TV Dramas: Bordercrossing, modification, and transactiononly comes after the death of Chun-hwa, but throughout the effort of reunification and the
process of re-understanding, the girls gain a deeper understanding of each other. Sisterhood,
once again, becomes the invaluable quality among them.
The Hong Kong version of Sunny is a 32-episode television drama named Never Dance
Alone. This TV drama shares a similar plot structure and narrative style with Sunny. Never
Dance Alone is about the reunion of seven middle-aged women, who form among themselves
a group called M Club in their high school. The story is shown with a non-linear narrative,
alternating between the present and the past, which is a kind of production style similar to the
Korean’s. Although harmony of the sisterhood is retained as the main theme, Never Dance Alone
intensifies the complexity of the narrative by touching deeply into sub-themes of instability
and social issues in Hong Kong, such as marriage affairs and betrayal among fellow friends. The
transnational transfer of Sunny and Never Dance Alone not only represents a TV trade between
two areas, but also reinforces friendship or sisterhood as a common cultural value in Asia with,
of course, variations.
a hybrid mode of tV adaptation
Inter-Asia TV flow could demonstrate a more complex pattern involving multiple modes
of adoption and multiple regions. One classic case is the TV drama Meteor Garden, first pro-
duced by Taiwan (2001) based on the Japanese shōjo manga comics Hana Yori Dango (Meteor
Shower in English 1992–2003), which can be seen as a transnational transaction involving two
media. The Taiwan version became a big hit in China and Hong Kong after the drama was
broadcast on their respective local television stations as a bordercrossing TV drama. The same
script was then produced as a TV drama named Hana Yori Dango (2005), and the format was
later purchased by South Korea under the production of Boys Over Flowers (2009). Without
licensing the TV format, China also locally modified the story and produced Let’s Watch Meteor
Shower (2009). All these adaptions of the original TV drama were produced in 2001 to 2009
and created a fad of cultural icons in various Asian countries and regions. The original plot
is about a love story among four boys from super-rich families and a girl from a grassroots
background. It is noticeable that when the story plot crossed a border and was adapted there,
traces of regional and local cultural ideo logies were injected into the adopted versions (Fung
and Zhang 2012).
Meteor Garden emphasizes class struggle and striving for upward movement of social status.
The first version of Meteor Shower produced in Taiwan demonstrates the heterogeneous nature
of wealthy people in society. The text of the TV drama is vague and open for interpretation,
as Fiske (1998, 199) noted “semiotic excess”. Audiences are able to perceive the meaning with
their own awareness. For example, the mother of the rich male leading actor is seen as a mean
lady, and the parents of the grassroots girl are eager to push her to get married into a rich family,
and they even prepare a “marry a rich guy” roadmap for her. Such complicated discourses and
ideological structure enable audiences to imagine and get into the school of thought they prefer,
which is the key to boosting audience satisfaction (Fiske 1998).
The 2009 Korean Broadcasting System production of Meteor Shower went along a similar
direction as the original drama to a certain extent, by featuring the class conflict. There are two
dimensions to it: the first is within the upper-class family, and such conflict is manifested as the
quarrel between the rich mother and her son as the mother deliberately threatens the son’s poor
girlfriend; the other is the bottom-up conflict from the grassroots family, in order to change the
family’s standard of living, the parents of the grassroots girl are so greedy that they urge her to
hunt for a rich man.