One To Watch

Noi is a great fan of Malay language dramas on the telly and I've occasionally found myself watching alongside her and enjoying the fare on offer, especially the comic variety, though I can stand a bit of melodrama now and again. That sounds like a put-down, I know, but I watched enough to realise there's a genuine tradition of the melodramatic in this kind of drama that wouldn't work on English television, say, but has its place on the Suria channel.

But I found myself for the first time ever last night entirely caught up in the last episode of a series on Suria in the same way I might be for something produced by the BBC that I'd got into. The series went by the title 93m2 (sorry, but I can't do the 'squared' thing properly) and, as its off-beat title suggests, wasn't typical of the sort of thing you normally expect on Suria in the 9.30 - 10.30 pm slot. The performance of the male lead, for example, was utterly unlike anything I seen in the context of Malay drama before, combining real comedic flair and genuine depth of feeling in a realisation of a convincingly quirky character with no sense of stereotyping at all - other than the broad conception of a 'nerd' type. There was a vulnerability about the performance that was very curious, as if the actor were, in some sense, playing himself at his most ridiculous without holding anything back. It felt, oddly, very extreme, like someone really letting go in front of the camera, not trying to be cute in any respect - indeed, in the earliest episodes there was something convincingly infuriating about the character, tying in seamlessly into the plot, which centred on the breakdown of his marriage.

There're plenty of other things about this series which struck me as refreshingly different, including some of the other key performances and characters generally, but I suppose what drew me completely into the series over several episodes was the tightness of the writing. I've seen plenty of dramas on Suria with high standards of cinematography and  often strikingly good acting (though often mixed in with performances that verge on the incompetent) but it's rare that serials sustain strong scripts, even when individual scenes work really well. Generally the sheer length of the various series produced militate against uniformly strong writing and I think it's fair to say that the constraints involved in needing to hold and entertain a reasonably solid audience don't encourage the development of scripts of depth and resonance. But those it was precisely those qualities that 93m2 had, as well as being thoroughly entertaining - and good-hearted in a way that was acceptably sentimental without being overly manipulative.

I don't normally look out for the names of script-writers when watching Suria, but I noticed this time that one M. Raihan Halim seemed to be the guy chiefly responsible for the show - and I reckon he has a lot to be proud of. Good stuff! I wouldn't say no to more of this - and neither would the Missus, which is the really important thing.