In the footsteps and in the spirit of the late filmmaker Chi Po-lin, A Thousand Goodnights weaves the story of a people into the story of a land. As expected and as required, the cinematography makes the island of Taiwan the true star and that is what you should really come to see.

Did you come for romance? While individual characters come close and their hearts meet, romance is not the point. The romance is with the land and with the notion of home. People love and live within that context. This is more about reconciliation, about healing both the land and the people.

The story begins with a travelogue that becomes more charming every episode. Each destination raises questions and the determination of the leads to answer all of them and find closure is beautifully portrayed. The way in which the characters grow together is natural and organic and reminds us that love does not need to have fireworks. I was not terribly fond of the Yilan arc from ep 14 to 18, which had much family melodrama, but the story recovers and I had no regrets about watching it in the end.

The casting was, as far as I can tell, careless and not done by expert hands. The acting was very uneven and by far the weakest part of the series. I only really loved Yao Ai-ning and Yang Jie-mei in their parts, and the old veteran Chen Bo-zheng was acting circles around the whole lot of them. I really, really did not even want to look at Lu Bei-an's character. My biggest problem, though, was that I could never bring myself to like the lead even though I liked the character's design. I don't like her looks, I don't like her acting, and something was so weird about her elocution that it sounded off even to someone like me who is not at all intimate with spoken Mandarin.

I don't usually make separate mention of the music but this one contained a rather interesting mix of both soaring and intimate documentary music with songs about romance and longing mixed in. Just when you think you're getting tired of the piano in the background it does something to make you forget that it's there.

I felt that this series was created by artists who wanted nothing more than to pay tribute to a master of the arts and to tell me what they love about their people and the country they live in. So yes, I'm scoring some of its individual components lower but in the end it's about how much I liked it and I am also rating the work for the vision and the heart that went into it.