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

This week I got through episode 4 of my Old Fashioned Cupcake recaps. It’s only got 5 episodes total so I’ll finish it next week. I also started recapping a favorite Thai soap-opera (lakorn?) with a LGBTQ+ main character and loveline and unfortunate title for English SEO purposes To Sir, With Love.

I’m in the middle of a lot of shows, so I only finished one show which I’d only started watching last week:

My Roommate Is a Detective – 民国奇探 – 2020 (Pictured)

A Chinese historical comedy mystery series with 36 episodes.

A lazy, cash-poor finance guy is enlisted to help a former gangster-turned-inspector solve crimes in 1920s China. Also, there’s a woman reporter.

The fact that I binged through 36 episodes in 2 weeks says something in itself, but my ultimate feelings about this show are a mix of fondness and dissatisfaction. I think some of the binging was because I kept wanting it to do something it ultimately never did, so I was constantly hungry for more and never got it. 

So then first my biggest complaints. 

The English-speaking sections were repetitive nonsense of the same meaningless phrases that made it impossible to follow what was happening with those characters. They were important characters though, so this was frustrating but also had some absurd humor. I kind of want to do a compilation video of all these sections.

The cases never felt like they mattered much and the big reveal was a big bunch of nothing.

And ultimately what I think I was hungry for was more of the interactions between the cop and the detective. I think that was the main audience draw and a lot of people were satisfied by it, but I wasn’t. I wanted their backgrounds to figure more into cases and cause some angst. Probably though, I want a kdrama kind of intensity from a cdrama, which isn’t fair.

There was a lot of good about this show though. 

Up top would be seeing the usually stoic and strong Hu Yu Tian play a more flamboyant, cowardly, extroverted character. Underneath his more alienating qualities was a sweetness and vulnerability that made it easy to understand why the other characters wanted to protect him.

He was well paired with the tough cop with a hard-luck background, played by Zhang Yun Long. It wasn’t hard to see why the cop treasured his eccentric and at times helpless partner who basically did his job for him. 

While I may have wanted more dark intensity, it was the light-hearted-madness of it all that made it an easy binge-watch. The show moves super quick, even those meaningless English sections were short at least, and is never boring. 

I am completely unfamiliar with 1920s Shanghai and while I won’t rely on the show for historical accuracy, it gave me a sense of that time and place and left me curious to know more. 

So while I’m a little unsatisfied, it’s a show I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend under the right circumstances.