This Taiwanese series is ten episodes of roughly an hour each, and deals with such weighty topics as mental illness, trauma, ethics (or lack thereof) in journalism, social media, parenting, marriage, and the workaholic lifestyle. One of the major plot lines deals with the aftermath of an adolescent having shot and killed a number of people inside a movie theater, exploring the emotions of the families of the victims, those of the perpetrator's family, and how a defense attorney and mental health professionals fight to do what's right in this and other cases. I'm not sure why the English translation ended up as it did, when the original Chinese translates to The Distance Between Us and Evil, and was much more fitting.
There is great emotional power in the scenes of parents trying to cope with the senseless murder of their child, and on the flipside, the parents of the murderer trying to cope with guilt and grief of their own. It's heartbreaking to see everyone connected wondering if they had just done something different whether things would have turned out better. Equally good are the scenes of the defense attorney's impassioned arguments with his father-in-law about why he should defend murderers. This is a show clearly trying to make points about how these things are treated by society, and even if it's didactic, what a fantastic thing it is when a psychiatrist says "The media places too much emphasis on the mental health status of criminals. So much so that everyone forgets unemployment, poverty, and drug abuse are the main reasons for criminal behavior."
As a warning, the series is a bit on the melodramatic side, and full of convenient coincidences. One example is the sister of the mass murderer happening to find a job with the mother of one of the victims (a producer of TV journalism), and also happening to rent a room with the sister of another mentally disturbed man, one who then breaks into a kindergarten which happens to have as of its students the daughter of the murderer's defense attorney. Is your head spinning? On the other hand, many stories are contrived and artificially compressed to some degree, and this one does so probably to deal with its themes with a manageable number of characters.
Relative to the depiction of mental illness, I'm no expert, but it was certainly empathetic. It confronts some of the traditional cultural prejudices, including a rather horrifying story from the family's past of a schizophrenic aunt chained up in the backyard buck naked and screaming. The way a schizophrenic hears voices in his distorted mind was well represented, most importantly because it was in a way that helped me understand what the man was dealing with on a daily basis. The show argues for humanistic treatment, against involuntary admission, and more understanding to help prevent violence.
Along those same lines, kindness, communication, and reconciliation are shown again and again as important to a better understanding, and the series shows just difficult this can be in the face of grief and heated emotions, impacting marriages and family relationships. The idealistic attorney who works tirelessly to provide a defense for those reviled by society has a bucket of crap tossed on him in the very first scene, and soon finds that his own wife questions him. The TV producer's marriage is being torn apart by her responding to trauma by drinking and throwing everything she can into her work. The sister of the schizophrenic has to exert incredible patience and make sacrifices to house him when he's released, and is soon arguing with her fiancé.
Journalism is critiqued along the way, in particular, its slide from the days of verifying the truth in reporting and attempting to ensure it was unbiased, to getting it on the air as soon as possible, and as splashy as possible. We see the press behaving like jackals around innocent people they hurl questions at like weapons. Indeed, more than once they are rebuked that they "kill with words instead of bullets."
While the arc of the show bends towards healing and redemption, the path to get there isn't romanticized (at least too much) - one killer says he would do it again if he had a chance, the schizophrenic who is sent home with his sister is dangerous after he stops taking his medication (although my understanding is that this is uncommon), and the victim's families find it very hard to forgive the perpetrator's families, even if rationally they understand they were victims themselves. I liked how the show illustrated how great courage and patience are required in life, professionally and personally, to help get through difficulty. Overall, worth seeing.
