Young Blood Agency (2019)

So it was not bad... but it wasn’t really good either. It seems like the producers tried to reproduce success series like Detective L (and by the way, incorporated the good old cliche 4-flower-boys)... but everything is wrongly exploited. The various investigations are pretty uninteresting and we quickly lose interest. Moreover, they last more episodes than they should and they are pretty cliche and predictable. The main actors lack charisma and expression (except for Yu Yi Jie). However, most of their scenes do not require much emotion so this may be due to the fact that their characters are pretty weak in substance. For example, I feel like Zhai Xing’s character could have been awesome but they practically only give him one line in one episode (hard to show your acting skill that way) and we don’t get to see new aspects of his character. Tong Qiu Bai’s past and investigation about his dad is extremely cliche and it feels like we’ve seen that a million times. The actor only shows a poker-face all the time, whether he’s supposed to be happy, angry, thinking or hurt. His character and his romance are all pretty boring. His love interest, Qingmu, is no better : they try to give her personality by making her an expert in forensic but again, this was already used in the past and is nothing original. She’s basically only here to be the hero’s love interest and has no real personality whatsoever.
I was only interested in Nangong Shuo (Yu Yi Jie) and Song Miao Miao (Zheng Cheng Cheng) whose personalities, characters, acting and charismas are the only interesting thing in the drama. I look forward to see more of them in the future. I kept going the drama because I’m always interested in new faces like these two : however, this is not enough to save the drama

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Quite Enjoyable

Young Blood Agency isn't the best detective series (if it is even one); in fact, it is quite a distance from the best of whatever you might classify it as.

Perhaps because I wasn't expecting much, I was pretty impressed by how various cases the detectives encounter come together eventually. The weakness, however, is that we don't quite get anything really exciting or fascinating most of the time: it's just like one half-solved case after another until the dots start to become connected.

One of the better aspects of this drama is the depiction of the relationships between the characters. There is romance, friendship, and bromance. Oddly enough, Tong Qiu Bai, who is a central character, is barely developed. The other three male leads are interesting in their own ways. Nan Gong Shuo is a bit of a comic character, seemingly a frivolous, self-entitled brat at first but actually righteous and serious about what he is doing. Mei Ruo Lan is suitably mysterious from the start though one can sense that he is a true friend of Tong's regardless of what he is doing. Zhai Xing is like Nan Gong Shuo's sidekick, but a much better fighter and we can feel for him as we see his secret crush on one of the female leads. The romance and bromance are not gratuitous, thankfully, They do play a part in the story as their relationships get tested as they unravel mysteries.

Perhaps there is even a slight hint of BL? I see this in two minor characters, two artists who are very close to each other. I'm not very sure why they are even featured in the story though there is a small mystery involving them. Additionally, Mei Ruo Lan is the only one amongst the four male leads who does not have a clear love interest, but I wonder if he actually secretly likes Tong Qiu Bai. In one scene, he jokes to Zhai Xing that they are both abandoned when the other two male leads are with their love interests (one of whom is Zhai Xing's crush).

What would have made the series better is perhaps a few more truly interesting cases for the detective agency to solve or at least a tweaking of the same cases to make them more engaging. At times, some situations are a little too unbelievable for a story that seems to be part of the detective genre, e.g. some unknown poison in a world where traces of specific chemicals can be detected in a cup? A drug that allows a person to feign death? I know it's fiction, but perhaps the story would work better if it forensics weren't featured so heavily or if the main characters weren't trying to be actual detectives.

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