How new shows Dream Raider and The Victims’ Game are powering Taiwan’s TV drama renaissance, with the help of US studios
- Following years of pop-idol-driven romance series, critically acclaimed new Taiwanese TV dramas are giving those in the industry new hope
- Of the around 40 TV series productions in Taiwan last year, a combined 15 were co-produced by US studios HBO, Netflix and Fox
With a similar premise to Hollywood blockbuster Inception (2010), HBO Asia’s new Taiwanese TV drama series Dream Raider follows a group of neurological scientists and policemen as they go inside the dreams of comatose patients to investigate murders, mass disappearances and suicides.
Taiwanese actor Weber Yang Yi-chan, who plays a detective who sets out to investigate the mysterious circumstances of a girl’s death in the first episode, says that each of the eight episodes in the series – whose chief scriptwriter William Rabkin has written for notable TV shows including Baywatch (1989) – is a condensed movie with its own unique themes.
“The show has all the drama elements, including action, romance, family relations, sci-fi and suspense,” he says.
Launched on August 16, Dream Raider is among a rising number of Taiwanese TV drama series that have surprised audiences and critics over the past few years. Of the around 40 TV series productions in Taiwan last year, a combined 15 were co-produced by US studios HBO, Netflix and Fox, according to mainland Chinese media site Movie Information Office (Dian Ying Qing Bao Chu).
The trend of large foreign studios doing co-productions with local Taiwanese producers started in 2016, when HBO Asia teamed up with Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS) to make The Teenage Psychic . Revolving around the adventures of a girl who can communicate with the supernatural, it was HBO’s first TV series in Chinese.