My Week in Dramas 28 August 2025

I detect a disturbing trend in C dramas of late especially with regard to female centered historical dramas. Either the quality of said dramas are deteriorating rapidly or the good ones are going under the radar. The latest of these is Legend of the Female General. I had the lowest possible expectations going in (minus zero as a matter of fact) and the show is even worse than I had imagined. Up to now The Legend of Anle has been the dud of all duds for me and this one is fast becoming a contender for that ignominious position. Compare the titles and the similarities are chilling. The relentless pangs of second-hand embarrassment experienced here is almost unprecedented. One thought reverberates: Who wrote this piece of cringe? It has the hackery of a low budget production yet there are enough decent action set pieces whitewash the show’s fatal flaws. Lately it seems like every single historical drama is being squashed into the Cinderella mould in the same way that every fast food eatery is now selling deep fried chicken. He Yan (Zhou Ye) routinely parrots the line that she out to get everything back that’s hers. She dances/trains with the suspicious princely commander, Xiao Jue (Ryan Cheng) after dark, while hiding her “true identity” in men’s weeds. Here Cinderella doesn’t have a step-sister but a dastardly brother who rides on the coattails of his sister’s hard won achievements after going AWOL for a time.

Zhou Ye, in my view is miscast as the titular character — not my idea of a military type, male or female. No doubt she was picked because she doesn’t look anything like warrior but a candy female lead from a rom com. She’s stumbled into the wrong drama but unabashedly (albeit unconvincingly) trying to make the best out of a terrible hand. She’s adept at wielding blades but lacks the heft and dexterity when brandishing larger weapons. I don’t object to the female general trope on principle as I’ve watched a few short dramas centred around those but this one was badly done Emma!

Also baffling is the choice by the protagonist to go for a cocky, brash disguise under the suspicious eye of Xiao Jue. The braggadocio is completely wrongheaded and comes across as flirty and overdone cute instead. Considering what’s at stake, it’s silly to take that approach and bring so much attention to herself. It isn’t as if she’s unfamiliar with the brooding Xiao Jue either, considering their history. Moreover the fact that they have a history opens another can of worms that all the lampshading in the world can’t fix.

I might not have objected to the lighthearted tone if it weren’t for that dark ominous start. There was a massacre of 30 000 men on the battlefield and a good man’s reputation has been sullied. So why is that? The contrast is stark. What exactly am I supposed to be watching? A revenge story? Court conspiracy? Situational comedy? A high school romance? A reverse harem in the making? Trying to appeal to as many as possible often means that we all end up treading shallow waters. Any kind of seriousness in this show is almost immediately undercut by levity — none of which, so far, is at all amusing. Or helpful.

I’m not sure what the show is doing right that it is as popular as it is. Apart from the eye candy, it doesn’t do much well or anything original to warrant the hype. More often than not the show reverts to overused rom com tropes with more cheese than my local supermarket. It’s becoming evident that C drama productions are less and less interested in telling a good story as much as exploiting an existing IP as a soap box for some girl power agenda.

Of course we can’t leave out the antagonists in this discussion, who are anodyne to the point of being forgettable. Their motivations are unclear, weak or not stated. Brother He Rufei falls into the category of a moustache twirling villain of a cartoon. Others go through the motions with chips of varying sizes on their shoulders with all the complexity of a piece of cardboard.

Serves me right for getting sucked in because Ryan Cheng looked so fine in the trailers romancing Zhou Ye. Despite my misgivings about Zhou Ye, I tricked myself into thinking that at least the romance would save the show.

On the K drama front it’s Beyond the Bar that’s got my attention. It’s the Lee Jin-uk factor and five episodes later it’s still the Lee Jin-uk factor that’s keeping me coming back for more. On the surface it seems to be about the inner workings of the SK litigation procedures. Certainly there is an element of that but what this drama is really about is the human heart. It’s an anthropological exploration of motivation. Human nature is a battleground of desires which lead to complex and contradictory choices. The cases are fairly straightforward and while things might not be what they seem at the start, good and nasty fall along obvious lines. As always these stories of ordinary people speak to contemporaneous issues that occupy the minds of the Korean public as they navigate the challenges of modernity.

Yoon Seok-hun (Lee Jin-uk) is the top litigator and partner in Yulim, one of the top law firms in the country. At first glance, he styles himself as the curmudgeon but it’s mostly a bit of theatre to get the novices to toe the line. Under the crusty exterior is a soft centre that beats the heart of a father in search of parenthood. He has his brood of new “associates” to whip into shape and the most diligent of the lot is Kang Hyo-min (Jung Chae-yon) a highly regarded if scatty SNU graduate. It’s hard to say at this point if romance is on the cards — it won’t be the first or the last onscreen mentor-pupil romance. In the episodes that I’ve seen, he’s barking orders and playing the sage to the more impulsive student who can be seen gazing at him during unguarded moments in undiluted admiration.

Some short C drama recommendations:

In the vein of You Are My Glory, is this romance between an actress and a geologist with a hidden identity. Liu Xiyu and Liu Lanbo play the said couple. The female lead is experiencing depression as a result of a scandal with her ex-boyfriend and lack of support from her agency. It sounds all too familiar. They first meet when she attends a lecture on behalf of her bestie. He’s the lecturer and she’s smitten at first sight. After her very public break-up, she encounters the geologist again and is determined to make him hers. Carrying around some baggage of his own, he doesn’t say “yes” straight away so it’s a bit of a slowburn. But as soon as his defences are down, the sparks start to fly. It’s not a recent drama but the leads are very attractive.

This is a good rebirth drama featuring Wang Jiamao as the emperor and Zhang Chuxuan as the reborn favoured consort trying to change her trajectory of the previous lifetime. I haven’t seen the earlier versions of this storyline but this is palace intrigue done decently with the female lead dodging swords from her own sister and other members of the harem. It’s really nice to see a clever emperor for a change maneuvering behind the scenes playing the optics game with so much flair. The romance is pretty good too. Overall this is probably my favourite role of Wang Jiamao.

This is another rebirth drama about two sisters who are reborn and swap trajectories — a storyline that has been done many times whether modern or period. A word of warning: This one is very bleak and violent. It goes into domestic violence, rape and sex trafficking. In the previous timeline, the female lead stayed with her father and ungrateful brothers while her sister followed her mother to live with the step family. It didn’t end well for either then but to the sister the grass was greener on the other side. The moral of these types of stories is not only that you can change your “destiny”, so to speak, but that the outcomes are not the result of external forces but on personal effort and virtue.

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