Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Accidentally In Love’ On Netflix, A Chinese Dramedy About A Young Romance Created By Chance

Everyone loves a love story, especially one where there’s a “meet cute” followed by a “will-they-won’t-they” followed by lots of “what’s going to get in their way?” The Chinese are no different, which is why the soapy young-adult dramedy Accidentally in Love looks and feels a lot like similar shows made in the U.S. Read on to see if you want to watch two crazy kids fall in love…

ACCIDENTALLY IN LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young girl is being chased by white-suited men into an alley. She stops and says, “They don’t even let me catch my breath!”

The Gist: The glasses-clad girl sees a girl in the alley putting on a t-shirt and wonders if this is how permissive girls are in the city of Yuncheng, in which she just arrived that day. It turns out to be a boy, and she uses him by pretending to kiss him to hide from her pursuers. Then he turns the tables, because black-suited men are looking for him. But this time she actually kisses him, which upsets her because that’s her first kiss.

We back up a day. We find out that the girl, with long hair and no glasses, is an heiress named Chen Qingqing (Sun Yi Ning), who is about to get married to an heir from another family in a marriage arranged by her grandfather. She escapes via an elaborate hoax where she sends her best friend out to the ceremony in her place, then after a comic chase around the reception. She manages to fly to Yuncheng after selling all her gifts to the servants, because she wants to go to the college where her late mother and father fell in love. She puts on a wig and dons glasses because she’s living a whole new life.

But when her bag accidentally gets mixed up with someone else’s and she has no money, she learns “the art of begging” from a random hobo, and she encounters a concert of a boy band led by a singer nicknamed “Your Highness”. The singer, Situ Feng (Guo Fiction) seems to be ambivalent about his career, but when, after his concert, he encounters his father’s black-clad thugs, who are trying to force him to go to his father’s wedding, he says no, still bitter over how he treated his mom. So, with help from an assistant, he dons a dress and runs away.

We see the moment they meet each other again, and while it seems like it’s going to be magic, Qingqing is pissed. And, judging by what we see in episode 2, it’s not exactly love at first sight.

Our Take: We’re glad we watched episode 2 of Accidentally in Love, a dramedy from mainland China that’s definitely aimed towards the 13-25 set. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten the entire conceit of the show. In the second episode, Feng defies his father by getting engaged to Qingqing during his fathers wedding. In later episodes, we see Qingqing end up sitting next to Feng in their college class. With 30 episodes, it seems like this romance will develop slowly. But it’ll develop with Qingqing looking ordinary, with short hair and glasses.

But we also see another aspect: Feng’s best friend Gu Nanxi (Ma Li) encounters Qingqing in the wedding’s changing room, looking like herself, with her long hair and no glasses. And he’s immediately smitten. So there’s a soapy element, too, where Qingqing will have two identities, two loves, and a heck of a time trying to keep things from blowing up in her face.

It’s a cute show, sometimes a bit too cute, with music cues that seem to guide viewers to the show’s more whimsical or comedic moments. But, then again, we’re not experts on Chinese TV, so that may be something that’s standard. But the stars are appealing and are good comedic actors, and the dual-life plot feels like it could sustain for 30 episodes. We’re just not sure we’d watch for that long.

Sex and Skin: It’s all pretty innocent.

Parting Shot: Qingqing’s shocked face, as we hear her voice saying “my first kiss has been taken away!”

Sleeper Star: Whoever the dude in the blue vest who plays Feng’s money-obsessed manager is, we want to see more of him.

Most Pilot-y Line: As we said, the music cues are pretty heavy-handed, as if they’re telling viewers “LAUGH GOES HERE.”

Our Call: STREAM IT if you think you can hang with this story for 30 half-hour episodes. The leads are appealing enough and there’s more than enough time to explore their stories.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Accidentally In Love on Netflix