Small Town Remedy

After a surgery he took on as an outside "flying knife" job goes wrong, Liu loses his post in Shenzhen and is out of money. Then his mother stops answering the phone. He goes back to Fucheng (抚城), the small Northeastern town he left as a boy, for the first time in winter in 23 years, and finds his mother missing and his younger brother, Liu Zhengguang (刘铮光), who sells urns for a living, in need of brain surgery.

Liu plans to leave before the weekend's snow, but Dean Long Dongdong (龙冬冬), played by Ni Dahong (倪大红), has other ideas, and Liu ends up on the staff of Xiaoximen (小西门), a run-down local hospital with an unexpectedly good operating theatre. Around him are his old friend Chen Junnan (陈俊南), a local doctor, and Ai Chen (艾辰), who runs the funeral shop where his brother works and who meets him with a bucket of water before she meets him with anything else.

The series adapts the novel Fei Dao (飞刀, "Flying Knife") by Liu Sanshu (刘三叔); in medicine, feidao is slang for a surgeon travelling to another hospital to operate. The first episode explains Liu's fear of snow: as a child he watched his father dive under the ice while winter swimming and never come up, and the show names his condition as post-traumatic stress.

The Chinese title plays on liangfang (良方), "a good prescription". The drama is made by CCTV and Ningmeng Pictures (柠萌影视) with iQIYI, directed by Zhang Xiaobo (张晓波) from a script by Nie Chengshuai (聂成帅). In an October 2026 interview with China News Service, the novelist said the trailer matched what he had imagined, apart from Xiao Zhan being too handsome for the part.