I'm hearing rumors that Yoshiko Nakamura's deliciously funny revenge manga Skip Beat! is going to be made into a Taiwanese drama starring Ariel Lin. Frankly, my hopes are not high.

Not everything about this idea is terrible. Ariel Lin is an appealing actress (although she's a solid decade older than the character she would be playing), and most of the T-dramas I've seen have stuck very closely to their source material. Unfortunately, I don't think this story will work as a live-action production.

The heroine of Skip Beat! is a sweet, gentle girl named Kyoko, who is totally devoted to her childhood friend Sho. When Sho decides to run away from home and become a singer, Kyoko goes with him, taking on several part-time jobs to support them. Kyoko comes home early one day and overhears Sho telling his manager that Kyoko is nothing but a servant to him, and (now that he's a success) he plans to send her back to their old home. Enraged, Kyoko swears vengeance and buries her nice-girl persona forever, deciding to become a star in her own right...

Most of the humor in this series comes from Kyoko's innappropriate, over-the-top reactions to her new world. It's full of the kind of sequences that are funny in a single manga panel, but will be very difficult to recreate in a live-action. Here's Kyoko's reaction to overhearing Sho's real opinion of her (that evil-looking thing in the trunk is one of Kyoko's inner demons):


And this is a couple of pages later, once all of Kyoko's inner demons have emerged and she's busily killing off her selflessness and love for Sho (represented by those sweet little fairy-things she's squishing):


Hmm. It would probably work as an anime, and it MIGHT work if they play it totally straight in a live-action, but I suspect we'll be in for a lot of cheap-looking comedic fantasy sequences and sitcom-style over-acting.

Labels: dramas, manga