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Sam Wang Shao Wei plays an ex-con in Feixing Shao NIan.

Most Taiwanese romantic melodramas on television end happily with a wedding. There have been some really remarkable ones: in the final episode of Heaven’s Wedding Gown, for example, Ming Dao, Cyndi Wang and Leon Jay Williams are actually at the altar with their respective wrong partners until a crucial truth comes to light at virtually the last minute, allowing Leon and Cyndi to be reunited; in The Prince Who Turned into a Frog, Chen Qiao En has to deliver a natural gas cylinder to a customer while in her wedding dress. Then she and Ming Dao fall into a conveniently placed ravine and are greatly delayed on their way to the ceremony. In fact, it is left in doubt if they arrive at all.

Feixing Shao Nian (They Are Flying), CTV’s earnest and inspirational new drama series, turns convention on its head and begins with a wedding: a very sad one. In it, Sam Wang Shao Wei plays Ah Jie, a hardbitten, recently released jailbird who, with their father presumably deceased, is determined to be the one to give away his desperately ill elder sister to her wealthy fiancé.

In a scene outstanding for its meticulous art design, Sam, in a smart grey groomsman’s suit, pushes his sister’s wheelchair slowly along a causeway to the dirge-like cadence of a church bell. The meters of icy white tulle that engulf the austerely beautiful bride in her wheelchair look sepulchral, while the bouquets of flowers atop the steely, cylindrical uprights of the railings are mauve and white, look ghostly, with dangling silvery diaphanous ribbons. The waters to either side of the bridge are still and metallic—it’s the Taiwanese version of the River Lethe.

Ah Jie (Sam Wang Shao Wei) is determined to get his sister to the altar in Feixing Shao Nian.

The bell continues to toll and white doves fly overhead. There is something dreamlike and hallucinatory about the scene. What brings it down to earth and the viewer in touch with genuine human emotion is Shao Wei’s restrained acting. His pace may be stately but his posture is rigid with alarm and his expressions concerned and anguished.

Approaching the door of the church, the bride insists on walking, although she can stand only by clinging desperately to the arm of her stalwart sibling. A musician begins to play Amazing Grace on a white upright. There is no singing, but those fans familiar with the words of the song will realise that the wretch being saved by grace is not the poor frail bride but her renegade younger brother, who as the nuptials morph inevitably and almost seamlessly shift into an ash-scattering ceremony on a still lake, commits to making major life decisions in honour of his sister’s memory.

Looking suitably penitent, Ah Jie (Sam Wang Shao Wei) travels south by train..

These plans take him south by train where he encounters female lead, Pets Ceng Pei Ci, with the usual formulaic misunderstandings of each other. It seems from the first episode that much of the action and the emotional heart of the drama, in keeping with the true story on which it is based, will be set south of Taipei. A few scenes have already suggested that the writers have not romanticised life in the countryside but have quietly included areas of rural disadvantage and marginalisation.

Shao Wei apparently left the Jungiery Stars agency at the end of 2009, so Feixing Shao Nian is his first drama since CTV’s Mo Nu 18 Hao in 2009. In previously work, he always had a wonderful chameleon quality. He could shift from playing the toughest of street thugs in one drama to the sweetest and most accommodating of romantic leads in the next. Sam turns 35 in December but the years, and perhaps his two-year break from the industry, have been kind to him. He has a new chiselled look but his eyes are intense and bright. So far, equipped with a new gravitas, his acting has been arresting and compelling and neveridol predicts he will be highly successful in portraying Ah Jie’s long, restorative emotional journey.

Feixing Shao Nian production credits on Facebook page.

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