情牵南苑 - Age of Glory

I love pilot episodes; they either decide the success of a series, or its doom. They tell audiences what to expect, and generate further expectations, and at the end, make you anxiously waiting for that next episode to be aired next Monday. That's what happened to me with favorites such as Stargate SG-1, Seaquest, Lost, Prison Break, most of the Hongkie stuff and all of the J-Doramas.

In case you didn't know, "Age of Glory", a Malaysian made drama which I am deeply (almost affectionately) involved with, premiered earlier tonight on NTV7. Don't worry if you missed that. There's still 39 episodes to go, every Monday to Thursdays at 9.45pm. Edit: Past episodes are also available on www.ntv7.com.my, without the ads (yeay!). After watching the pilot of AOG, there are some points that perplexes me.

I'm not saying that perplexing is a bad sign for a drama premiere. I happened to like dramas that does things out of my comfort zone (the great TVB drama War and Beauty has IMHO an aptly apocalyptic ending which The Girlfriend loathes), although they did it at different stages, rarely at the pilot. So seeing the first episode of AOG departing from its comfort zone makes me don that Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson look. Nolah, at least they don't have shaky handphone-esque camerawork and stuff that needs me to turn my TV screen 90 degrees. So what's the quirk?

It has centralized dispersion. That means contradiction lar, even the two words are opposites mah. It tells the story from a flashback from Rose, excuse me, Yuk Lan's point (kudos James Lee for those beautiful opening shots). But, the (flashbacked) story is skewed towards what's happening to Rose's elder sister (played by Yip Lai Yee). We see a bit of what's coming for Rose - her being smart (conversations with sister), her being defensive (saving Janet Khoo from Uncle Hamsap), and most importantly her dreams (being taught makeup and dancing). Those are small bits of information to what lies ahead of young Yuk Lan. Yuk Lan is definitely the focus here, but so far its her sister's issue that is of concern, and the episode ends in that way too.

That brings us to the second point, that AOG follows a sequential character revelation ark. Most series opens with all main characters (mainly protagonists) and most side casts showing up. The characters' lives often cross paths between each other or they are shown with their own lives in the first episode until they converged at a later stage (usually less than two episodes later). AOG opened with only Yuk Lan and her immediate family. This indicates that the other two main casts would be sequentially revealed along Yuk Lan's life. This too means that audiences would need to stick to seeing only her for some more episodes. I don't suppose that is the case though. A person's life is usually boring. The characters of Shu Juan and Chen Mei would probably pop up sooner.

Finally, hooray for the comeback of Cantonese dialect. Although Janet's Malay-slanged Cantonese amuses me, but I hail the producers' bold decision to stick to it. At first I thought the editor gods made a mistake, but nope, its all true that I'm listening to locals speaking Chinese dialects on free TV again (there are maybe some others that I had no knowing of). Its odd, but my friend theorizes that maybe Janet's character came from KL, that's why she speaks Canton. I had a nice time watching HVD and The Company's Cantonese dramas during the good ol 90s, but quitted since the gaberment's initiative at pushing Mandarin as de-facto dialect for public TV. Those sucked in part because the actors had not acclimatized to speaking in full Mandarin. The small doses of Cantonese in AOG hopefully is a start for more localization of Malaysian dramas.

Maybe I was most edgy about AOG because I worked on it. I knew how they made those shots and they deliver more memories than objective emotional impact on screen. I hope those who view it purely for what they are - drama, would enjoy it as much as we enjoyed (har har) making it.

no-fark!