Hello, you're watching AvenueX
where a junkie on good storytelling shares her thoughts,
knowledge and occasional weird ideas
on stories and how they're told.
Jing Cha Rong Yu, Ordinary Greatness is a 38 episodes contemporary drama
that has just finished airing in china on both the web platform iqiyi
and cctv eight satellite television station,
this drama is produced by iqiyi
directed by Ding Hei
as an original script,
not based on any existing material,
written by two script writer
Zhao Dongling and Tan Jiayan
The drama is led by Zhang Ruoyun, Bai Lu, Xu Kaicheng, Cao Lu
as the four main young policeman
plus the older generation of policemen
who would act mostly like theirteachers and mentor in the police station.
played by Wang Jingchun, Ning Li, Zhao yang
and many other people
the drama is shot in the city Qing Dao
in Shandong province from the very end of April last year to September.
And since this is focused on a specific police station drama
that police station is fully built,
the exterior light were completely done by studio lighting
comparing to another drama that is airing at the same time,
which also uses a lot of artificial lighting
within a studio space to fake the exterior light.
This drama has done an outstanding job
with the knowledge of the entirety of this drama.
I'll get give it a 2.7 gold mine
just that tad bit away from a full, convincing, well-deserved.
I have no problem at all three gold mine.
I'll tell you later in this review,
what part of it may not be so satisfying or enjoyable to watch
quickly put the geist of this drama together.
It is focused on fou r young policemen and woman.
They just graduated from police academy or
other universities and they're fresh newbies
They have to go to this community police station and work there.
Eventually, if they don't make any mistakes and they work fine,
they're gonna become formal,
proper policemen.
And they have extremely different educational
family background and different personalities.
And it's definitely totally intentionally written like that.
So you can have the most amount of possibilities of things happening.
They get assigned to an older,
more experienced policeman acting as their mentor.
So the story goes to look at four different newbie policemen with their "shi fu"
what they deal with at a community level based police station.
Your car is parked in my slot,
and I call the police that type of problems that they have to deal with.
Now let's go into the specifics.
First, I wanna talk about the positive things.
I'm just gonna roughly break it down to two categories.
One is on the acting casting performance that side of things.
The other one is on the story itself.
So first on actors and acting
one of the best i've seen this year,
it is directed by Ding Hei
who is a very very experienced director
probably la st drama he did that made a big impression on my audience
and probably also just in that year's drama is
Na Nian Hua Kai Yue Zheng Yuan
So you know this is a pretty soilid director
knows how to direct actors and how to utilize
what's best of each person
for the younger actors.
Thanks to the script's groundedness
solid characters than what they usually get in dramaland these days.
The only one i'm not very familiar with is Cao Lu
but the other three actors Xu Kaicheng, Zhang Ruoyun, Bai Lu
they all have been in very idol, very period
the popular young actor oriented dramas,
the selling points of those dramas were costumes,
the beautiful time setting and the unusual cool character abilities.
But in this drama,
they're just normal, ordinary people.
And with that it really shows
certain actors may be much better suited for certain dramas,
Zhang Ruoyun
If you consider every facade of an actor and every
skills and every tools in the box that they can use,
he is pretty good
compared to the same age range actors in china right now.
So basically his delivery of his role Li Dawei is very convincing,
but it totally fits my expectation of his ability.
Then for the other ones
the one actually delivered most surprise to me is Xu kaicheng
because of his previous
cringy toe grabbing performances in a couple of period dramas.
If you've watched chinese dramas for a while you know okay
where his acting is weird,
he just can't seem to control his facial expressions.
He doesn't even know where to place his bodies and limbs.
And his line deliveries are all weird.
Just when you think he can't act and he's hopeless,
this drama comes along and this role is so perfect for him,
and immediately he becomes so much more likable.
so It really made me think of that expression.
That means there really isn't trash in this world.
There's only misplaced resources
and he's acting flows so much better in this drama.
I think he needs to do more contemporary dramas,
more realistic roles
it just suits him so much better than the period dramas.
Cao Lu, I don't know about this actor at all before,
but he is a really good actor
I think he should work towards the serious actor end of things
where it's not because of you're super good look
or certain charismatic part of you
that you become a leading man of a drama.
But then for the golden supporting roles
he probably will be such a good fit.
In comparison actually Bai Lu comes probably, in my opinion,
as the weakest of the four.
Her role isn't so well worked out and too focused on that one thing
of her childhood trauma
that's like the only thing that's important to her
and she doesn't have any other space abd any other possibilities to play with.
It's not like she delivered a bad performance,
but compared to the other 3
less interesting.
But overall these four young actor actress did a really good job
and then we have to praise the older ones.
oh my god
These guys made this drama.
I'm just gonna quickly mention Wang Jingchun, Ning Li, Zhao Yang
Somehow they are all from Zi Jin Chen adapted iqiyi dramas previously
Long Night and The Bad Kids
Without these three guys,
the drama will not be half as interesting.
Wang Jingchun plays Suo Zhang 所长, the head, the chief,
the lead of that community police station,
the soul, the bone the center
that without him,
it wouldn't be the same place.
How should I describe it?
Basically, if Earth doesn't have a film, television, visual story telling industry
for whatever reason we don't have the technology,
we never thought about doing that
he incarnates into our world,
then it will be an unfairness of the universe to put him in our
time and space where there isn't a film or television industry.
That's how I would describe.
Wang Jingchun's acting
Ning Li, also such a great actor.
You wouldn't think of him as like super good looking in any sense right?
But think about all the roles in recent years
that you probably have watched of him playing a serial killer
of him playing a lawyer,
of him playing a spy,
and now a middle aged suffering from a lot of
personal problem community based policeman,
he can just fit into any kind of characters.
and he doesn't need to do like change my hair or change my look of anything.
He just just stand there and he is his character
having him and particularly Zhang Ruoyun
playing the... that particular pair of mentor and apprentice.
so enjoyable
and then Zhao Yang as well.
An actor when he was younger was actually known for being good looking
The type of Shu Sheng, the scholar,
the ancient good looking, very clean cut young man
who is well educated
in his middle age,
he totally is a different person.
You can't almost recognize it's him,
but he is also so perfect for this drama and his particular role
And a lot of audiences while watching this drama would say
it just makes so much sense that they cast Zhao Yang as this role.
Because when he was younger,
he really would be that type of dashingly good looking young man
that the wife character would give up everything to marry,
which is how the story is set up.
And he's acting is just also ~~~
So acting casting part of this drama made it successful
probably for at least half of the success comes from this part
and then the other half comes from the story itself.
It's so rare that you get a police drama like this.
When it concerns police in chinese dramaland these days
you see usually anti drug stories
how many we've had already and how many more are coming ?
or the crime crackdown stuff going against local gangster group
or corruptions of higher ups
plus the more on the criminal investigation
like Under the Skin
like Dr. Qin Ming that the first season was actually led by Zhang Ruoyun
So if you think about police drama,
you almost only have those three types in china.
And now you have this one
which totally takes a different angle.
It really is just about Ji Mao Suan Pi
Chicken feather and Garlice skin
so tiny things, light and messy
and as community based policemen,
that's what they deal with everyday
like somebody lose their keys and cannot get into their apartment
they call police
or their pet went missing,
they have to go and respond to that call.
And this drama really doesn't resolve to giving
all those little but super annoying problems.
A perfect resolution
an idealized everybody come together,
shake their hand and become good friends type of ending.
They just try to find a way to calm it down and make it go back to normal.
And there's a lot of compromise in this drama.
It doesn't try to make it great and grand and ideal.
I just really am thankful for the writer to do that
to most of the problems, conflict and the characters' troubles.
When I was on Discord,
I did discover a lot of people who are not familiar with chinese policemen
and what is different between chinese policemen
and a lot of other countries' policemen
They found it's really unusual to see
policemen actually respond to calls like this.
It's like my chicken when missing
which in a lot of countries,
it wouldn't be the policeman's job to deal with these things.
And I think this is really great drama in that sense
that it introduce this to people who are outside china
who have very different police systems.
It is true that in china community policemen are like this.
And if you wanna research further into this and find it's quite fascinating,
there's a great series.
Although I don't think there's english subtitle,
that's a problem
that's on Bilibili, produced by Bilibili
It's running into its 4th season called
Shou Hu Jie Fang Xi, 守护解放西
which is a documentary.
So it's not a drama.
It's actually going to a Hunan province,
local sort of community based police station
filming their daily life and cases they run into and weird things and
bizarre things and little things that happen everyday.
It's very similar in terms of what those policemen deal with
day in and day out as compared to this drama Jing Cha Rong Yu
I don't think there's another program like that anywhere in this world,
and it's fascinating to see
just how unimaginably weird life can be.
And the weird, little things that doesn't really have a huge consequence
that the policeman have to deal with.
But nonetheless,
almost unimaginable for script writers to create.
So if this drama has sort of excited your desire to
check out more real stuff of community policemen,
I highly highly recommend this series from bilibili
and i'm gonna leave a link in the description,
but then yeah subtitle probably is gonna be a big problem.
So i've said the great things about this drama.
Now let me say why I didn't give it a full three gold mine.
I think as a storytelling of 38 episodes
it still can work a little bit on its structure.
You would almost feel the first half of the drama or like the first
20 episodes and the later
sort of 15 episodes are two different dramas.
And I feel in the process of telling the story,
they still have to resolve to some very,
I wouldn't say tropey
but too familiar ways of setting up characters and resolving them.
There's intentionally set up conflicts and character arcs
that kind of functions as the classic.
We have to have this type of character and plot.
At least once
you almost feel they have to do that.
So at the end,
without spoiling it,
you're gonna come across a characte'rs arc
that resolives in a way that I think is a little bit to
pushing for the dramatic
kind of going against the at the beginning
set up daily routine police work.
So it has the quality of not quite sitting comfortably with itself,
especially as it moved towards the end as they have this
long buried thread of a case that happened earlier,
gradually leading to something and resolving at the end
that is going for the traditionally very heightened dramatic police drama
that I don't think actually it's so well
with the overall tone of this drama.
Also there's another thing I have to warn you.
It could be a really negative thing for you to watch this drama
If you have a very strong sense of empathy
easily get moved by other people's emotion,
the first half of this drama is gonna give you many many
heart attacks and blood pressure explosion moments.
You're gonna come across,
unbearable old men,
insane mothers,
and then they come back over and over and over.
And you feel like your blood boils.
You kind of have to be a saint of patience and kindness,
understanding and generosity,
to be able to sit through all those points and not go exploding
at least once.
And I know it's actually happening everyday in real life.
You would say this is the success of the drama
being able to capture that and put it on screen.
And in the way that is just so convincing and effective.
But also, on the other hand,
you're like life is fxxxx up anyway,
it's 2022
there aren't that many people who are doing very well in this world.
Let's be honest,
like why do I need an extra thing to make me feel
I don't wanna stay on earth anymore?
So that's my warning.
If you are really sensitive, right?
and you know you're gonna get triggered like hell,
warn you
see it coming,
just turn away
mental peace
okay? keep your mental peace
you're gonna need it.
We're all gonna need it for a long time to come.
So that would be my final review on this drama.
I'm very happy I came across this drama.
I enjoyed it immensely.
It's not perfect and it made me very,
very uncomfortable many times,
but doesn't change the fact.
It's a great drama,
it's a rare drama,
it's the one and only almost of a police
drama these days from Chinese dramaland
and I hope this review has been useful for you to decide
whether you should go into watch this community policeman
from China's chicken fly dog jump life, day in, day out.
Thank you for watching AvenueX
I'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.