As an aspiring lawyer wannabe when I was a kid, I was fascinated by all kinds of legal dramas. Of course, there are good ones and bad ones, but when I ran into a good, I just got hooked.
I ran into ‘OMG Your Honour’, a TVB legal drama on YouTube by accident. Since it has Louisa Mak, one of my favorite Miss Hong Kong in the recent years in it, I decided to give it try, even though I knew that she probably would only be in a small part, being still pretty new to the entertainment business at that time.
The year of production was 2018, and it shows its age, not because of its production value, but because of the world view at that time.
The story circled around a group of young barristers and a young solicitor (Louisa Mak) trying to make sense of the legal world they threw themselves into after years of hard work in the university. One of them gave up a lucrative government job to become a barrister to fight for justice, another fell into the profession because of family expectations, while others were proving a point, either to the society or to their families. However, they shared one main thread – what is the point for being a custodian of law in an increasingly volatile legal environment in Hong Kong?
Like all the other legal dramas, they have cases to deal with on top of family and personal drama. Under the flashy suits were just a bunch of real people dealing with real issues. Some of them let the drama played out, while others scrambled to face the truth of their case and of themselves. Most were not whom they seemed to be, at least as compared to the persona they threw out in the court. The seemingly strongest on the outside could be the most fragile from within, while the seemingly docile one could turn out to be the toughest inside. Life is not easy for most of them, and as they said, there are points to argue in court, but life is much murkier.
The series has some of the most celebrated cast members in the Hong Kong TV industry, such as Eddie Kwan and Ben Wong, leading a group of upcoming stars at that time, including Louisa Mak, Oscar Leung, Grace Wong, King Lam, Jonathan Wong etc. And unsurprisingly, Eddie and Ben served as the mentors for most of these younger cast members. While the generational interactions were full of wisdom, it is how the young ones saw the world and some of their throw away comments about an industry that they were totally green in that hit a lot of heavy notes.
It is a legal drama, naturally there are lots of court scenes. Apart from how they found those meticulous angles and arguments to win their cases, either as the prosecutor or the defending lawyer, the drama also focused on a lot what they learnt from every single court case they were in, and reflecting on who and what they wanted to become. I think there were great stuff in the writing, and that was complimented by some right to the point acting of some of the delivering cast members. You will question their motives and their actions, they might be flawed, but you did not hate them or dislike them, because you found empathy from their angle. And I think this is what made the characterisation of a drama series great.
As I said, the drama was made in 2018, a year before the social turbulence that swept through the territory in the summer next year, leading to a completely reshaped social, political and legal landscape. Watching the series, I couldn’t help but wondered what if the social turmoil had never happened in 2019 and 2020, would we still have a Hong Kong that we always thought we used to know and valued? Or would the end result still be the same? Faces and places were changing rapidly in the last few years and Hong Kong, like a lot of other countries in the world, was shaken to its core by a divided society.
Maybe as those young guns in the series said, ‘it’s easier to find a point in a case than finding the true meaning in the real life’.
We moved on and moved forward. But what’s left behind?
