Small Town Remedy's first eight minutes take everything from its hero

I've started Small Town Remedy (小城良方). I'm eight minutes in.

A countdown in the rubble

The opening credits give way to ruins. The camera pushes past broken walls to Liu Zhengliang (Xiao Zhan), his face buried in dust. Everything is grey except a red countdown in the lower left corner. He comes to and starts trying to work himself free. A voiceover asks when the wheels of fate started turning, then answers itself: "Was it that phone call? No. It must have been the snow."

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A drama about a small town in China's Northeast that opens on a disaster site is not what I expected. The hook goes in deep. What happened? Why is he down there, in what looks like a rescue uniform? What is the countdown counting down to, and what happens at zero? Which phone call? What snow? The show throws every question at you at once, and you want to know.

There is something else in that line. If you follow Xiao Zhan, the first half, "the wheels of fate" and "that phone call", sounds like a wink at the actor himself, and the alarm bells go off. By "the snow" it is someone else talking. It is a neat handoff: from here on, he is Liu Zhengliang.

The melodrama it skips

One year earlier, Shenzhen, where improbably it is snowing too. Liu sits in the back of a car rubbing his forehead, eyes puffy, face drained. He can't get out of an operation he agreed to: a feidao (飞刀, "flying knife"), the term for a surgeon travelling to operate at another hospital on the side. A little girl's life is in his hands.

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The operation goes wrong and the patient dies. His hospital has to pay 750,000 yuan; insurance won't cover an unauthorised outside operation, and the hospital, guarding its name, deals with him. The camera passes his "Top Ten Young Physicians" certificate on the office wall.

I had been worried about how the show would handle this. A surgery that kills a child is sensitive ground. It promises big drama, and plenty of viewers see room for a showcase, but get the tone wrong and you either start a row or leave the audience miserable.

Small Town Remedy gives it about a minute: voiceover, quick flashbacks, gone. Where the camera actually stops is the aftermath: a Northeasterner in Shenzhen with no job and no money. The writers know the story is not the accident. It is the man after it.

He gives away his desk

On his way out, Liu hands the things on his desk to his colleagues, a word of advice with each one.

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He seems like someone who looks out for people. So what do his colleagues say behind his back? Great hands, no people skills. He doesn't fit in, and when things went wrong nobody stood up for him.

One minute, and you know who he is: technically superb, socially clumsy, not much liked. Whatever waits for him at the small hospital back home, this scene has already set it up.

No breakup scene, just the car

The payout has wiped him out. He wants to sell the car he and his ex-girlfriend bought together before they split, to her, cheap.

Where you would expect a breakup scene, you get a car sale. That cleanly skips another round of melodrama and a cast of people who have nothing to do with the main story. The scene is played for laughs, and once the laugh fades you are as deflated as he is: single, no money raised, and now no car either.

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Back at his flat he calls his mother. No answer.

By now Shenzhen has nothing left to hold him. Job, reputation, savings, girlfriend, car, taken away one at a time. The call that won’t connect is the last push north. In the next scene he tries his younger brother, Liu Zhengguang, who finally picks up: their mother is missing.

He doesn't want to go home. He has to.

Barely alive

For these few minutes Xiao Zhan is slumped, numb, nothing behind the eyes. Chinese viewers have a phrase for that state, huoren weisi (活人微死, "alive, but only just"), and a word for the worker it describes, niuma (牛马, "oxen and horses"): someone life has pinned to the floor and kept grinding. I'd had four hours' sleep the night before I wrote this. Watching him hunched over a takeaway dinner, it didn't feel like watching a show.

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Just past the eight-minute mark, a weather forecast warns of a cold wave over his hometown, Fucheng, with a blizzard at the weekend. He plans to head back to Shenzhen on Friday, before the snow.

The story starts here.