Heartbeat Love (2021)

Short and sweet love story

This is a mini drama. The female lead is a female lead inside an manga novel. She needs to get out of the novel to try to find the author to continue the story. She gets out and meets the male lead. The male lead is a science major and not very sociable. The female lead is a mary sue character (which is dumb and naive but cute) . At first the male lead is just interested in studying her, but then decides to help her get back to the novel. Along the way even the suppose male lead from the manga pops out. He is very chauvinistic and think he owns everything . ( at the same time his character is funny)

It's a cute watch without nothing too dramatic or draggy. The story is interesting and funny. The leads have a cute relationship! but wish they had kissing scene. They had a peck on the head.

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A load of twaddle but thankfully it is short

Other than a few cute moments, there is very little about this show that is original or special. The plot is super tropey. Everything is done in a fairly simplistic way. There was a twist towards the end that was necessary to make the plot work and tie up the loose ends but it had marginal emotional impact. That sort of sums up the problem with this show, it tried to deliver the goods but the script and acting were not up to the task.

Speaking of acting, it ranged from passable to bad. The brainy ML is like a block of wood most of the time. He has very little facial expressions and his delivery is weak. He is an idol and certainly has the looks. Maybe this show was created so that his team can test the water with a tentative foray into the acting world. Let's just say, at this point in time, he shouldn't give up his day job. The 2ML (pulled from the manhua) is very annoying. Yes, he was role playing but his character is so unlikeable, it just make you want to cringe every time he shows up. His habit of starting every sentence addressed to a female with "Woman, ...." is so condescending that I wanted to start a new #tag movement to hunt him down. He did tone it down towards the end but for a good 2/3 of the show, he was just a buffoon and not particularly funny.

The female leads fared better but they have very straightforward roles and were straightjacketed by their characters. They did their best but it is hardly breakout roles. Most of the support casts were amateur hour material and one dimensional.
They also played the fish out of water trope for all its worth but this is old hat nowadays with the predisposition of recent c-dramas to drop M/FL from the present into ancient/mythical Chinese settings and vice versa.

Honestly, I am not against this type of short form web dramas but they still need to hang together with a decent script and some acting chop. I have watched other short form dramas where it is done with 3 or 4 actors and a couple of rooms as sets and they were compelling and engaging. This show had bigger ambition, a sizeable cast and probably a decent budget but it just come across as try hard. Shows should not automatically get a get out of jail card free just because of its format.

The short web episode format worked against them in this case as well. In a typical 11-12 minutes run, around 3 minutes is taken up by the intro and outro. What is left just felt jumpy and insubstantial before the end credit rolls again. An edited version of several 30 minutes episodes might work better as it will lets the story flow more organically and sustain a narrative without having to fight with all the stop-start editing.

In the end, there was just enough cuteness and fragile hope for me to stay. It never quite delivered but the ending was as sweet as you'd expect so it was true to form.

One time watch and one time listen. Peace out.

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