Love After Addiction (Chinese Series)

How is a professional reality show supposed to work with one director and one cameraman? That question kept pulling me out of this twelve-episode series, whose installments run about twenty-five minutes each. The leads behave as though they’re performing for a show, yet the production around them hardly seems to exist. The fishing-town scenery is beautiful and soothing, but repeated drone shots wear out their welcome; eventually, I felt less like I was watching a drama than an advertisement for the island where it was filmed.

It’s frustrating because the first two or three episodes are genuinely lively and fun. Yoki, a well-known actor whose career has collapsed under a series of scandals and persistent insomnia, reluctantly follows his manager’s advice to join a reality program and repair his image. In a small fishing village, he runs into Yang Meng, a school friend he hasn’t seen in years. Yang Meng initially holds him at arm’s length, but Yoki persists, and their renewed connection becomes a real relationship. Then Yoki’s manipulations for the cameras are exposed. Yang Meng misunderstands what Yoki wants from him, they break up, and Yang Meng returns to the city with his estranged father. There’s also a romance between another contestant and one of Yang Meng’s friends, though it left me cold.

From there, the series loses the energy that made its opening work. The game-and-challenge comedy swells into reality-TV excess, while the plot wanders from episode to episode through what feels like an uncountable number of holes. Yoki tries to put things right by leaving acting altogether and publicly coming out at a press conference. A year later, in the middle of a desert, he saves a dying man who turns out to be a well-known director; the director decides to turn Yoki’s story into a film. Yoki and Yang Meng eventually reunite when both return to the fishing town. Those final two episodes take such a different direction, and hurry through the reconciliation so abruptly, that I was left wondering how the leads had made up at all.

Apparently this is a spin-off about side characters from the popular show Addiction, although I can barely remember that show now. Perhaps that connection explains the reliance on recognition, but it doesn’t give this story a compelling shape or any real emotional weight. The attractive cast clearly tries hard, and they deserved a better script. Instead, shaky production, an unconvincing central premise and a hollow ending make this a difficult watch. The audience deserved a story with a clearer sense of what “addiction” was meant to signify. (2.5/10)