HIStory3: Make Our Days Count

Loud, hot-tempered and coasting as the college entrance examinations approach, Xiang Hao Ting (Wayne Song) throws his weight around with his friends. Yu Xi Gu (Huang Chun-chih) is a quiet newcomer who works several part-time jobs and keeps himself to himself, and after a first encounter that goes badly Hao Ting starts following him about. The tutoring arrangement that comes out of it, Xi Gu steering him through the examinations, becomes the ground everything else is built on. Alongside them Sun Bo Xiang (Wilson Liu) and Lu Zhi Gang (Thomas Chang), a dessert shop owner, carry a second storyline about responsibility and self-restraint.

Time is the unit's constant subject, and how little of it these characters believe they control. Study sessions, exam preparation and the question of what comes after graduation give the couple a reason to count their days. Household circumstance decides what each of them is able to ask for, one family stretched by illness and money, the other comparatively settled, and that disparity does the work an external villain usually does in this genre. Director Tsai Mi-chieh called it a deliberately small story, built on love and collision, not any grand narrative, centred on a single ordinary day.

Make Our Days Count is the second and closing unit of HIStory3, running on the same LINE TV banner as Trapped and sharing no characters, cast or director with it. Tsai, who comes from a directing family, was offered both the producing and the directing role and chose to direct. The cast was assembled almost entirely from inexperienced performers, and Huang Chun-chih and Wayne Song were already classmates at National Taiwan University of Arts before being cast opposite each other. A shoot planned for 60 days ran past 80. Twenty episodes went out in pairs every Wednesday from 16 October to 18 December 2019, and Wilson Liu was later put forward for Best Newcomer at the 55th Golden Bell Awards.