Ossan’s Love

The photographs are the first sign. Tin Yat Hung (Edan Lui) is a property agent in his thirties who has never managed to find a girlfriend, and he discovers that his middle-aged boss Chak Kwok Keung (Kenny Wong), known to the office as KK, has been quietly keeping pictures of him. KK confesses, then walks out of a twenty-year marriage. Almost in the same breath, Tin's new flatmate and colleague Ling Siu Muk (Anson Lo) tells him he is in love with him as well. Tin has gone from never being wanted to being wanted by two men and watched by the whole office.

It is a workplace romantic comedy and it plays as one, running on jealousy between colleagues, the gap between professional admiration and something warmer, and the practical texture of two men sharing a flat in a dense city. Underneath that, it is about a man with no vocabulary for what is happening to him trying to work out what he actually wants, and the later episodes carry that into family: coming out to relatives, an existing marriage, the idea of marrying a partner of the same sex. An expanded strand hands KK's wife Francesca (Rachel Kan) an investigation of her own, as she sets out to identify her husband's third party, recruits Tin to help her watch him, and for a stretch mistakes Tin himself for the person she is hunting. Lui Chun Lam (Stanley Yau) and Chow Ching Man (Colin Chan) round out the office.

ViuTV took the 2018 TV Asahi format and stretched seven Japanese episodes into fifteen Cantonese ones, localising the workplace as a Hong Kong property agency and shooting at real sites from the Observation Wheel in Central to the Mody Road footbridge and Tai O on Lantau Island. The producer said the extra room went into character backgrounds and supporting arcs rather than new plot machinery, and when the team sent outlines to Tokyo using labels such as BL, the Japanese side replied that the story was about pure love across different kinds of relationship. Fifteen episodes ran as a weeknight strip at 21:30 from 28 June to 16 July 2021, with bonus footage after every set of closing credits and a making-of special two days before the premiere. Variety reported it as the first Hong Kong television series to put a gay romance in its main plotline, recorded an average of more than 450,000 viewers in the closing week, the station's best since it launched in 2016, and noted that TV Asahi then licensed the Hong Kong version back for Japan.