2011 wasn't a very good year for TVB. It reinforced the accusations that people often made of how the company rehashes old ideas, plagiarizes, and really bad scriptwriting.
Decent Series
The Other Truth
Ghetto Justice
7 Days In Life
Only You
The Rippling Blossom
Entertaining but not w/o Major Plot Issues
River of Wine
Grace Under Fire
Lives of Omission
WTH TVB? (The worst of the worst)
Links to Temptation
Super Snoops
I'm not going to mention the other mediocre ones but I'd like to gloss over each of the categories I've mentioned up there.
Due to the case by case format that The Other Truth, Ghetto Justice, and Only You all had in common, they were more entertaining and easier to follow through that most of 2011's dramas because they didn't have me constantly shouting at the screen consistently for inconsistent character and plot developments. Only You was entertaining to watch overall but no one particularly shone for me. However, I dare say that Keith (Ruco) and Law Ba (Kevin) shouldered a fair amount of weight in pushing the plot somewhere and keeping me engaged with their well written characters. Solid acting does help of course. 7 Days in Life and Rippling Blossom were both enjoyable comedies in their own right though not deserving of any awards.
Lives of Omission was overhyped. Trying to ignore the completely inaccurate portrayal of the triads in Hong Kong and undercover work, I genuinely was absorbed for about the first 10-12 episodes. But as the story progressed, the story become more and more unbelievable in terms of plot consistency and character consistency. Nevertheless, it was still a good watch but nothing worthy of having a movie spawned off the series.
-_-. River of Wine was surprisingly very engaging and entertaining but unfortunately, as others have pointed out on their blogs or on forum posts, it became a victim of poor script writing and the character focus went out of control and Pierre's character more and more reminiscent of the one he played in Rosy Business. Same goes for Grace Under Fire. I already wrote a review about this in the previous post so I'm not going to elaborate further but yet again, bad script writing strikes.
Super Snoops was just.... no words can describe how ridiculous that show was. Liza Wang should consider retiring from acting soon or at least find better characters to flex her acting muscles because her roles in the past half decade or so have been horrendous. Links of Temptation started off interesting but spiraled downhill into a cheap, poorly-executed revenge story. Nuff said.
In summation, this year of TVB dramas has made me lose faith in TVB's management, production quality, and scriptwriters. None of the "decent series" noted above felt worthy of the title "Best Drama". Kevin Cheng delivered a fine performance in Ghetto Justice but if anything, his sweep at the awards ceremony should be attributed instead to his rising popularity in the mainland from the aftermath of Bu Bu Jing Xin. I'm not entirely unhappy that he sweeped because most of the other nominees weren't more deserving but I felt that Ruco deserved an award for his excellent performance in The Other Truth. Also, although I felt like it wasn't the right time either for Linda to truly deserve receiving an award for her performance in YSSS, I don't think Myolie's Sze Fu was deserving of favorite female character award either. It was a little heartbreaking to see the disappointment that Linda faced after all that hype about a "sure win" on her part for that particular category. One more thing, as much as I like Tavia as an actress, she appeared way too often this year for my taste and with similar "weak-woman" roles that only seem to provide the main protagonist with a flower vase as a love interest. Her role in the Other Truth wasn't too bad though.
Gems of 2011: Ruco Chan in the Other Truth
Notable Performances of 2011: Kevin Cheng, Myolie Wu
Kicking and Screaming: Links to Temptation, Super Snoops, Men With No Shadows, Relic.... the list goes on and on and I don't want to harp on this too much.
