Odd Perfect Match (2011)

This drama was personally painful to get through for more reasons than one. I decided to watch it because its plot reminded me of In Between, another drama about a novelist whose writing gets intertwined with his love interest and daily life. I like the concept overall and thought I’d give another drama with the same premise a shot, but...

Like any drama, Odd Perfect Match had its good and bad points. It’s just unfortunate for this one that its bad points far outweighed the things it did well, like humor. If all this drama focused on was delivering humorous scenes, I would have scored it much higher because when it didn’t take itself seriously and poked fun at the ridiculous situations the nonsensical characters were involved in, it was a joy to watch. Those types of scene are numerous in the first few episodes, but slowly fade away until only one of the supporting couples are left to carry the torch.

This lack of humor is made more evident by the negative aspects of the drama, largely its acting and execution. The story itself is pretty average by drama standards, and if it wasn’t bogged down by actors that sounded and acted like they were merely reciting lines they had rote memorized for a subject they haven’t the slightest interest in, it might actually have had some merit. The worst offender was Chen Shawn who plays the second male lead Ding Hai Mo, but others (Wang Shuan, Wu Maggie, etc.) also suffered from this Robot Syndrome that had me rolling my eyes and zoning out for long stretches of time.

Another fault I have with this drama, as mentioned earlier, is its execution. Basically, almost every character is shaped by their unbelievably tragic pasts filled with all sorts of emotional trauma. The notion that this trauma has stunted their growth is sort of present during the storyline, but mostly it just felt like the writers wanting to use any means possible for the audience to feel sympathy for these one-dimensional characters. Bad things happened in their past, and that’s the scope of their character. The writers thought, I guess, that that’s all we need to go by.

This is kind of redeemed in the last three episodes (by far the best of the drama, if you get that far), in which the characters finally stop acting so robotized, learn how to cry properly, discover they are adults and they do in fact have control of their own lives and decisions, and have massive amounts of character growth that had been missing for the ten or so episodes during which nothing of importance really happened.

Gao Godfrey and Yang Ming Wei were the only actors whose performance was the least bit entertaining/up to standard (and even they fall flat sometimes. Especially in those middle episodes...) All of the female characters are either annoying as a high-pitched whistle is to a dog’s ear, or have the intelligence of a 5-year-old (looking at you Tseng Alice / Huai Zheng -.-). This is just my opinion of course, but I didn’t find any of the characters really likeable in any way, just some were easier to take for long stretches of time than others.

All in all, I would tell anyone to skip this drama unless they are die-hard fans of the main leads (and even then, prepare yourself for some low-quality acting). The story is all right, but it’s executed so poorly that any of its greater points gets lost in the mess of bad acting and monotony. If anything, skip to the last three episodes. Everything that happens then is all you really need to know to get the gist of the story and its, I suppose, reasonably satisfying conclusion. Nothing is left unresolved, at least.

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