Grade: A
Category
Romantic melodrama
What it’s about
A spoiled rich boy with a tragic past and a bad attitude
finds angst-ridden love with a cafeteria worker at the college his family owns.
After separating them with a slew of soap-opera-style obstacles, the drama
catches up with the couple seven years—and one illegitimate son—later.
First impression
After the incessant cheerfulness of A Gentleman’s
Dignity, I’m hungry for something
unapologetically melodramatic. Looks as if this show is going to fit the bill—there
was a dead parent and an attempted child abandonment before the first
episode’s opening credits even rolled. That must be some sort of world record for misery,
and I, naturally, couldn’t be happier.
Final verdict
Some things are heart-warming—this epic melodrama is closer
to heart melting. The 21 lengthy
episodes of my first Taiwanese series flew by in a delightful blur of
stabbings, terminal diseases, spontaneous amnesia, court trials, and ill-fated
(but ultimately triumphant) love triangles. A distant cousin to the Endless
Love series of Korean dramas, Autumn’s Concerto is less innocent than most Kdramas when it comes to
sex and violence, but is still built of similarly good-hearted DNA.
Showcasing a pair of so-beautiful-it-hurts lovers and their mind-bendingly
adorable son, it pulls out all the stops when it comes to soapy tribulations,
but never fails to keep a relatable human face on the madness. Its somewhat
draggy final quarter and inexplicably random final episode didn’t even dent my
love for this refreshingly bad-guy-less show, all thanks to its squee-worthy
love story and the respectful way it treated its quirky cast of Gilmore
Girls-esque characters.
Random thoughts
• I can’t remember if I started off feeling this way, but I
love the sound of the Korean language—it has lovely, crisp consonants and
pleasantly curvy vowels. Japanese is nice, too. But Chinese? I’m really having
difficulty watching this show with the volume on because the dialogue is
hurting my ears. In contrast to the other Asian languages I’m familiar with,
Chinese is choppy and harsh. Here’s hoping it grows on me, or this might be a
long 21 episodes.
• So is it a Taiwanese thing that drama end credits ruin the
suspense of the story? “I wonder if the leads get together…but wait, according
to the cuddly, sun-drenched closing montage in every episode, they must!” I
like to know there’s a happy ending in store, but leaving a little something to
the imagination is cool, too.
• Episode 3. I can’t
say that Vaness Wu is doing anything for me; he’s too much of an over-processed
flower boy for my taste. The female lead’s gardening friend is another
story—he’s just my flavor of cute. Clearly, second lead syndrome is going to be
an issue in this drama. Finale update: Vaness Wu totally pulled a Gong Yoo—at first, I thought he wasn’t much
to look at, but by the end of this drama I was ready to pack my bags and head
to Taiwan just in hopes of camping on his lawn. His lovely, expressive face
made the show.
• Episode 5. So now I
see what people mean about Taiwanese television. This show is like a giant Saturday
Night Live sketch spoofing Korean dramas.
The plot is so stuffed full of unbelievable, outrageous developments and
coincidences that it already puts all 16 episodes of the lunatic Winter
Sonata to shame: it has dead parents,
abandonment, bullying, over-privileged schoolboys, near-rape, court trials,
stymied artistic dreams, and terminal illnesses. What in god’s name is left to
fill the next 16 episodes?!? (I’m waiting with bated breath, let me tell you.)
—What’s this? Asian
actors believably conveying physical affection? I never thought I’d see the
day. ::fans self::
• Episode 10. I’m not
a big fan of the young of the species, especially when they suddenly appear in
my television shows, but I’ll make an exception this time: the little boy in
this drama is so cute my ovaries are all but exploding. On top of that, he
actually improves the story, giving the plot more to do than simply split up
the main couple and get them back together, time and again. Love the burgeoning
family dynamics, love the male lead (now that his hair is shorter, thank god),
love the show.
• Episode 16. I’ve
heard of hate sex, but a hate marriage? That’s hardcore.
• Episode 18. Picture this: the female lead is locked in a phoneless bedroom by her scheming rival for the male lead’s attention. What happens? In a Korean drama, the girl cries a little, knocks on the door, and then waits to be rescued. In a Taiwanese drama, the girl finds a lighter and burns a towel, thereby setting off the smoke detector and sending the hotel staff running. Well played, drama.
• Episode 18. Picture this: the female lead is locked in a phoneless bedroom by her scheming rival for the male lead’s attention. What happens? In a Korean drama, the girl cries a little, knocks on the door, and then waits to be rescued. In a Taiwanese drama, the girl finds a lighter and burns a towel, thereby setting off the smoke detector and sending the hotel staff running. Well played, drama.
• Episode 20. Having
caught up with Dramafever’s subbing of this series, I’ve reluctantly moved over
to Dramacrazy for the last two episodes. The bright side? JKShows, whom I
hereby nominate for the title of Asian drama fan of the decade, has been there
first: he or she has made full-episode files available at YouTube. The
not-so-bright side? There’s so much Japanese language subbing on the screen
that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. It is amusing, though, to
watch a character say the word “boss” in Chinese, which is the word “boss” in
English, then see “boss” flash by in the Japanese subs, immediately followed by
the word “boss” in the English subs. Talk about going full circle.
• Episode 21. This
wasn’t an episode so much as it was a 23-minute denouement nugget. Totally
discordantly, every single plotline was given its own music-video style happy
ending, with little or no connection to the rest of the drama’s narrative.
Weird.
Watch it
DramaCrazy (look for the JKShows posts—they’re full episodes)
You might also like
The Endless Love series, for their fabulously over-the-top
melodrama
(P.S.: So I figured out what was behind the missing comments—Blogger spontaneously decided they were spam, and hid them away. I've liberated them, and will keep an eye out for this in the future. [And think about finally making the jump to WordPress, where the cool kids hang out.])
(P.S.: So I figured out what was behind the missing comments—Blogger spontaneously decided they were spam, and hid them away. I've liberated them, and will keep an eye out for this in the future. [And think about finally making the jump to WordPress, where the cool kids hang out.])
