Crowd Lu
鄭爽
Overview
A 28-year-old layabout begins to re-examine his life when his dysfunctional family assembles to pay respects to a dying grandmother who won’t pass on.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 7 episodes
- First aired
- May 26, 2017
Cast
12 people
Reviews
4 min readThe Quiet Storm of a Family That Won’t Let Go
I’ve seen enough dysfunctional-family dramas to know the beats by heart: the unannounced arrival, the buried grudge unearthed over a casserole, the patriarch who won’t speak, the matriarch who won’t stop. A Boy Named Flora A doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does something rarer—it lets the wheel creak. The series, a seven-episode Taiwanese dramedy from director Gia Lee, unfolds like a slow exhale in a room where no one’s quite sure they want to breathe.
The premise is simple: a 28-year-old slacker, played by Crowd Lu with the kind of hangdog charm that makes you root for him despite his laziness, returns to his childhood home when his grandmother is hospitalized. She’s not dying—not yet—but the family gathers anyway, as if her lingering illness is the last excuse they need to orbit each other again.
What follows isn’t a series of explosive confrontations or tearful reconciliations. It’s quieter than that. It’s the kind of story where the most dramatic moment might be someone forgetting to buy soy sauce, or a character staring at a wall for a beat too long.
Lee’s direction is unhurried, almost meditative, but never dull. There’s a rhythm to the way the camera lingers on small details—a half-peeled orange, a child’s drawing taped to a fridge, the way a character’s fingers tap restlessly against a table. These aren’t just filler shots; they’re the punctuation of a family that communicates in pauses.
The grandmother, Flora A (played by the formidable Chin Tzu-yen), is the gravitational center of the series, even though she spends most of it bedridden and silent. She’s the reason everyone’s here, but she’s also the reason they’ve stayed away for so long. The family’s dysfunction isn’t the kind that makes for juicy tabloid fodder—no affairs, no addictions, no dramatic betrayals.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsA first-time actor walked off with two Golden Bells.
Crowd Lu went into the 53rd Golden Bell Awards on 6 October 2018 with one television credit. He left with Best Leading Actor and Best Newcomer for A Boy Named Flora A. PTS News quoted him thanking director Qu You-ning for daring to hire someone with "insufficient looks" and no experience as the male lead. CNA had him thanking novelist Yang Fu-min and calling the whole crew his teachers. Vogue Taiwan counted four Golden Bells for the series, Best Television Series included, latestnetflix.com argues, plus Liu Kuan-ting for supporting actor. First job. Two trophies. Same night. 
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The show is the seventh Zhi Ju Chang, or Q Series, hour, adapted from Yang's novel Hua Jia Nan Hai. TTV Main Channel ran seven episodes of about 90 minutes from 26 May to 7 July 2017, after a 25 May premiere at Taipei's Yu Da vocational high school. Hua Jia is 28, still a college junior, spoiled as the eldest grandson. Tsai Chen-nan plays the father. Fan Chu-mei is the grandmother who will not die after they unplug the ventilator, so the clan piles into the ancestral house to wait, fight over land, and watch a ghost in the hall. Dialogue mixes Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese. Filming started 15 November 2016 and wrapped in February. Chinese Wikipedia records Qu saying, before air, that if people hated it he would jump in the sea. The finale hit 4.16 and took its slot. Series average 2.46, the highest in that slate. Tokyo's drama festival later gave it an overseas special prize, shared with two other titles. 
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The clip everyone saved was Yen Cheng-lan's confession after Hua Jia comes back from the army. TTV said the director asked them to stay glued for at least ten seconds. Lu joked that A-Wei sacrificed a lot. Yen said the weather was nice and his mouth tasted like sweet potato. Fans filled 422 pages of live comments on the finale. Lu told TTV he cried reading people who said the funeral speech covered a goodbye they had missed. Asked what he wanted next, he said Flora 2.0, or any part that did not need a pretty face. Netflix put the set on 1 August 2017 under the odd English title, because Hua Jia is a boy's name built from flowers. TTV later ran a ten-episode uncut recut. The same cast came back for Back to the Good Times, a Lunar New Year film that opened 9 February 2018 and finished around NT$102 million. Lu still looked like a singer who had wandered onto a family set. That was the point. , , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.