Si mei ren

Serve chilled with a drop of mint, in between stressful working days marked by missed project deadlines and/or angry bosses shouting.

The viewer can delight in... not much, perhaps? Beautiful sceneries, pretty faces, nice costumes, music for the soul, good acting, incredibly convoluted plot that winds and unwinds and rewinds till the occidental brain gets a shock. Yes, it's a TV drama! What were we expecting?! The impatience our consumer society has instilled in us becomes more and more obvious while the drama writers perversely insist on reminding us:

"You won't get your high! You won't get your high! *You* won't get your high!"

As the storyline twitches its tail, the audience is given plenty of opportunities to hypothesize what could account for the complete lack of social skills of the main character, Qu Yuan, a brilliant man otherwise. A degree in psychology will come in handy. Somewhere near the end of the drama the writers propose an elegant solution: he just doesn't have them. The audience may accept it - or not.

The main point of the story could be how difficult it is "to bring people's hearts together." Or not! Cultural differences probably impede the Western mind to see it? Which can only remind me of a certain work meeting where my superior muted the speaker to ask why our Japanese clients were laughing at the other end. And I, as just another Westerner, could only smile and say "I don't know".

The idea that Qu Yuan is a complete idiot in whenever he speaks to Moo Cow. She is rude and disrespectful. He has no courage to simply explain the situation. Nobody is stupid enough to do this. They take it way too far in the spirit of modern Chinese film making. The storyline is decent otherwise. It is extremely slow and requires the ability to fast forward. It takes two hours for anything meaningful to occur.

If you happen to watch this on Amazon Prime then they are screwed up. The story is just beginning at episode 4 and Amazon thinks it is over. Obviously no one has watched the show at Amazon. Reviews will be terrible because it is equivalent to watching the first 5 minutes of a movie. You can watch the rest of the series on the Viki app or website. Do a Google search " song of phoenix ep6 " Viki and the episode will show up on the first page of the search. Likely the first hit. If you choose episode 5 it sends you to episode 4 lol. That is a Google glitch.