This summer, I've embarked on a quest to improve my grasp of Chinese (Mandarin), and part of that involves watching Chinese movies and TV shows in the original language. I can understand about half of what is being said if I forego English subtitles, but I've been leaving them on to help with the other half.
I just finished this "C-drama" (Chinese drama) and highly recommend it for anyone who likes crime thrillers. It streams on Amazon Prime or you can find it on YouTube. If you have Prime, I would recommend using that because the picture and sound quality is much better. (The only advantage of the YouTube feed is if you want to follow the Chinese subtitling, which is readable if you turn off the English CC. Amazon, for understandable reasons, stripped the Chinese subtitling, which is otherwise standard for Chinese movies and shows.)
Anyway, "Love Me If You Dare" (or "He Comes Now, Please Close Your Eyes" in Chinese) is something like Silence of the Lambs if it had a rom-com element to it. The main characters are Bo Jin Yan aka Simon and Jian Yao aka Jenny. Names are given in traditional Chinese format, so Simon's surname is Bo and Jenny's is Jian. Professor Bo is a brilliant criminal psychologist with near zero EQ. He spent some time in the U.S. where he was captured by a serial killer known as the Flower Cannibal but managed to escape and is now recuperating back in China. He hires Jian, who is finishing college, to assist him in solving, as he puts it, cases involving the worst and most devious killers.
The first few episodes involve Bo and Jian chasing someone who has been abducting young boys and killing them in a gruesome fashion. With enough clues, Bo can sort of envision the crime from the killer's point-of-view (not unlike, say, Will Graham in Manhunter), and then he condescendingly prods Jian into figuring things out herself. This is the pattern for the first 3/4 of the series, before things kick into high gear.
Some of the rest of the case (to mention all of the characters would give away too much) include Fu Zi Yi, who is Bo's only friend and a tech genius (and my favorite character of the series for the comic edge that he added); and Li Xun Ran, who is a police officer and childhood friend of Jian's.
Lead actor Wallace Hou has a tough job, but succeeds in portraying Bo's supreme intelligence and his social awkwardness, and yet making the chemistry with Jian seem believable. Lead actress Ma Sichun (aka Sandra Ma) is terrific as Jian, showing her to be smart and fesity. In the later part of the show, she has less to do but even then Ma does some incredible acting, including one scene that's heartbreaking to watch. Yin Zheng (aka Andrew Yin) steals every scene he's in as Fu, and Wang Kai plays Li as a serious, dedicated police officer.
The production values are good. The music, in particular, really captures the mood of the show, from the creepy, "X-Files"-like main theme, to the light and funny rom-com ditty when the show veers away from the mysteries toward the developing relationship between Bo and Jian.
There's one really weird thing about the show, though. There are numerous scenes where Chinese characters speak to American characters, and everyone speaks in their own language without interpreters, yet everyone (save for one scene) understands everyone else. There aren't that many non-Chinese speakers of Mandarin in the United States...
Anyway, I really enjoyed this show. I picked up some new Chinese vocabulary, although I'm not sure how useful these words will be on a practical level for me: "perverted" (bian tai de), "victim" (so hai zhe), "fingerprint" (zhi wen), and so on.
