Ting-Ning Chen

Chen Ting-ning (Chinese: 陳定寧) is a Taiwanese screenwriter and director, credited as writer across all twelve episodes of the second season of Fragrance of the First Flower (第一次遇見花香的那刻), the Girls’ Love series carried by Netflix and GagaOOLala.

Two seasons, three years apart

The series is not one block of television. Season one ran six episodes from 12 November 2021. Season two ran twelve, and did not arrive until 18 February 2025. The writing credit here belongs to the second, longer run, which means this record covers the half of the property that had to be commissioned again after a gap of more than three years.

The rest of the filmography is short and almost entirely Taiwanese independent cinema. Two 2018 shorts came first, both directed rather than written: Lichao, twenty-six minutes, about a woman who returns to a hometown she left because her mother is selling the house and who keeps a pregnancy to herself; and Minus (冰箱), sixteen minutes, described on its own record as an old fridge and three sensitive women in an old flat. Then came writing work: the six episode series Who Killed The Good Man (2021) and the eighty-seven minute feature Fish Pond (幻象人, 2022), about a university student who applies a comparison-shopping theory to dating.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Five credits is a small record, and we would rather say what it actually shows than inflate it.

What it shows is the standard Taiwanese route, and it is worth naming because it is nothing like the Thai one. There is no studio here and no roster. There are two self-directed shorts, made cheaply, both of them small domestic pieces about women in enclosed rooms. Shorts of that kind are a calling card in Taiwan: they exist to be seen by the eight or ten people who commission things. Three years later the calling card worked, and the work that followed was writing for other people’s productions.

Our own read is that the three-year gap between the two seasons of Fragrance of the First Flower is the more important fact on this page, and it is easy to miss. Taiwan produced the Girls’ Love series that reached Netflix, and then took over three years to make more of it. A Thai studio would have had the second season shooting inside twelve months. That is not a judgement about ambition. It is what happens when a title is commissioned one at a time by people who have to go and find the money again, rather than scheduled by a company that already owns the pipeline.

The upside is on the screen. A season written by someone whose own films are sixteen and twenty-six minutes long, about rooms and the women inside them, is going to be a particular kind of television. Whether that is worth waiting three years for is a question we would rather leave with the reader than answer for them.