Xing Chen Ling (2024)

Starts As One Type of Show, Morphs Into Another

Four Immortals descend from the Heavenly realm at different times in order to collect a series of artifacts and stop the Heavenly Tribulation once and for all.

The show itself is a glaringly low budget Xanxia all the way through. Bright stage lights, bad make-up, awful wigs and costumes, flat cgi backgrounds, and MUCH more. The beginning of the show though treats all of these aspects as a comedy, having you watch the show knowing just how bad it looks and knowing it is deliberately making light of all these aspects. In this way the show falls into a very niche category of so deliberately bad it's amazingly good.

But then the show continues and with each episode there seems to be less and less deliberate comedy infused until suddenly you're watching a "serious" Xanxia but it's still just as low budget and bad looking. By this point you might find yourself wondering whether it is worth it to continue the show; after all, it still is lacking the emotional depth of the beginning and yet the scenes are calling for an emotional response that doesn't seem to want to come.

I finished the show liking it "okay" enough but with an absolute lack of the enthusiasm I'd had during the initial episodes. Instead, it left me frustrated with how to rate the show as a whole production and wondering if there were multiple writers and/or directors attached to the project.

In the end I would recommend this show for anyone who likes "so bad it's good" productions, light-handed absurdist comedy, BUT ALSO, "generic" angsty Xanxia without comedy. If you go into the show KNOWING that the comedy ends and the generic begins around the halfway/three-quarters point and like both types of shows then this will still be an okay show for you.

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Could have been a gem

I saw the trailer for this, and it looked insanely bad, so if course I decided to watch it. It's a mini dramas, so what harm?
I was greatly taken by surprise to find it hilarious. Every overused trope in xianxia was used and ridiculed. Even when they were being 'serious' the cast were sending a little wink our way, and it was delightful.
At some point however, roughly half way through, this little comedy, no budget drama, that had used it's shortcomings as strengths, decided to take itself very seriously indeed. The comedy flew out the window, the acting flew out the window, and left us with no option but to be held to notice, almost at gunpoint, everything lacking in this drama that the comedy has previously used to captivate us. The episodes may have been short, but this is still bloated at 48 episodes.
I thought this was going to be a little hidden gem, but alas, yet another disaster from xianxia storytelling. If I found out that there were two different directors for the first and second half of this series, I would not be surprised.

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