Well

Why Women Love is a twenty-four episode Chinese drama I decided to watch out of idle curiosity, and kept watching with morbid fascination for both the very extended emotional foreplay and an utterly immaculate, wholly sterile imaginary world that I thought only existed in Disneyworld and Barbie's Dream House.

Actually if you want a C-drama starter series you can't go wrong with this one. All of the female actresses are pretty and thin to the point of anorexia; all of the male actors are quite handsome and muscular. The dichotomy is quite painful for a Western female to see, but I think this is fairly standard in this genre. These two-dimensional characters work at fluff companies which wrestle with gritty non-issue issues like an important print order being stalled, social media fallout in comments, and he said/she said situations. They live in frankly gorgeous apartments that are spotless, drive brand-new cars and have the very best of friends. They look beautiful all the time, never having a single hair out of place, and evidently the ladies sleep and wake up with perfect makeup on. Often I felt like I was in a Jan Karon novel.

This story features a (slightly) older woman and a younger man who are launching a romance app at his mother's company. She's driven and hard-working but socially and romantically inept; he's filthy rich and a slacker but socially and romantically experienced. For no particular reason I could really fathom he falls for her and proceeds to spend nineteen episodes trying to win her over by basically strutting around looking buff and handsome, dressing in sometimes ridiculous fashions, and throwing money around by the bucketfuls to do this or that while romancing the older gal.

The emotional foreplay is mostly all you're going to get between these two for 80% of the episodes, but I will say that was done very well. By the end I was convinced Older Barbie and Younger Ken were actually in love. The rest of their emotions, like the remainder of the cast and in fact the entire series, were plastic fake. The entire series is a huge ball of plastic perfection, but I guess that's what Chinese viewers enjoy. Available to watch on Viki-com if you have absolutely nothing to do.