Meteor Garden (2018)
Review of Meteor Garden / 流星花园 (2018)
I’m going to be quite honest when I start off this review, but I’ve never seen Boys Over Flowers or any of the spinoffs. This show, which is from Mainland China, was based off of the original Taiwanese show Meteor Garden from 2001, which I also have not seen.
So I am literally coming into this show with fresh eyes. I generally tend not to watch Chinese dramas or shows, so this is new territory for me, despite having studied Mandarin Chinese for years.
And I will say, before I begin this review, that it was nice to watch this show as a student learning the language. I learned some phrases and words that I didn’t know before, and got to see how the youths talk in real life, even if it is a fabricated college setting.
But man do I have some thoughts about this drama. Before we even get into the bulk of this review, I’m going to admit this drama felt like it was all over the place and had some undertones I, who likes to look at things from a feminist angle, did not like.
I can see why this is appealing in the mainstream narrative of things, but I personally did not vibe with some things and had issues with them, thus making this a tough drama to watch.
Content
The story behind Meteor Garden is very simple, a trope repeated throughout the iterations of this this original series. Shancai is our female protagonist who is poor but goes to an elite school in Shanghai (although I wondered about the poor aspect of her family because they live in a big spacious home for, well, people supposedly dirt poor in Shanghai.
Maybe I’m just not aware of poverty in China but this seems like a bit overplayed? She can also afford to casually go to Canada…). She runs into F4, a bunch of rich wealthy boys who play bridge, and gets on Si Daoming’s nerves from the get-go. It escalates into a romance, but then oh no!
Another one of the F4 is in love with her apparently and she’s in love with him! What a tragedy! And then Daoming’s rich mother doesn’t approve of him dating a poor girl! What will we do next?
I only got about twenty episodes out of forty-nine before I really started to get frustrated with the drama. In terms of appearance, the actors really do look good for their roles.
They play the aesthetic and rich boy aesthetics, or, in Shancai’s case the brash quote-on-quote poor girl, but man does the acting leave something to be desired. Looking the actors up, this was the first big role a lot of them had, which makes sense in why their acting in this drama isn’t the greatest, but I really couldn’t get into the drama because of how stiff and wooden some of them seem.
We also get the classic toxic male lead and the second male lead (the F4 member who plays the piano) depicted as a literal angel on earth. Even their clothes tend to demonstrate their archetypes; Daoming often wears black and leather, spiking his hair up to look like a punk, while Lei Huaze has permed soft-looking hair and is often dressed in pale neutrals, one expected from this character archetype.
But Daoming is such a jerk and Shancai knows it at the beginning, but then she falls for him because he seems to genuinely like her? Girl, no. Don’t do it.
He is a bully who literally threw your mother’s food at you and flaunts his wealth as a reason to look down at people. People don’t change and he showed his true colors in the beginning. He literally shoves her against a wall and shit. We shouldn’t romanticize the poor treatment of women in television.
The plot also feels all over the place. We go through the episodes pretty quickly, and because it’s forty-nine episodes, there’s a lot of ground to cover.
We go from the feud between Shancai and Daoming to the love triangle, then we randomly smash in a food cooking competition that’s never brought up again, and then we enter an arc with Daoming’s mother.
And that’s just the first twenty episodes. It feels like there’s too many narrative threads here, ones that aren’t developed in a way that is necessary to the plot. Why have a rivalry in the cooking competition with Caina if nothing is ever going to happen with cooking ever again really?
You really can also tell that this is set in Shanghai because of the way these guys are dressed. It’s highly unrealistic that a group of four guys would rule the school like this, the fact that they’re head-to-toe in this season’s Dior, and can literally do whatever they want without consequence.
It literally feels like the F4 exists to be eye candy and Daoming’s side hoes in this drama, because they don’t serve much of a purpose outside of the romance between Daoming and Shancai.
There’s also a really awesome piano soundtrack that cuts in between certain scenes or tense moments, and I really loved that OST. Wanted to give it a shoutout in this review because it really set the scene for the story at times.
Overall Thoughts
In the beginning, the show was somewhat fine outside of the fact that Si Daoming was a complete and utter asshole. And then it became a slow train wreck before my eyes. Some people genuinely enjoyed this drama, but I just can’t look past how much of an asshole Si is. The acting is horrendous and there’s no characterization done throughout the show, and then the plot keeps diverging and converging. This one is a hard no from me.
