Review

reviewer LL's Musing
Daddy Good Deeds (當旺爸爸)
This was actually one of the more watchable series from this year -- for a light-hearted comedy, this series definitely does deliver the goods. One of the things I enjoyed most was the witty dialogue, which was delivered with the right amount of comedic timing by the cast – the unique thing about the script was the rhyming dialogue that was interspersed throughout the series, which I felt was quite clever, especially since the way they worked that dialogue in, it sounded very natural and effortless (at certain points, I didn’t even realize the dialogue rhymed until someone pointed it out to me).

The other thing I liked about the series were the pop culture references, many of which were unique to HK culture. This is where I need to give props to the scriptwriters for being brave enough to go down this route because it’s definitely risky, since having too many HK pop culture references and ‘inside jokes’ that most likely only Cantonese-speakers would understand / appreciate limits the potential for this series to break out into other markets. But I guess as long as the HK audiences are able to relate and appreciate the series, that’s what matters most, since the ratings are based on HK audiences. Oh, and I have to mention the ‘guest star’ thing that they did in this series – though it wasn’t unique (TVB has done it before in other series), it was definitely fun to see who would pop up next and under what circumstances. I had read somewhere that some audiences felt the ‘guest star’ thing was merely a ‘gimmick’ to get people to continue chasing the series (curiosity factor) -- yes, that’s probably true but my thought on this is that as long as they incorporated the guest stars in a way that made sense (and didn’t just put them in randomly for the heck of it), then gimmick or no gimmick, I’m fine with it.

One last note….originally, I decided to watch this series primarily because of Steven Ma (since this was his last series with TVB) and Ha Yu (just because I grew up watching his series…haha) – of course, both of them didn’t disappoint in terms of their performances and I definitely enjoyed watching them….but in terms of ‘breakthrough’ performance in this series, Edwin Siu was definitely the one – he absolutely deserves some praise for his portrayal of ‘Ah Yap’, as he was truly pretty funny and his ‘obsession’ with finding his long-lost sweetheart was quite cute (plus his ‘chemistry’ with Steven and the rest of the cast was quite good). Overall, I’d say that this was an enjoyable series!