TearsForFears
London, UK
A VAST IMPROVEMENT ON SEASON 1
Since I didn’t enjoy Season 1 at all (I gave it an overall 3.5 with a 1.5 re-watch value), I was going to give this whole show and its second season a wide berth. BUT I’m actually glad I didn’t, because Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) seems to have finally come into its own in Season 2. It’s a satire that mocks our modern-day conceptions of love, marriage and divorce in a world where real-life is Instagram photo-shopped within an inch of its life that the lines between reality and fantasy are now blurred. We no longer know what’s real, what’s imagined (but not impossible), and what is pure fantasy. So thanks to the C21st digital age, when it comes to romantic love, we speak of meeting “the One” or “our soulmate” whose is “our BFFs”; we have photo-shopped images of the perfect married life and the immaculate family in-tow; celebrity couples use the media to manipulate and spin a story about their imperfect personal lives; the aging couple growing old gracelessly, desperately holding off the ravishes of old age through cosmetic surgeries; and then there is the infamous “conscious uncoupling” scenario of divorced life. The unadulterated practical mundane realities of modern romantic relationships are summarily thrown out of the window. And I think it is this picture of modern romance that the writer takes a vicious and visceral axe to. And I loved it.
I’ll stand by my original feelings about this show re: Season 1. It was still flawed in my view in terms of structure, editing and pacing (and those flaws are still present in this current season), but there were nevertheless hints of it satirising our modern expectations of married life in Season 1, though its flaws tended to camouflage it. For instance, right from the get-go, the three wives set the stage for what is to come: they’ve such unrealistic views of what makes a good marriage that is based on marital fidelity, it’s only a matter of time for those views to be tested. We also have the three woman representing three types of wives: the image-driven celebrity wife made up with an ironically ridiculous Raccoon-eye get-up; the Stepford wife who, haunted by a divorce-driven childhood, takes up Proverbs 31 as her blueprint of living out the perfect noble wife; and finally the woman who sacrificed her life, inheritance and own wealthy family for an impoverished man, she ended up a 50-year-old Martyred Doormat on the altar of the traditional view of what is believed makes for the ‘perfect’ wife. And of course, there are the various reasons why a husband might stray: some of them coming from quite tragic yet still hurtful circumstances (the 50 year old professor, who having not being the main breadwinner, affects his feelings of the kind of man he traditionally believes a husband should be/ought to have been); others are purely ridiculous and stupid (the 40-year-old who has it all but for that apple as he plays Adam to Ah Mi’s tempting Eve); and yet others are due to lack of communication and unrealistic expectations from one another (the career-driven 30 year-olds who have to contend with the modern-day dilemma, stresses and struggles of having a career, maintaining a marriage, and raising children). So in this drama we have different ideas of what constitutes the ‘perfect’ marriage through the POV of four different generations over four ages: the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds, the 50 year olds and the 60s.
To its credit (at least for me), the drama comes into its own in Season 2, yet again (with its Season 1 flaws still intact) it does take its time getting there, I think. But there again, maybe that is the whole point. Just as it aims to satirise modern-day romantic expectations of an Instagram image-conscious world, it also seeks to up- end those same expectations its audience may unconsciously hold in itself. Given time, we soon discover that the joke is on us as much as it is on the characters, once we realise that this drama is not going to give us a rose-tinted view. Married life (featuring love) is messy, sometimes painful, and at times mundane. It’s hard-work, requiring patience, honesty, understanding, compromise and communication. It means being practical and realistic. It demands that we don’t take our spouses for granted. Our expectations change over a course of a married life or even within a couple of years into it. Tragically, affairs and divorce are often the last resort when it all becomes too much for some. But for this drama at least, the key is not to come to it with any expectation of a straight-forward dramatic treatment on infidelity, in which the audience is looking for revenge and retribution against the adulterous husbands and justice for their betrayed wives, which has the hallmark of a 1990s mind-set if I'm honest. Given the modern depiction to varying degrees of strong independently-minded women, with careers of their own, not even the wronged wives are looking for that, because that's just too easy for men while the women still lose out. And that’s progress of a sort, surely. So no, this was never going to be a straight-forward realist drama but a satirical one that makes fun of the whole idea of the perfect romance, love and marriage set-up while casting a disapproving eye on the way it is often handled.
I’ll stand by my original feelings about this show re: Season 1. It was still flawed in my view in terms of structure, editing and pacing (and those flaws are still present in this current season), but there were nevertheless hints of it satirising our modern expectations of married life in Season 1, though its flaws tended to camouflage it. For instance, right from the get-go, the three wives set the stage for what is to come: they’ve such unrealistic views of what makes a good marriage that is based on marital fidelity, it’s only a matter of time for those views to be tested. We also have the three woman representing three types of wives: the image-driven celebrity wife made up with an ironically ridiculous Raccoon-eye get-up; the Stepford wife who, haunted by a divorce-driven childhood, takes up Proverbs 31 as her blueprint of living out the perfect noble wife; and finally the woman who sacrificed her life, inheritance and own wealthy family for an impoverished man, she ended up a 50-year-old Martyred Doormat on the altar of the traditional view of what is believed makes for the ‘perfect’ wife. And of course, there are the various reasons why a husband might stray: some of them coming from quite tragic yet still hurtful circumstances (the 50 year old professor, who having not being the main breadwinner, affects his feelings of the kind of man he traditionally believes a husband should be/ought to have been); others are purely ridiculous and stupid (the 40-year-old who has it all but for that apple as he plays Adam to Ah Mi’s tempting Eve); and yet others are due to lack of communication and unrealistic expectations from one another (the career-driven 30 year-olds who have to contend with the modern-day dilemma, stresses and struggles of having a career, maintaining a marriage, and raising children). So in this drama we have different ideas of what constitutes the ‘perfect’ marriage through the POV of four different generations over four ages: the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds, the 50 year olds and the 60s.
To its credit (at least for me), the drama comes into its own in Season 2, yet again (with its Season 1 flaws still intact) it does take its time getting there, I think. But there again, maybe that is the whole point. Just as it aims to satirise modern-day romantic expectations of an Instagram image-conscious world, it also seeks to up- end those same expectations its audience may unconsciously hold in itself. Given time, we soon discover that the joke is on us as much as it is on the characters, once we realise that this drama is not going to give us a rose-tinted view. Married life (featuring love) is messy, sometimes painful, and at times mundane. It’s hard-work, requiring patience, honesty, understanding, compromise and communication. It means being practical and realistic. It demands that we don’t take our spouses for granted. Our expectations change over a course of a married life or even within a couple of years into it. Tragically, affairs and divorce are often the last resort when it all becomes too much for some. But for this drama at least, the key is not to come to it with any expectation of a straight-forward dramatic treatment on infidelity, in which the audience is looking for revenge and retribution against the adulterous husbands and justice for their betrayed wives, which has the hallmark of a 1990s mind-set if I'm honest. Given the modern depiction to varying degrees of strong independently-minded women, with careers of their own, not even the wronged wives are looking for that, because that's just too easy for men while the women still lose out. And that’s progress of a sort, surely. So no, this was never going to be a straight-forward realist drama but a satirical one that makes fun of the whole idea of the perfect romance, love and marriage set-up while casting a disapproving eye on the way it is often handled.
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