連續劇

We just finished a Taiwanese soap opera, 超人氣學園. We can buy the Asian soap operas in boxes of 30 to 30 DVDs that (like the one in the photo below that we haven't opened yet) They can be watched gradually at our leisure, which isn't as much as we'd like these days, but at least we don't miss any crucial parts.

This one was very good although as my wife said it has no head 沒有頭 and 沒有尾 no tail. It started out silly and ended without tieing up all the loose ends like a Korean soap opera, but the middle was great. It had good character development and realistic but dramatic plot lines. I even liked the ending because realistically not everything comes together at a certain time and it was upbeat.

One can tell a lot about a culture by its television programming. Asian soap operas are different from their American cousins in that are limited in time. American soap operas go on forever it seems. Some of them have been going on since I was little, though I suppose the characters would have to change. A second thing is that, probably because of their limited duration, there is much more variety in Asian soap operas. Some are funny, some are sentimental, yet others are oriented around suspense.

Regardless of the type, though, especially the Chinese (Taiwanese) and Korean ones are relatively moral. There is never the feeling that we are cheering for characters that are doing the wrong thing.