Ode to Joy

The five women meet as neighbours, and according to Sixth Tone an elevator accident is what turns them into friends. Fan Shengmei, Qiu Yingying and Guan Juer share an apartment; Andy and Qu Xiaoxiao live nearby on the same floor. Work and romance run through it: an office romance, a blind date arranged by a parent, and the idea of the shengnu (剩女, "leftover woman", a label for unmarried urban women past their mid-twenties).

It is a slice-of-life ensemble rather than a single-lead drama. Entertainment commentator Wu Zhili said he liked that it had no male lead. Men appear as colleagues and love interests, but the central relationships are among the women.

The premise works because the five women sit at different points on the same ladder. Qu Xiaoxiao is a fu er dai (富二代, "rich second generation"); Andy has come back to China to look for her long-lost brother; the other three work for salaries and negotiate rent, family obligations and what a good marriage should look like. A 2017 commentary in Daily Economic News (每日经济新闻) sorts them by how family origin shapes them. Fan Shengmei, who rose to a senior role at a multinational from a poor family and sends money to relatives who favour her brother, fed a wider conversation about yuan sheng jia ting (原生家庭, "family of origin").

The series is adapted from the novel by A Nai (阿耐), set in a fictional city that the series moved to Shanghai, and is gentler in tone than the book. Daylight Entertainment (正午阳光) produced it. Some Weibo users objected to characters who seemed desperate to marry wealthy men, and a Guangming Daily (光明日报) piece places it as the start of a run of dramas about women of different classes, while warning that the formula has grown repetitive. Four more seasons followed; from Season 3 the leads were recast.