![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Quarantine Drama Reviews, Really Excellent Edition — Joy of Life
Joy of Life
I started but have not yet completed other high school / college romances, so for now I'm moving onto the next category — shows I really, really, really liked.
This review is going under a spoiler cut because unlike romance dramas, there are a lot of important plot spoilers in this one and you really benefit from going in unspoiled.
Joy of Life! The show everyone is / was talking about!
I actually watched about 10 episodes over the winter because it came so strongly recommended by just about everyone I knew but really primarily because of AvenueX's review video where she noted that despite the trailer being All Drama All The Time, the drama itself is 80% comedy. Me, I'm always willing to give a comedy a shot, so I checked it out.
My impression of the first 10 eps was that it was funny but that it was also deeply, deeply weird. There were a lot of confusing things that were meant to be confusing. Even the opening theme song had this weird melody that I think was meant to be not a normal melody (I don't have the music vocab to describe it). Nevertheless, I was sold on the show within episodes. I think my favorite part of the show has to be when Fan Xian wants to make money off all his future knowledge only to find out that his mom (who we think at point is also a time traveler!) has already paved the way and there's nothing left for him to innovate. But a close second (possibly in the same episode? or shortly before/after?) is when he accuses his stepmother to her face of trying to have him murdered, his stepmother protests she's too smart to do it in that way, his half-sister (er, I guess they're not related at all, actually, in retrospect?) concurs, and then they have that super-weird, hilarious awkward dinner.
I stopped watching because the lovable bodyguard died (after some very foreshadow-y moments), which made me sad, and then I was home for the holidays and then just didn't have a chance to pick it back up again. Once quarantined (and once I'd run through like five other dramas), it occurred to me that I should finish Joy of Life.
It was an excellent decision. The show is smart, it is hilarious, the cast is really strong and the show also drops a lot of surprises on you in a very impactful way. I mean the big dramatic reveal that they were all in the future? I gasped, and immediately gchatted my friends that this show is AMAZING and they should start watching it RIGHT NOW. And then that entire thread got dropped (because there were other things going on) only to come up again at the end in a very satisfying way.
As another example, I was spoiled pretty early on that Fan Xian was the Emperor's son because I watched on Viki with the comments on and every other Viki comment was about this. (To be totally fair to those commenters, as they themselves pointed out, this fact is revealed in the synopsis for Joy of Life on Viki — as well as other spoilery things that have not yet been revealed in Season 1, and presumably are written by someone who read the book. I will not reveal them here.) Despite fully knowing this spoiler, though, the moment that Fan Xian finds this out was done really well — both Fan Xian's utter shock and the way the show chose to drop that reveal still almost made me gasp out loud. The scene was just that compelling.
Speaking of shocking twists, the reveal about the Chen Pingping long con and the Second Prince both make me want to go back and re-watch the whole thing all over again, though I think I'm going to hold off on doing so until the second season is about to come out.
I have seen a lot of commentary that Fan Xian's romance is not very compelling, which I agree with. I like him and Lin Wan'er together because they are separately cute, I want them to be happy and it looks like they'll be happy together. But ... it's definitely not a shippy ship, if that makes sense. Reading a synopsis of the book, it sounds like the book is more of a harem romance and he ends up with a host of wives & concubines that all love him (not my favorite plot device), so it actually makes sense that the main romance in the TV show is one of the weakest links.
The show of course has a really excellent cliffhanger — I'm putting out my theory now that Yan Bingyun's faking his betrayal of Fan Xian (mostly because I want Yan Bingyun to be not-evil and because I really want Yan Bingyun to know about his grandfather) and I really, really hope that Season 2 is good. Because the Chinese TV industry really isn't set up to produce seasons, I have a lot of misgivings about Joy of Life having 3 seasons. On the one hand, it was so popular that it will definitely get a second season and will probably be able to get most of their original cast back (I heard that most of the cast is confirmed for S2, actually). On the other hand, with the whole COVID situation going on, I don't know when that's going to happen. I just ... really don't like when they re-cast characters, and haven't seen a strong case for Chinese TV being able to pull of multiples seasons. (HZGG 2 was good; HZGG 3 recast everyone except poor Er Kang!).
I am actually thinking of hunting up the webnovel to read and find out what happens next. The reason I'm hesitant to do so, though, is because from what I've heard, the show did a really good job of fleshing out minor characters, especially female characters, in its adaptation which implies that the book did not. I'm ... a little leery of checking out the novel if the things i like best about the TV show are going to be unique to the TV script. But let's be real, I'm going to check the book out sooner or later because I want to know what happens next!
Final Verdict: Would Recommend (in fact, given the category this is in, would STRONGLY recommend)
I started but have not yet completed other high school / college romances, so for now I'm moving onto the next category — shows I really, really, really liked.
This review is going under a spoiler cut because unlike romance dramas, there are a lot of important plot spoilers in this one and you really benefit from going in unspoiled.
Joy of Life! The show everyone is / was talking about!
I actually watched about 10 episodes over the winter because it came so strongly recommended by just about everyone I knew but really primarily because of AvenueX's review video where she noted that despite the trailer being All Drama All The Time, the drama itself is 80% comedy. Me, I'm always willing to give a comedy a shot, so I checked it out.
My impression of the first 10 eps was that it was funny but that it was also deeply, deeply weird. There were a lot of confusing things that were meant to be confusing. Even the opening theme song had this weird melody that I think was meant to be not a normal melody (I don't have the music vocab to describe it). Nevertheless, I was sold on the show within episodes. I think my favorite part of the show has to be when Fan Xian wants to make money off all his future knowledge only to find out that his mom (who we think at point is also a time traveler!) has already paved the way and there's nothing left for him to innovate. But a close second (possibly in the same episode? or shortly before/after?) is when he accuses his stepmother to her face of trying to have him murdered, his stepmother protests she's too smart to do it in that way, his half-sister (er, I guess they're not related at all, actually, in retrospect?) concurs, and then they have that super-weird, hilarious awkward dinner.
I stopped watching because the lovable bodyguard died (after some very foreshadow-y moments), which made me sad, and then I was home for the holidays and then just didn't have a chance to pick it back up again. Once quarantined (and once I'd run through like five other dramas), it occurred to me that I should finish Joy of Life.
It was an excellent decision. The show is smart, it is hilarious, the cast is really strong and the show also drops a lot of surprises on you in a very impactful way. I mean the big dramatic reveal that they were all in the future? I gasped, and immediately gchatted my friends that this show is AMAZING and they should start watching it RIGHT NOW. And then that entire thread got dropped (because there were other things going on) only to come up again at the end in a very satisfying way.
As another example, I was spoiled pretty early on that Fan Xian was the Emperor's son because I watched on Viki with the comments on and every other Viki comment was about this. (To be totally fair to those commenters, as they themselves pointed out, this fact is revealed in the synopsis for Joy of Life on Viki — as well as other spoilery things that have not yet been revealed in Season 1, and presumably are written by someone who read the book. I will not reveal them here.) Despite fully knowing this spoiler, though, the moment that Fan Xian finds this out was done really well — both Fan Xian's utter shock and the way the show chose to drop that reveal still almost made me gasp out loud. The scene was just that compelling.
Speaking of shocking twists, the reveal about the Chen Pingping long con and the Second Prince both make me want to go back and re-watch the whole thing all over again, though I think I'm going to hold off on doing so until the second season is about to come out.
I have seen a lot of commentary that Fan Xian's romance is not very compelling, which I agree with. I like him and Lin Wan'er together because they are separately cute, I want them to be happy and it looks like they'll be happy together. But ... it's definitely not a shippy ship, if that makes sense. Reading a synopsis of the book, it sounds like the book is more of a harem romance and he ends up with a host of wives & concubines that all love him (not my favorite plot device), so it actually makes sense that the main romance in the TV show is one of the weakest links.
The show of course has a really excellent cliffhanger — I'm putting out my theory now that Yan Bingyun's faking his betrayal of Fan Xian (mostly because I want Yan Bingyun to be not-evil and because I really want Yan Bingyun to know about his grandfather) and I really, really hope that Season 2 is good. Because the Chinese TV industry really isn't set up to produce seasons, I have a lot of misgivings about Joy of Life having 3 seasons. On the one hand, it was so popular that it will definitely get a second season and will probably be able to get most of their original cast back (I heard that most of the cast is confirmed for S2, actually). On the other hand, with the whole COVID situation going on, I don't know when that's going to happen. I just ... really don't like when they re-cast characters, and haven't seen a strong case for Chinese TV being able to pull of multiples seasons. (HZGG 2 was good; HZGG 3 recast everyone except poor Er Kang!).
I am actually thinking of hunting up the webnovel to read and find out what happens next. The reason I'm hesitant to do so, though, is because from what I've heard, the show did a really good job of fleshing out minor characters, especially female characters, in its adaptation which implies that the book did not. I'm ... a little leery of checking out the novel if the things i like best about the TV show are going to be unique to the TV script. But let's be real, I'm going to check the book out sooner or later because I want to know what happens next!
Final Verdict: Would Recommend (in fact, given the category this is in, would STRONGLY recommend)