Unknown

When their parents die, Wei Qian (Chris Chiu) is barely more than a boy himself and there are two other people to keep: a younger sister, Wei Li-li (Tammy Lin), and Wei Zhi-yuan (Kurt Huang), the child the family took in. He leaves school, takes dangerous and sometimes illegal work, and only later, with help from a friend, turns it into something legitimate. School fees, debts and risk are what narrow his life, not any general notion of hardship. Then Zhi-yuan comes home from his studies, kisses him, and says what he has been holding onto for years. Wei Qian's response is to send him abroad, which is not a response.

The series takes a household assembled by circumstance rather than birth and asks where its boundaries lie. Affection that began in rescue and gratitude has to be renamed as something else, and the story keeps returning to who is permitted to want what, with distance and study serving as ways of postponing a reply. Because the twelve episodes cover sixteen years, time is part of the material rather than a backdrop, and much of what matters is carried in silence long before anyone can say it. Chris Chiu has said the director asked him to keep his character's feelings hidden and carry them in behaviour and in the eyes rather than in speech.

Unknown is adapted from 大哥 by Priest, serialised on Jinjiang Literature City from 2013 across 71 chapters and tagged there as an urban, age-gap, underworld drama; it had gathered over 432,000 collections and more than 187,000 reviews. Priest is among the most adapted authors in Chinese-language danmei, so taking this book put a Taiwanese production straight into competition for an established pan-Asian readership, and it moved the team behind We Best Love from original scripts to adapted material and from WeTV to Youku. Ray Jiang directed, his fourth title with this producing group, and the production carried an unusually heavy action component for the genre, with fight sequences that needed weeks of preparation. Twelve episodes of roughly 25 to 37 minutes went out on Saturdays at 8pm from 24 February to 20 April 2024, free on YouTube in Taiwan alongside the Youku International premiere, with Sam Lin of We Best Love guesting as Lin Zu Yuan and the Korean actor Kim Jae-hoon as Tan Yu. It took BL of the Year at the 2024 Splash Awards, and Chris Chiu performs the opening theme himself.