What a view | In Netflix office drama The Rational Life, starring Qin Lan and set in Shanghai, treachery rules
- Qin plays a hard-nosed but warm-hearted lawyer who must face down corporate duplicity and vicious competition in The Rational Life
- In Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis reprises his role as the eponymous bumbling soccer coach who is still blissfully unaware of his many sporting shortcomings
The career of a company high-flyer in glittering Shanghai is throttled at the hands of some vindictive competition in The Rational Life (Netflix, series one now showing).
Qin Lan stars as hard-nosed but warm-hearted lawyer Shen Ruoxin in this slow-burning concoction of romance, corporate duplicity, stalking and ... amateur astronomy.
Far from putting a downer on the whole enterprise, its relatively slow pace is a welcome relief from the shouty sort of drama that hurries along at the expense of character development and credibility. And The Rational Life certainly feels believable, with its vicious office politics, a big boss clueless about the real, nefarious goings-on and a slimy back-stabber slithering his way up the corporate ladder by sabotaging Shen.
Even as her standing in the legal division of Zenpro Automotive disintegrates, Shen must also combat antisocial media trolls who blame her for a complainant’s injuries, a mother haranguing her for being left on the shelf at only 33 years old, and an obsequious colleague-boyfriend, seemingly on a mission to keep Shanghai’s florists in business, who mortifies her before the entire department.
Her response? To remain calm and infuriatingly rational, knowing that revenge is a dish best served cold. This is a philosophical lesson her two most loyal allies find difficult to comprehend, but as lowly young interns they have much to learn about treachery in the workplace. Shen, on the other hand, realises that when it comes to Qi Xiao (Dylan Wang) and You Sijia (Lin Xinyi), it’s good to have friends in low places, because they will never sell you out for a corner office with a view.
And what views the series’ director of photography presents: Pudong and the Bund from every angle and at every time of day, the coruscating heart of a metropolis in which, at least according to Zenpro, it’s still a man’s world.
