Forget You Not Review
Director: Rene Liu
Date Created: 2025-05-24 18:04
3.5
Forget You Not Review: This is an 8-episode Taiwanese drama (忘了我记得), directed by Rene Liu, elegantly enters into the world of ageing, memory, and complicated parent-child relationships. The show is approximately 45 minutes long and boasts a fine cast led by Hsieh Ying-Hsuan, Chin Han, Wallace Huo, Esther Liu, Tracy Chou, and Chen Yi-wen. The show traces the life of stand-up comedian and sometime salesgirl Cheng Le-Le whose life begins going downhill along with the health of her elderly father. A quirky, offbeat family drama is what begins as a light-hearted comedy that eventually transcends to be something deeper about caregiving, grudges of old age, and the fine line between freedom and responsibility.
Forget You Not Review
In all honesty, the drama Wà ngle wÇ’ jìdé really resonated with me. A person who has already seen how age begins to seep into our lives—through our parents’ sleepiness, their little forgetful mistakes, or even their little nods in thin air—this show was speaking my language. Netflix’s Forget You Not doesn’t simply narrate; it responds to all of us quietly watching our parents grow older while we are speeding through our own mad lives.
But all that aside, although the emotional core of the show did resonate with me, I did lose the show sometimes. My favourite thing about the show is the Le-Le and her father, Kuang-Chi, dynamic. Their dynamic—unapologetically funny and tear-inducing—was brutal and raw. To see their roles reverse gradually, the daughter caretaker to her parents, was a reminder of things that I’ve witnessed in life. The director was very good at describing how anger and love could collide with each other in parent-child relationships. Le-Le’s frustration, guilt, and powerlessness were so well described that I was crying over it and rewinding more than once.
Where I was disappointed, though, is that rather than remaining so close to that larger emotional arc, the show begins to stray off into sideplots that aren’t so well built. Le-Le’s romance, though as cute as it was, sometimes at the expense of the bigger picture. Her fiancé Chang Kai brought drama and tensions, but I was feeling that the show was being unnecessarily clingy. I waited forever for the writers to hold on to some of the unnecessary plot threads and instead reward us with more of the small moments between Le-Le and her dad. Less is more.
The show itself also has a great balance of tones. It is broken up by bouts of humour, most prominently in the form of Le-Le’s stand-up, which disrupts the otherwise gloomy tone. Those were actually recallable to me, not only, of course, because they broke the emotional tension, but because they actually worked and were actually funny. Hsieh Ying-Hsuan did a wonderful job in those moments. As a kind of person who tends to naturally default to stand-up stuff in a drama like this or be insincere, I was impressed at how easily she was able to deliver them.
Even the veteran, Chin Han, is wonderful. His understated and devastating performance as a man who forgets his memory—and, in so doing, his self—is a pleasure. There was one moment when he gently forgot one of the most precious memories Le-Le holds as a child, and took my breath away. It wasn’t flashy. It was simply the truth.
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Where the show fell short was in attempting to wrap all the loose ends into neat little bows in the last episode. Having gone so far to invest the emotional complexity of caregiving, dementia, and guilt, I was appalled at the last episode’s cavalier discarding of it all. The world is not always going to provide us with closure, and I wish the show were less reluctant to acknowledge as much. The last episode was, though, in the business of reassuring the viewer when something more realistic would have worked better.
One thing that does occur to me is that the show never once attempts to delve into the complexity of caregiving when the parent-child dyad is not necessarily a utopia. Le-Le does get some experience with her dad, but of course, there is love and devotion which is present. What about caring parents who are abusive or emotionally unavailable? The Taiwanese drama Forget You Not does broach the subject, but never does it come.
In virtual terms, the show looks great to watch, but by no means original. There are some neatly clever touches of edits, such as the occasional flashbacks or fourth-wall breaks, deserving of their well-deserved praise, but then the show overdoes it and is too concerned with melodramatic moments with obligatory slow-motion and string music over the top. I didn’t mind it much, but it did make some scenes feel overly dramatised.
Netflix Forget You Not Review: Summing Up
Forget You Not is another that I’d still highly recommend you enjoy sob-inducing family drama about difficult issues with heart. The acting is excellent, the emotional moments are real, and the show has something worthwhile to say about ageing, caregiving, and letting go of old wounds.
Taiwanese series Forget You Not is now streaming on Netflix.
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