Plum Blossoms

What is best way for us, as an audience, to evaluate an actress's acting abilities, over the long run? Observe her in a variety of roles, roles that challenge her limits, roles that views can relate to, etc.

And TVB almost never provides that. Their writers are lazy and the roles are inevitably one-dimensional. Worse is the fact that actresses are always typecast and nobody dares to put an actress outside of her comfort zone. Here are some examples:

Jessica Hsuan, Maggie Cheung

Obnoxiously loud, bitchy characters, with a streak of tomboy extrovertness.

Shirley Yeung

Cute innocent sheltered type.

Charmaine Sheh

Slightly annoying (to the audience) female who is a lot more feminine than a Jessica or a Maggie, but still has a slightly repressed bitch streak going.⁴

Sonija Kwok

Cool professional working women (n&uumault; qiang ren), will find herself dating the successful professional male before finding a superficially inferior but way more sincere type.

Myolie Wu, Bernice Liu

Stereotypical Westernized free spirit.

The only exception to this sort of stupidity is in the very occasional gigantic drama production that uses a lot of first- and second-line⁵ actresses, and the need to fight for favouritism from the higher executives means that actresses are a lot more willing to do more interesting roles. Plus the writers can't take the easy way out, and won't write in any easy roles. This is why I'm surprisingly eager in waiting for Flames Dancing on Yellow Sands, since it's of a similar sort of drama, plus it features my long-time infatuee Ada Choi in a dramatic leading role, a long wait since the disappointing Where the Legend Begins.

Case in point: Charmaine Sheh was recently quite visible on Fairchild in prime time, starring in both War and Beauty and Angels of Mission. The contrast couldn't be more drastic: an hour with a scheming, conniving palace concubine portrayed with (relatively) natural acting, followed in the next hour by a ridiculous loudmouth police officer who is depicted using possibly no acting skills at all.⁶

The problem is that roles like the Angels of Mission one come up way more often than the War and Beauty one, and had Charmaine not played that role (say if she was replaced by, I dunno, Anne Heung), we'd be left with the impression that Charmaine can't act her way out of a paper bag.⁷

A counterexample to all this nonsense is Fiona Yuen. Not surprisingly, the fact that she has taken on so many different roles in the past probably has some correlation with the fact that she's nowhere near a first-line actress, and indeed might not even be a second-line one.

Is it any surprise that actresses are increasingly reluctant to sign exclusively with TVB, or even stay with TVB on contract? Of course, mainland opportunities are much more financially lucrative, but TVB certainly cannot make the case that it's giving anyone any artistic opportunities, and even if a good portion of these actresses really aren't that good, they'd certainly think of themselves highly enough to take artistic opportunities into consideration.

Footnotes

¹ No, such a list does not actually exist. It was a rhetorical device.

² See ¹.

³ Actors are not immune to this, but the average TVB actor is better than the average TVB actress, so it's not quite as noticeable and not quite as irritating.

⁴ Actually, Charmaine has already gone through one transformation: in her earliest roles, she was incredibly 'deh' (a concept I can't explain well in English, but it can be described as clingy saccharine flirting or affection). Thankfully those days are over.

⁵ These ratings are not in their acting abilities, but in the prominence of their place in TVB. Sheren Tang wasn't a first-line actress until War and Beauty, and she can act circles around many of her more popular counterparts.

⁶ Actually, there is one thing that I find fascinating about Charmaine's acting in Angels: her character's tendency to talk to herself. These are not just the indirect soliloquies that characters often say to themselves for the pure purpose of letting the audience know her thoughts; this is full-fledged self-to-self one-sided dialogue here. And it's something I've never seen before in a TVB series, maybe any TV series, which creates a bizarre attraction towards watching Ah Sheh in that abomination of a show.

⁷ A confession: this post was partially motivated to my desire to justify my salivating over the Charmaine photoshoot in the this month's HIM magazine and to post a pic from it, but I've felt this way about TVB for quite some time.