We Best Love: No. 1 For You

For more than a decade Zhou Shu Yi (Yang Yu-teng) has been second. First place has belonged to Gao Shi De (Sam Lin) ever since Gao arrived in his class in the fifth grade, and Shu Yi has organised his life around closing a gap that never closes. University was meant to be a clean start, and it is, right up until Gao turns up in the same place, and then on the same swimming team. What Shu Yi reads as relentless rivalry is something else: Shi De has been in love with him since they were teenagers, and shadowing him is simply how he has stayed near.

The series turns academic ranking into the vocabulary its characters use for feelings neither will say aloud. Class positions, examination results and the habit of measuring yourself against one specific person carry the story out of school and into working life, so competition functions as intimacy and as avoidance at the same time. There is also a silence to account for, since the two meet again as colleagues after years apart and the absence between them was never discussed; family expectation and the pressure of being the dependable child are where the reasons sit, while the swimming pool gives the rivalry a body. Pei Shou Yi (Ray Chang), Fang Zheng Wen (Zack Fanchiang), Jiang Yu Xin (Belle Shin) and Liu Bing Wei (Evan Luo) fill out a story that runs on pride, apology and the recognition that first place mattered chiefly because of who was watching.

Six episodes of about thirty minutes went out on WeTV on Fridays at 8pm from 8 January 2021, with simultaneous carriage in Japan on VideoMarket and Rakuten TV. This is the first half of a single twelve-episode commission rather than a show that got renewed: Fighting Mr. 2nd followed on 5 March 2021 in the same slot, with the same leads five years older and the rivalry moved from a classroom into a corporate buyout, and a director's cut, We Best Love: Special Edition, arrived on 25 June. Ray Jiang directed from a screenplay by Lin Pei-yu for Result Entertainment, in what business coverage treated as a notable case of Tencent's international platform investing directly in a Taiwanese production. One detail from the shoot has outlived most of the others: the underwater kiss was filmed in a pool five metres deep, and Yang Yu-teng could not swim at all, so the two leads trained in the water together beforehand.