Ivy Shao
Overview
Adapted from HOU Wen-yong’s novel Adrift in Love, this series weaves two contrasting tales of passion, desire, and struggle. One story explores a forbidden relationship that blurs the boundaries of morality and longing, while the other follows an unexpected romance that brings hope amid hardship. Together, they portray the choices and complexities of love.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
The Currency of Desire
Modern romance can feel less like surrender than bookkeeping. Time traded for affection, stability traded for desire, emotional need converted into something suspiciously close to a contract. *Adrift in Love*, Hsu Fu-chun’s 14-episode adaptation of Hou Wen-yong’s novel, takes that ugly truth and refuses to soften it much. I came in expecting a sleek Taiwanese melodrama of the kind Hsu helped popularize with *The Fierce Wife*. What I got was harsher and more prickly than that. The show keeps asking what happens when the emotional math never balances.
Its structure is almost combatively split. On one side is Zhou Xiao Qi (Ivy Shao), a woman so entangled with a wealthy older man that she has learned to measure love in transfers, gifts, and maintained dependency. On the other is Pan Xin Tong (Vivian Sung), an office worker with terrible luck, a cheating ex, and a sick mother, who crashes into the orbit of the pampered overgrown child Xin Yi Fu (Fandy Fan). On paper those threads look like two different dramas stapled together. For the first episodes, I honestly thought the tonal gap might sink the whole thing. Eventually the design becomes clearer. Hsu is setting two survival strategies beside each other and letting Taipei’s social pressures connect them.
The real voltage, though, is in the therapy scenes. Xiao Qi begins seeing psychiatrist Gu Hou Ze in the hope of prying herself loose from her gilded misery. Tony Yang plays Hou Ze with a fascinating stiffness that turns his usual appeal inside out. He has spent years weaponizing a relaxed, golden-retriever charm. Here he seems trapped inside his own clothes. The shoulders sit too high. The posture is formal to the point of discomfort. He looks like a man already aware that something inside him is bending the wrong way.
Episode four has the scene I keep replaying. Xiao Qi sits on the couch reciting the jewelry her older lover bought her, and Ivy Shao empties the lines out until they sound like inventory rather than memory. The camera holds on her face far past the point of comfort. Then Hou Ze’s pen stops scratching. Silence thickens. When the angle finally changes, he is not studying his notes at all. He is looking at her collarbone. That tiny lapse, almost nothing on paper, turns the whole room rancid. No music rises to tell us how to feel. You just hear the air conditioner and suddenly understand that the doctor may be more compromised than the woman seeking treatment.
Whether the series can stretch that central sickness across fourteen episodes will depend on your tolerance for damaged people sabotaging themselves. Mine wavered in the middle. The Xin Tong and Xin Yi Fu subplot, for all Vivian Sung’s talent, sometimes drifts too close to ordinary romantic comedy and feels featherweight beside the rot inside the therapist’s office. Sung is such a gifted physical performer that she still finds good details—like the way she kicks off her shoes under the desk, all dignity drained out of her by the workday—but that whole strand feels safer than the rest of the show.
Still, the series accumulates force. By the final stretch, the polished surfaces of the production have thinned enough that all you really see are the dependencies underneath. Jian Man-shu, as Hou Ze’s increasingly suspicious partner and clinic co-runner, does excellent peripheral work. Her jaw stays half-clenched, as if she already knows the structure is collapsing and just refuses to step outside it. I do not think *Adrift in Love* fully solves the challenge it sets itself; the finale tries a little too hard to braid its two thematic threads into something neat. But I admire the attempt. The show refuses easy condemnation. Instead it watches what people sell, what they buy, and what it costs. By the end, it leaves a bruise and a sour little gratitude for whatever parts of love in your own life still feel uncomplicated.
Modern romance can feel less like surrender than bookkeeping. Time traded for affection, stability traded for desire, emotional need converted into something suspiciously close to a contract. *Adrift in Love*, Hsu Fu-chun’s 14-episode adaptation of Hou Wen-yong’s novel, takes that ugly truth and refuses to soften it much. I came in expecting a sleek Taiwanese melodrama of the kind Hsu helped popularize with *The Fierce Wife*. What I got was harsher and more prickly than that. The show keeps asking what happens when the emotional math never balances.
Its structure is almost combatively split. On one side is Zhou Xiao Qi (Ivy Shao), a woman so entangled with a wealthy older man that she has learned to measure love in transfers, gifts, and maintained dependency. On the other is Pan Xin Tong (Vivian Sung), an office worker with terrible luck, a cheating ex, and a sick mother, who crashes into the orbit of the pampered overgrown child Xin Yi Fu (Fandy Fan). On paper those threads look like two different dramas stapled together. For the first episodes, I honestly thought the tonal gap might sink the whole thing. Eventually the design becomes clearer. Hsu is setting two survival strategies beside each other and letting Taipei’s social pressures connect them.
The real voltage, though, is in the therapy scenes. Xiao Qi begins seeing psychiatrist Gu Hou Ze in the hope of prying herself loose from her gilded misery. Tony Yang plays Hou Ze with a fascinating stiffness that turns his usual appeal inside out. He has spent years weaponizing a relaxed, golden-retriever charm. Here he seems trapped inside his own clothes. The shoulders sit too high. The posture is formal to the point of discomfort. He looks like a man already aware that something inside him is bending the wrong way.
Episode four has the scene I keep replaying. Xiao Qi sits on the couch reciting the jewelry her older lover bought her, and Ivy Shao empties the lines out until they sound like inventory rather than memory. The camera holds on her face far past the point of comfort. Then Hou Ze’s pen stops scratching. Silence thickens. When the angle finally changes, he is not studying his notes at all. He is looking at her collarbone. That tiny lapse, almost nothing on paper, turns the whole room rancid. No music rises to tell us how to feel. You just hear the air conditioner and suddenly understand that the doctor may be more compromised than the woman seeking treatment.
Whether the series can stretch that central sickness across fourteen episodes will depend on your tolerance for damaged people sabotaging themselves. Mine wavered in the middle. The Xin Tong and Xin Yi Fu subplot, for all Vivian Sung’s talent, sometimes drifts too close to ordinary romantic comedy and feels featherweight beside the rot inside the therapist’s office. Sung is such a gifted physical performer that she still finds good details—like the way she kicks off her shoes under the desk, all dignity drained out of her by the workday—but that whole strand feels safer than the rest of the show.
Still, the series accumulates force. By the final stretch, the polished surfaces of the production have thinned enough that all you really see are the dependencies underneath. Jian Man-shu, as Hou Ze’s increasingly suspicious partner and clinic co-runner, does excellent peripheral work. Her jaw stays half-clenched, as if she already knows the structure is collapsing and just refuses to step outside it. I do not think *Adrift in Love* fully solves the challenge it sets itself; the finale tries a little too hard to braid its two thematic threads into something neat. But I admire the attempt. The show refuses easy condemnation. Instead it watches what people sell, what they buy, and what it costs. By the end, it leaves a bruise and a sour little gratitude for whatever parts of love in your own life still feel uncomplicated.