HIStory3: Make Our Days Count

Loud, hot-tempered and coasting, Xiang Hao Ting (Wayne Song) is in his final year of high school and throwing his weight around with his friends. Yu Xi Gu (Huang Chun-chih) is the quiet transfer student 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 college entrance examinations, becomes the ground everything else is built on. Alongside them Sun Bo Xiang (Wilson Liu) develops feelings for Lu Zhi Gang (Thomas Chang), an older dessert shop owner, and that age gap raises its own questions about responsibility, self-restraint and the distance between wanting someone and being ready for them.

Time is the unit's steady 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, and the story keeps circling a promise attached to an eighteenth birthday, which LINE TV's chapter titles name outright. Household circumstance decides what each boy 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 rather than 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; coming off the more stylised HIStory2 unit 越界, she aimed this one at realism and stripped out dated school-drama devices such as love letters so it would sit convincingly in 2018 and 2019. 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, each pair sharing a chapter title, and Wilson Liu was later put forward for Best Newcomer at the 55th Golden Bell Awards.