Ren Yu

The setting is a small city in the 1990s. Su Lin comes from a family that favors sons and tends to overlook her, as the launch-day coverage puts it. Her school life brings its own pressure. Her classmate Ma Na (马娜, played by Duan Yu, 段钰) is a bully, and Jiang Ting (姜庭, played by He Sitian, 何思甜) is a quiet girl who watches without speaking up.

When Su Lin goes missing, the investigation turns up strange details: withdrawal paperwork for her school that was handled oddly, and a household registration that has been cancelled for no clear reason. Police also find an unidentified woman's body in an underground waterway, a lead that connects to her school. Old and new cases begin to overlap. Gu Hao (顾浩, played by Dong Yong, 董勇), a retired police officer who once showed Su Lin kindness, and the officer Tai Wei (邰伟, played by Zhang Kaitai, 张开泰) keep looking for the truth.

The drama is adapted from a novel of the same name by Lei Mi (雷米), according to HK01 and a Henan Business Daily item. It is directed by Yang Lei (杨磊) and written by Chen Chen (陈晨), per the Beijing Daily piece. Henan Business Daily describes the setting as a fictional small city called Chaobei (朝北, "facing north").

The title echoes Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. According to HK01, Su Lin works hard on her spoken English to win the mermaid role in a school recital, which sets off the first conflict. Henan Business Daily quotes one assessment of the series as a "dark fairy tale" about self-rescue.

Reception was uneven. Henan Business Daily reported that the series opened quietly, with first-day heat well below expectations and opinion divided.