Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.

This week I posted through episode 13 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love (seriously I love this show SO MUCH) and episode 8 of the Japanese BL My Love Mix-Up!. 

I’ll be wrapping both of those up in the next two weeks. After that I’ll start recapping Oh No! Here Comes Trouble which, for a few weeks at least, maybe the only show I recap as I’d like a little summer break.

Meanwhile, I am more than a third of the way into:

Joy of Life – 庆余年 – (2019) (Pictured)

A 2019 Chinese court-drama-kinda, I’ve watched 18 of 46 episodes.

A young man with a mysterious past who only wants to enjoy life is drawn to the capital where he finds himself in the center of all kinds of political scheming.

This is one of the reviews that feels a little silly to write. Like, this show everyone likes? Turns out it’s good! I have no hot takes on why this show everyone likes is actually a harbinger of the downfall of society.

Instead, I’ll talk about why I am really intrigued by this show: All the weirdness. 

On a broad, surface level, this show is an intriguing, off-beat court drama with princes and concubines and illegitimate children and various court officials that are hard to tell apart.

But there’s a lot more going on. Our lead character has memories of the present, 21st-century China though he is living some time in the past. Most of the time he lives his life straightforwardly, but occasionally he throws out statements about his confusion over the nature of his reality.

The story, events, and other characters move around him in a mysterious but deliberate feeling way. Some characters seem to be simply court-drama-type characters while others have their own reality-defying mysteries. Some characters seem in on the fact that there’s something odd going on here while others seem totally oblivious. Many of the mysteries in the show revolve around out-of-place items or unexpected turns-in-events that seem to hint at this hidden bigger picture. There’s something more going on, but what?

The court intrigues, the characters, they’re entertaining, but it’s this weirdness that makes the show special. The strangeness is also delightfully subtle, it’s as though Westworld were a pretty good Western show where characters occasionally allude to the fact they are robots.

So far anyway.

A few final notes: Zhang Ruo Yun, who plays our main character here and I recently watched in Under the Microscope, is a really excellent actor. He strides around chest-first, often in a Matrix-Meets-Historical-China outfit, and veers skillfully between lightness and deep emotion.

There’s romance, kinda, but it’s definitely not the reason to watch this show. On the other hand, this is the kind of show that I feel could appeal to people who aren’t huge East Asian drama fans. People who like high-concept plots with intriguing twists.

There is a second season to this show that I know people have been waiting for since this first one ended. Luckily for those people, it is filming now!