Angel in the Making 實習天使 TVB - Review

Angel in the Making 實習天使 - Review

This is our review of Angel in the Making. This time we are also featuring thoughts from our part-time contributor Ah Tao!

Basic Overview: (We're gonna skim through this part so we can get to our thoughts!)

Halley Kei's (Eliza Sam) dream is to become a nurse and in this drama, she plays a part of TUNS 6, a group of intern nurses going through an internship at Hang Yan Hospital. She is a caring and kind character that works under her "devil" mentor Ray Yeung (Tony Hung). Tony Hung is an enigmatic character that is still traumatized by his family's death in a car crash when he was six. He was the lone survivor and was taken up by Dom Cheung (Chung King Fai "King" Sir). Tony became a nurse under the care and love he received from the nurse Dom. Initially, TUNS 6 (consisting of Eliza Sam, Moon Lau, Jinny Ng, Momo Wu, Oil Chan, and Kevin Tong) hated Ray because he always yelled at them for doing things wrong. Adding to this, they were on the brink of drifting apart as a result of Abby Tang (Moon Lau) having a drunken one-night-stand with Halley's boyfriend, Patrick Ko (Jay Fung), with Alison Yu (Jinny Ng) revealing this to the entire group. Eventually, however, they overcome this hurdle and rekindle their bonds amid the challenges ahead of them. Soon, they start to see that Ray uses a different teaching style to challenge them to be better nurses and they end up liking him.
On the other hand, we have Defea Cha (Alice Chan), a senior nurse who has marital problems and often seeks relief from her marriage through Doctor Kennedy Tong (Pal Sinn). The two are old lovers but somehow things didn't work out. Defea finds her husband half-naked with another man and realizes he is gay further damaging their marriage. Throughout the drama, her daughter shows weird behaviour and is diagnosed with a mental illness. Under all this stress, she looks to Pal Sinn but he's already dating fellow nurse Sylvia To (Elaine Yiu). All these characters get tangled together in relationships and together, they look after a variety of patients and the interns show their love for nursing.

Thoughts from Cee:

First off I'm gonna start with the songs. We've noticed a lot of people wondering about the rap song that's in the drama. We tried finding it but we couldn't and instead we found this. When I initially saw it, it had 280000 views but now its got over 300000. I wonder where the views are coming from lol. This guy is actually going the Korean route and he actually wrote all the lyrics too which I really admire. There's a lot of heated discussion about this cover right now but too bad we can't find a version of the Angel in the Making sub-theme song by him and Kevin Tong. It's a crazy funny copy of the original.

Aaryn Cheung - CROOKED HONG KONG (G-DRAGON COVER)

UPDATE! - Thanks to a fellow commenter that found the song for us, we'll link it here for everyone!

Various Artists - Real Me

 

 https://youtu.be/Yq1PibTBTlw

Alright, now back to the drama. Initially we watched this being aware that we might be disappointed with the rookie cast. Instead, we found this to be a good drama although it had some flaws. First off, this role was practically written for Eliza Sam to shine as a caring nurse. The writers added depth to her character with the missing mom story and the dramatic friendship with Moon Lau. Personally, I think this is Eliza's best roles to date, if not the best one. Many of my friends like her role from The Hippocratic Crush 2 but I didn't really like it so I'd say this is the best one. She can still play young roles even though she's rather old for them. Her crying scenes are quite spontaneous and aren't too forced like Tony Hung's. Moving on to Tony Hung, this is one of his best roles again besides the crazy plotline in the last 2-3 episodes. Of course Tony has improvement for his crying scenes because it was hard to watch him cry for so hard and only have one tear. Maybe get tips from Natalie haha. With that being said, Tony did well in the rest of the drama as the monotonous mentor. He kept in character the whole way through and when we saw interviews/bloopers from tvb's channel you could see the difference between his role and his actual self. Some actors are the same in every drama and are the same in real life which is not acting. The rest of the cast did well except the beginning with Jay Fung was a bit awkward but that is forgiven since it's his first drama. I found Jinny to be great in her role and hope she sticks to acting instead of singing lol.

Like Jay and Ah Tao will mention, this drama simply suffered from poor transitions and a lot of untied ends. Is tvb planning a sequel for this? Because what happened to the nurse clinic? and the weird UFO thing on the last episode? and the love square between Jinny, the intern doctor, and the two guys from TUNS 6? and did the rowdy nurse assistant ever break up with her counterpart? LOL. The worst part was the ending I would say because of these loose ends and there was no time for Tony and Eliza to bond which I was waiting for. I haven't seen a good romance from tvb in such a long time since I skipped Every Step you Take (because of Moses LOL). The last memorable one I saw was Swipe Tap Love... two years ago. Anyways another thing that I didn't like from the scriptwriters was how Elaine came back with a daughter.... like... was that a joke or something? Because how can Alice Chan's character possibly be ok with her husband running back and forth between so many children? Will their marriage be doomed like her previous one? and why didn't Elaine come back or call him about it before having it and raising it for a couple years? These questions sound like they lead to a sequel, not that I'm against one but they tend to flop a lot. Overall, I just liked Eliza Sam and especially Tony Hung more in this drama. That's about it but it was good so I'd say 7/10.

Thoughts from Jay:

I initially thought this drama was gonna be like The Hippocratic Crush but with the nurse perspective. But as things progressed, it wasn't really like THC. Especially towards the end, things got so weird and creepy... it was just unexpected from TVB. I liked seeing some newer faces in TUNS 6 and all of their acting was acceptable, thank goodness. Jinny Ng seems to be a pretty good actress so far, hope to see more dramas with her! Most supporting roles were portrayed well by the actors and actresses. I was never too fond of Pal Sinn but he seemed to be fine as Dr. Tong, with the exception of his glasses without lenses. It really bugged me. Alice Chan's acting was exceptional just as in Lord of Shanghai. She puts just the right amount of emotion into acting, making her character convincing and natural. Tony Hung and Eliza Sam were pretty good leads and did not let the series down like Cee mentioned.  It was definitely disappointing we couldn't see more of Tony and Eliza because they were only together for the last two minutes and I think a lot of people were anticipating them together since the start. There were several story lines so that sort of took the spotlight away from them. The story between Alice, Elaine, and Pal was good and more mature, but I feel like there should have been more screen time for Tony and Eliza. Story wise, it was better than expected because after seeing all the big anniversary dramas, I didn't expect much from this. It followed the similar case-after-case formula that dramas usually have. However, many parts were kind of disturbing, gory, super creepy especially during the holiday season! That being said, there were humorous parts too, which made the series more enjoyable and less dark. But what's with Noddy (Tony Leung) asking to marry Mo Chi-fung (William Chak) all of a sudden when they weren't even in a relationship? Noddy always just went to nightclubs and everything... The worst part is HE SAID YES! That was just so awkward and bad.

The case of Joel Chan as Arthur or should I say... "Veronica" was just really weird and unexpected but he didn't have a big role so I don't know why his picture kept appearing on the poster during the break before and after commercials. Near the end of the series, things just turned sloppy and unexplained, which was unfortunate because of the successful beginning. There were some things that didn't need explaining and were unnecessary but they still put it on. The finale episode was a bit of a letdown, to be honest, and I agree that there should have been more episodes! Overall, I think I really got a deeper understanding of the nurse occupation which was the whole point of the drama. Besides that there were several memorable parts and it was a great opportunity for fairly fresh actors to improve. 7/10.

Thoughts from Ah Tao:

I haven't watched a TVB drama recently and even chose to skip the grand productions like Lord of Shanghai, so I thought Angel in the Making would be a good one to pick up that delight and sense of 'homeliness' you can find with (good) TVB productions. Overall, the drama was mostly well written and brought plenty of awareness about the nursing profession and their challenges. Like what Jay said, I was very impressed by Jinny Ng's acting; let's just say she isn't the most stable Cantopop singer out there but her acting skills prove otherwise. Her portrayal of the scene where she dumped Hugo Wong, who had placed a lot of negative pressure on her to become more 'lady-like' and adopt a more mature image, was relatable and made you empathize with how she had suffered. Initially, the TUNS 6 characters and their storylines weren't all that intriguing for me; I was rather always anticipating the Alice Chan-Pal Sinn-Elaine Yiu veteran 'love triangle' and their backstory. Elaine Yiu and her longing love for Arthur (Joel Chan) was clearly expressed through how she handled emotional scenes and it just made me thought about how she has attained 'fa dan'-level acting skills but missed her opportunity... I felt the same way with Alice Chan's character, the abuse she suffered from her husband, and her motherly instincts for her daughter. Both veteran actresses and Pal Sinn held their ground despite the TUNS 6 group being promoted as the highlight of the drama. Each component of the storyline was written well, but it was just the organization of it that got disjointed and made the drama feel rushed towards the finale. The plot might have worked better if there were more episodes to cover all the necessary plot transitions. 8/10.

We found this funny video on Tony attempting to surf! :)

Final Verdict:

Cee: 7/10 - Tony and Eliza were the highlight with the plotline being bad.
Jay: 7/10 - Some ridiculous scenes (William and Toby's flash marriage) but overall it was interesting and we kept wanting to watch more.
Ah Tao: 8/10 - Meh, it was above-average for TVB but the flow (or lack thereof) detracted from it.

Together we give this a 7.3/10 for the new attempt at using rookies for a nursing drama. We all loved the acting and hope that next time TVB puts in more time and effort in editing their script and final editing of the broadcasted episodes for a more coherent story.

Please let us know if you like these posts and what you want to see more of!

-CeeJay and Ah Tao!