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There are surprisingly very few TV series that deal with dementia or Alzheimer’s, and how it affects not only the people who have it, but the family members who see their loved ones slipping away and/or become their caretakers. When we do see the topic in a series, it’s generally treated with a lot of sensitivity and emotion. But in a new Taiwanese series on Netflix, a woman will talk about her caretaking relationship with her father via her stand-up act.
FORGET YOU NOT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: At a market, a father walks hand-in-hand with his young daughter. She gets distracted, and the girl can’t find her father.
The Gist: Cheng Le-Le (Ying-Hsuan Hsieh) is telling that story in a comedy club in front of a very receptive audience. She’s just over 40 and has been doing stand-up comedy for awhile, and much of her comedy lately has consisted of stories about her father, Kuang-Chi (Chin Han).
Kuang-Chi isn’t a typical doting father, even though he mostly raised Le-Le on his own after her mother left them to explore the United States. He definitely is a dreamer and a bit silly, and sometimes he has his head in the clouds. For instance, the story Li-Li tells about getting lost in the market ends with her finding her father drinking some juice without a care in the world.
She tells another story, about her wedding to Chang Kai (Wallace Huo), from whom she’s currently separated. Kuang-Chi hasn’t shown up, even as the emcee is showing slides about the couple and their families and is getting ready to introduce them for the first time as husband and wife. One of the reasons is that he’s blithely riding his bike there, and he ends up in the hospital when a stick gets stuck in the spokes and he goes flying.
Currently, Li-Li is doing comedy — a very male-dominated field in Taiwan — while working at a convenience store. Making time to spend with her besties, Lin Chia-Yun (Tracy Chou) and Huang Su-Fei (Esther Liu), is hard because one has two kids and the other has an aging cat. She doesn’t even date, which makes it hard for her to come up with anything relatable to say during the club’s theme night about dating.
She’s called to the ER yet again after Kuang-Chi takes a tumble. He there telling his silly jokes to the nurses and all seems normal, but the ER doc tells Li-Li that he’s exhibiting early signs of dementia and should no longer be living alone. Li-Li refuses to believe the doctor, attributing his behavior his usual head-in-the-clouds manner. Then she goes back to his apartment and sees that he’s living like a hoarder, has no concept of what date it is and recalls recently talking to people who died years prior.
In the meantime, Kuang-Chi, who doesn’t want to be a burden to Li-Li, is looking up old girlfriends and proposing that they get married, solely to have someone take care of him. Of course, that’s not going well.
Photo: NetflixWhat Shows Will It Remind You Of? Elements of Forget You Not remind us of films like Still Alice and the more heartfelt storylines in A Man On The Inside.
Our Take: Forget You Not is designed to take some heavy topics and make them somewhat lighter through the story of Li-Li coming to understand her father Kuang-Chi better as he goes through his cognitive decline. In the first episode, we see that Li-Li is at a point in her life where it feels like she’s starting over, trying to get a comedy career started against the odds, given how male-dominated the field is. She’s separated from her husband. And it seems that she’s drifted apart from Kuang-Chi of late, likely the result of accumulating resentment over his not being a traditional father figure.
But you can see in the chemistry between Hsieh, who plays Li-Li and Han, who plays Kuang-Chi, that there is a lot of love there. And it’ll be interesting to see how Li-Li’s stand-up act evolves as the caregiving relationship with her father progresses. It’s not like Kuang-Chi is all gung-ho about wanting his daughter taking care of him, but at a certain point they are both going to need to come to some sort of detente about it. In the meantime, Li-Li’s stories will likely be about her as a kid, her marriage and separation, and her friendships, all of which should make for funny and heartfelt flashbacks.
Photo: NetflixSex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Kuang-Chi crosses another name off his list of potential wives-caretakers.
Sleeper Star: Tracy Chou and Esther Liu, who play Li-Li’s buddies Chia-Yun and Su-Fei, are there mainly to be sounding boards for Li-Li, but it looks like they may get stories of their own.
Most Pilot-y Line: Stand-up is one of the hardest things to script for a show, and it’s certainly much harder to get across what the comedian is saying via subtitles. Li-Li’s stand-up isn’t exactly laugh-free, but what we heard from her certainly doesn’t explain the raucous laughter she gets at the club.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Forget You Not is a sweet, emotional take on caring for aging parents, told through the perspective of a woman’s stand-up act.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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