Kevin C. Wong

Love, Now (2012) [/]

Love, Now was a modern-day Taiwanese romance/drama that ran 72 45-minute episodes.

Workaholic Yang Yi-ru (Annie Chen) is tricked by her family and co-workers into thinking she has a terminal illness which is the only way to get her to go on a lifetime vacation to a tropical island. There she meets Lan Shi-de (George Hu) and they fall in love and get married (but it's an island marriage and not a legal marriage). Eventually Yi-ru finds out and rushes home leaving Shi-de what happened.

Later on they meet again because Shi-de, who runs the family company, hires Yi-ru's video production company to do a job. But now Shi-de thinks Yi-ru tricked him so he puts her through the wringer with unreasonable work requests. Once the misunderstandings are explained they fall in love again and eventually get married around episode 35. Then it's about getting pregnant and then she gets cancer but eventually everything works out by the end.

The second half of the series is a lot less interesting. We do have two minor romances to keep it interesting. In the first, Sun Qi-ming (Bobby Dou), Yi-ru's playboy boss, falls for Oncologist He Tsai-jung (Mandy Wei). It's neat that Dr He came in as a bit of a rival for Shi-de's affection but was pivoted to be Qi-ming's love interest once their on screen chemistry was apparent. The other one involves Shi-de's author sister Shi-yun (Vivi Lee) who is pursued a much younger "fan" of hers, Zheng Yu-xiang (Harry Chang), who secretly blames Shi-yun for a failed romance and wants revenge (but later comes to love Shi-yun).

The first quarter is really good with the developing romance. The next quarter is not bad with them finally getting married. After that the series kind of drags on a bit. It's nice seeing the characters continuing but it's not really exciting. Overall though it was a nice series to watch all the way through.