayne Lai, Steven Ma, Pix 2: Bernice Liu, Kate Tsui, Pix 3: Matthew Ko, Wu Fung
Thankfully the performances in general are okay and Steven Ma and Bernice Liu are very watchable. Wayne Lai maintains his usual standard even though his character makes an abrupt and annoying change in the second quarter of the series. Regular B-lister Claire Yiu is also fine. Kate Tsui isn't fantastic but she's not terrible although I do find the quality of her voice to be lacking. I'm also still decidedly unimpressed with Stephen Wong, his horrible enunciation and his slightly wooden acting.
Chen Fala with Steven Hyunh in pix 1. Chen Fala in the centre, Bernice Liu on the right.
The person I actually found myself liking, surprisingly enough, is Chen Fala. For an inexperienced actress, I think she acquitted herself well enough and even though she was saddled with a very unlikeable character, she played her well enough that I found this character less annoying than sad and troubled and hence, sympathetic. It helps too that I do find Chen Fala rather good-looking and like her smile. :)
Pix 1: Steven Ma with the some of the support cast and on his left is the unfortunately Akina Hong Wah who gets yet another thankless role. Pix 2: Bernice Liu and Steven Ma with Claire Yiu who gets one of her rare more important roles in a TVB series.
Bottomline is, don't rent this series unless you really like the stars and I mean REALLY like them or unless you like fluffy romances which don't stimulate the mind. If you like drama and if you like your characters and plot to progress logically, then save your money and go rent something else. Unless a major miracle happens from ep13 till ep20, I'm unlikely to change my assessment of this series.
PART 2 - added 29th Oct 2007
Okay, I've just finished this series and it's official, this series is absolute trash and if it wasn't because I was working and wanted some tv on and if it wasn't because I actually wanted to know what happens to Ka-man, I would have dropped this series at ep13. There was no miracle, there was only disaster as all the characters, especially the so called good guys, managed to become even more unbearable than before.
All I can say is, no wonder Ka-man turned out so screwed up. Not only did she have a really horrid childhood, she got a mother who really didn't know how to help her obviously troubled daughter and a brother who's idea of showing concern is to think that things will work out by themselves and a future sister-in-law who's such a good person she's probably not even homo sapien, no wonder Ka-man turned to the first person who pays her some real attention. Never mind that this woman is so obviously nasty. Ka-man is so desperate for anyone to be the mother she never knew that even this totally I'm-so-bad-it-is-oozing-out-of-my-pores woman would do. It helped poor Ka-man even less that the script also decided to screw her over by abruptly changing her into turn-over-new-leaf daughter just so as to abruptly change her yet again into vengeful, hate-filled, self-destructive daughter. Really, it would have made so much more sense and taken just as little amount of effort to show that Ka-man hasn't exorcised the demons from her childhood. Seriously, I can't really blame her either, her family continues to pay her as little attention when she's good as when she was bad and hey, since it's more fun being bad, can anyone blame Ka-man for becoming bad again?!?!?!? I certainly can't. Fact is, she's simply the most comprehensible character in this series. From the very beginning till the end, Ka-man has always been a lost little girl who's self-destructive tendencies were really her way of crying out for help and all this stems from her feelings of abandonment and loneliness. I really did feel for this character in the end because her mother really did treat Sum-ying better, you never get the feeling any time in the series, except for when Ka-man got into trouble, that her mother even cared about her. Guess that explains why Ka-man got into so much trouble, even though I doubt if the script-writers intended it to be this deep given how shallow the rest of the script and characters are.
Seriously, the script should have shifted the focus of this series to Ka-man and her family. They would have been so much more fascinating, what a bloody waste. Another advantage of making the Ching family the focus of the story would be that the dance would be at the centre of this series as it should have been from the very beginning.
And really, one must give newcomer Chen Fala a ton of credit. She really did play this character relatively well because she is one of the reasons this character worked for me in spite of the inconsistent scripting.
Okay, that's enough ranting from me. I've wasted enough time and brain cells over this pointless and lazily scripted series. =(
