What a viewCollege sweethearts reunite in Netflix’s No Regrets in Life, and you wonder what she saw in him – a sulky, dithering wimp
- No Regrets in Life follows a group of college friends eight years after they graduate, including former sweethearts whose argument in a Taipei street goes viral
- There’s no physical passion, and long periods in which nothing much happens. For an antidote, Industry, a sexed up series about high finance, is back on HBO Go
Social media has certain useful attributes (allegedly), but they’re unlikely to spring to mind when your big bust-up with your sort-of partner has just been filmed and the whole episode has – in that horribly irritating cliché du jour – “gone viral”.
Eight years on from their largely carefree college days, a group of friends pretentiously calling themselves the Nine Suns organise an annual reunion in No Regrets in Life (Netflix, Season 1 now complete). Which is ironic, because regret permeates the show.
The ulterior motive for the latest gathering is to bring back together Ning Yu-chu (Annie Chen) and Wang Yen (Liu Kuan-ting), who have been avoiding each other. In college, they were an item – almost, the roadblock to their ever-after happiness being Wang Yen’s inability to tell Ning if he loved her.
This has bothered her ever since, but one wonders why – Wang Yen being a sulky, dithering wimp continually complaining about being tired. (Even the wife he has recently collected wants a divorce.) Raking over old college coals, the regulation 15 minutes of fame arrives for Ning and Wang Yen during a fight they have outside a Taipei MRT station, which hits social media via a crowd of gawkers.
Yu-chu’s decisive moves include biting Wang Yen on an arm and battering him with a stuffed toy shark.
Thanks to the clip, 15 minutes balloons into a kind of extended celebrity feed by news reports, chat shows and internet forums. This must be a comment on privacy, plus its erosion in this era of saturation media coverage of trivial nonsense consumed by vituperative critics with nothing better to do.