Interesting series that has the potential to change Taiwan's television market

I’ve been exploring international TV series since the start of quarantine. I’ve seen quite a few series from different regions of Asia and recently I’ve come across some shows from Taiwan. After seeing one of the supporting actresses in another show I decided to watch this as the plot also seemed interesting.

The show's overall concept is intriguing. The main plot point is about a website Futmalls, acronym for Future mall, that’s used to purchase products from the future. With a length of eight episodes and a tale of three separate stories intertwined with the same characters, we see how these future products affect the people who purchase them and those around them. When rating a show I hold the standards to that of the region it was produced in. Kdramas for example have a pretty large international market which allows them to produce high quality series, having a very large budget and all. For this reason my expectations for the quality of Kdramas are normally quite high. Taiwanese cinema is a relatively smaller market and there’s no series or films that really stand out on the global scale. So my expectations are gradually lower. However I think shows like Futmalls will start the uprising of a new wave of cinema in Taiwan.

I’ll start with the strong points of the show. The acting is very good and the cast really sells their performance however this can sometimes be ruined by the bad writing and sloppy editing which I will get into later. The series is very psychological and doesn’t give too much backstory until the end and I found the cast did an amazing job with their performance on endorsing characters who have gone through trauma. For example in story 3 Chien-Ho Wu does a stellar performance of playing an introverted scientist with little social life, he keeps the audience guessing whether he’s the suspect or not until the very end. For the second story Phoebe Huang did an amazing job of playing a grieving mother, I personally think the second story was the best because of how well Cheng-Hen Chu (who played her husband) and Huang embraced their roles of parents dealing with loss. Considering the budget this show had, the special effects were really well done and it never seemed fake and it never took me out of the story, of all things to me it really increased the quality of the show. I applaud the VFX artists and special effects team. One of the strongest points of the show is how they don’t present information to the audience and how they deliver characters' backstories at the right time.

On the other hand the weaker points of the show was the writing, editing and sound design. Although I did say the concept of Futmalls is interesting, the writing of certain episodes and character backgrounds has me conflicted. For example Eugenie Liu (who I consider to currently be a breakout actress from Taiwan) plays a therapist. However she seems to be self conscious about a scar on her face, it doesn’t make sense that her literal job is to help others mental health when she herself seems so caught up about receiving a cut on her face that happened so long ago. Another thing this show falls victim to is plot holes. The whole idea of purchasing products from a website that appears and disappears is intriguing however we soon discover the products are delivered by people. When the police do arrest one of the deliverymen they do not follow up and ask where the products come from, rather they let the episode finish and we never see him again. The deliveryman is used as a weak link to conclude the second story. It would’ve been a lot more intriguing if the products had just appeared at each character's house with no other context. Making the delivery of products more mysterious was a huge miss by the writing team in my opinion. Other problems I found is how easily everyone seems to accept that products come from the future. The police have multiple people who have used the Futmalls site and the site is what fuels the whole plot of the show, but again there’s no follow up or questioning them.

Now to me the editing was really inconsistent. Sometimes it propelled the show to new levels and other times it took it down a few notches. For example the scene where Phoebe Huang (the grieving mother in story 2) is seen chasing around her kid on the school grounds is a beautifully constructed sequence, but in the last episode when the two police brothers, played by Bryan Chang and Wei-Ji, are searching a dark building for the kidnapped Bai Yong Xin (played by Yu-Wei) they have their guns drawn and flashlights in one hand, but when they exit the building their flashlights suddenly disappear and they’re holding their guns with both hands. Another thing I found to be quite problematic is during climax sequences for whatever reason the editors decide to lower the frames and so the scene plays out choppy, I don’t know if this is an effect used in asian dramas, but to me it looked amateurish and did not in any way heighten the emotions of the scene.

The sound design is the weakest part of the series. To me the use of music was horrendous. It seemed like whoever was in charge of sound didn’t know the basic rules of film and sound. Music is like sauce. It’s there to make the main dish better, but if you put too little it’s noticeable and if you put too much it becomes uneatable. In this case the dish was uneatable. It seemed like during every dramatic moment the wrong sauces were used, it was like someone searched up into youtube: “Dramatic cinema music” and then pasted it on the scene without ever listening to the track. Music is supposed to heighten what you already see on screen, however every time there was a scene with music in Futmalls it took me out of the story because of how badly it didn’t fit and this was mainly during scenes of climax which made it worse.

Now the reason I pointed out so many cons is that I hope this can be fixed for season 2. The show has its fair share of corny moments, but it also delivers some tremendous moments of cinema. I know that if we compared this show to other shows in the west or Kdramas, it’s not on the same level, however I hold my standards to each region separately and I was really impressed with a lot of aspects of Futmalls and what it was able to accomplish in just eight episodes. Unlike some Kdramas that drag on forever, Futmalls pacing seemed well constructed given how short the show was. I feel the cast did an incredible job with their characters and this show could potentially make way for the Taiwanese market to produce more interesting content on an even higher level and for this reason I rated it a 9 overall.

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