★★½
“Lifestyles of the rich and attractive.”
Not to be confused with Sheroes – because I know I did – this is a TV series from Singapore, marking the country’s first appearance on this site. So that’s nice. It’s the story of the Zhang sisters, Yin Xi (Wong), who runs an (almost) all-female bodyguard company, SHERO, and her younger sibling, photographer Yin Chen (Peh). While on a job in Australia, Yin Xi is attacked, and disappears: unknown to anyone, she is hospital, having lost her memory. Yin Chen takes over the company, and works to unravel the mystery of why her sister was attacked, with the help of Yue Rui Xiang (Tan), the CEO of a shipbuilding company who is a client of SHERO.
Turns out, there is a lot going on here – as you can imagine, given there are twenty episodes, each around 45-50 minutes long. Fifteen and a quarter hours, in total. So, for example, there’s an eventual connection to the murder of the sisters’ parents, seven years previously, which needs to be addressed. It also feels like SHERO need to ramp up the background checks on their employees, since it feels like all of them have secrets. Or as another example, there’s one worker who was a former drug addict – which is okay, this was known when she was employed. But her mother is a raging alcoholic, now victim to a blackmailer; a situation now seriously affecting her daughter’s work for the company.
So, really, there’s as much soap opera here as action, with romantic entanglements and family drama very much the order of the day. I was expecting something a little more like Pamela Anderson’s V.I.P. series (which I feel I must get round to reviewing), but this is much more one over-arching story-line across all twenty episodes, with occasional side-plots. Everyone in the show is almost weirdly attractive, and while I get that Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world, this feels almost a promotional video for the country [Makers Mediacorp are a state-owned media company, so that may be a factor]. Certainly, the Australian capital of Canberra gets its product placement in – and they are not the only ones.
There are some action scenes, mostly martial arts based, though guns seems to end up doing most of the killing. But they’re competent rather than particularly outstanding. The use of both amnesia and multiple personality disorder as plot points is hackneyed, both of these coming and going as the plot requires. Though I was impressed by how unexpectedly bleak the show ends up being. While I might not have made it to the end had I been more actively watching it, it was simply something not too demanding, to distract me while I got my daily exercise in. As such, it filled the gap in my morning regime adequately. Yeah, “adequate” seems like the right word for this overall.
Dir: Chen Yiyou
Star: Joanne Peh, Romeo Tan, Carrie Wong, Nick Teo
The whole series is available with subtitles on YouTube.