Things I checked out that did not click
Now, you can see a lot of posts about stuff I am watching that I am enjoying more or less but this post is dedicated to all the stuff I checked out and went nope nope noppio.
Halef: Call of the Ancestors - I don’t know what ML Serhat’s ancestors called for, but my ancestors, being caring individuals, would have 100% called on me to peace out of something that over the top and boring at once. I am a filial individual so I did.
Basically, this is what you’d get if you put Ask Ve Ceza into a stupidity blender. Our ML, Serhat, is a brilliant Istanbul surgeon who marries an Istanbul (?) girl Melek after the least interesting and chemistry lacking courtship ever. Oops, he’s secretly actually a clan head somewhere deserty and old school and he has to go there and marry his arranged bride Yildiz to end a feud. What’s better than one wife? Why, two, of course.
Yes, instead of a proper love triangle, we are gonna get a man who has two wives for a while, as one does. No, I am not kidding.
This show doesn’t have a terrible premise per se (see Ask ve Ceza) but it fumbles it in every conceivable way. His arranged bride, Yildiz, for example - we are told that she wants to get married because she thinks Serhat will let her go to university and that’s her one life goal. That is honestly incredibly sympathetic but they first turn her into a scheming villain who is very hard to like and then into a man-obsessed saint who puts Serhat on a pedestal and for whom every word of his is law. I don’t really expect some epically feminist narrative in this set up but that is ridiculous by Turkish show own standards! I mean, Uzak Sehir and TBD are both set in rural conservative areas and somehow manage to be in another universe as far as this sort of thing is concerned! Or Hercai even (or if we go way back, Sila and Ask ve Ceza again.) Even dizis set in super conservative religious settings like Omer and that one with silver fox daddy the name of which I am too lazy to look up take better views on women!
That Yildiz is his destined endgame (a man who prefers an old school woman over a modern wife he himself chose is a hard narrative to pull off) is the least of Serhat’s issues. Ilhan Sen is a ridiculously hot man but no levels of hotness can save that character. Serhat is hot yes but he’s also self-absorbed, weak, wishy washy. It would be one thing if the show agreed with me and wanted to take us on a journey about a flawed man but it does not. He’s apparently a dream with a mustache.
As to Melek, poor Aybuke Pusat - that character is so inconsistent and so poorly written, I can’t even say anything. I want her to go back to Istanbul, get a divorce and live laugh love in a yoga studio around no men but perhaps some personality classes.
The ultimate sin tho is it’s so freaking dull. The first ep had a forced wedding and a patricide and it was still boring. That’s a feat.
Guller ve Gunahlar - one ep of this one was also enough. I love Murat Yildirim but I don’t love any actor enough for this one. He is a perfect man who discovers his perfect wife had a secret child who’s now six during marriage, not with him. (How did the logistics work? Why didn’t she get an abortion which she could afford? Why didn’t she scheme to pass it as his? Why’d she blab to people? Who even knows.) Wife is now in a coma, child is dumped on his lap, he hires child’s pushy neighbor, our female lead, to look after her. Cemre Baysel is lovely but her character is awfully shrill and hot tempered in a way that passes for strong willed in a badly written show. It especially seems out of place in fancy upper class set up with a very reserved male lead.
Also, I am used to contrived set ups but why our ML doesn’t just pay someone to take the kid away and keep her somewhere else with a caretaker instead of keeping her in his house is beyond me; not like he’s feeling charitable towards the kid - he’s understandably mad about the whole situation.
All the characters are either unlikable, uninteresting or both, and there is a viewer-genre mismatch since I rarely like soapy doings of a rich family in Istanbul subgenre without more. It’s not me, it’s you, show!
Moving on to China - Fate Chooses You. It’s so boring I keep spacing out. It has interesting concepts but wrapped into such a dull narrative and with actors who are going through the motions. Fate does not choose me to watch this mess.
Then there is last but not least A Lover In the Mortal World which I knew I was not going to like when it opened on our FL swathed in a ton of red gauze standing in the middle of the desert. How did she drag that train through the dirt and why did she climb on a hill in the middle of nowhere and how is she going to get back and will she experience severe dehydration?
Will I finally find a new show to love
Voting ended onMay 9
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