Where do I even start, alright so about the writing. I think the writer had enough well thought out material up to about maybe 8-10 episodes. Come filming they bloated that up to 18-19 episodes & oh boy there is an incredible amount of super boring filler in this one. Of course this drama is getting an incredible amount of praise & all that is not -completely- unfounded, some of the scenes in the aforementioned first half or rather 60% are borderline brilliant, it's just that as a viewer I expect my attention held to some degree throughout the show or at least most of the show & to me 1 minute of brilliance per episode is not enough to forgive how boring the rest of it was. Moving on, come episode 20 the writer has ran out of the good stuff & then decided to just very abruptly transform the drama into a basic romcom with some tragedy baked in, I would have been okay with this had it been a good basic romcom, but it's very light on the com & the rom does not work all that well for me in this one & the filler plots, secondary semi-couples were really not great still. The dialog here and there had some shining moments even in the later episodes, but overall BORING is what I kept feeling most of the time.

Basically I said everything important already, just to add a few more things, I think this show had a great cast, it's a bit of a waste really. I like both Shen Yue and Lin Yi, but together I think they were not the best, though admittedly their chemistry was not terrible or anything. Mei Xia is a great character, her final ehm appearance was certainly very surprising and impactful, though I still cannot tell how I feel about it, on one hand I could call it almost trashy storytelling, on another it certainly carried a surprising amount of punch, I don't know, I have never seen anything like this before.

ML's illness is not very well explained & his behavior is not really consistent with what explanations we do get about his mental condition. I think if I try to look at this drama as a show largely about portraying mental illness as its main conflict there are several problems with the concept, though admittedly in the earliest episodes (1-5), the directly related scenes were quite interesting. Anyway coincidentally this drama is almost exactly the same genre as `It's Okay, That's Love`, which would be romance+mental illness+ comedy, but to me that drama is a real 10 out of 10 & this is so much worse in almost every aspect that I feel bad about even mentioning them in the same paragraph.

The standup comedy in the show is awful & most people probably agree with me just on that one point, I want to add that it's not just awful because the humor is lost in translation, it's just awful period. I speak a wee bit of Chinese & oh my god It's so bad. Throughout the entire time I felt that Shen Yue agrees with me on this one, she was so awkward in some of those super cringy standup? scenes, that must have been a torture for her too. Sure censorship is a difficulty, but decently funny stuff still passes it sometimes, there are countless safe topics to ridicule etc..

TLDR: Of 25? hours maybe 14 is extremely boring & the rest is barely 7 out of 10 on average. (yes there is 10 minutes that's 15 out of 10 brilliant, but that's hardly enough in a 25 hour show)