Chilam Cheung, Myolie Wu Star in Remake of Japanese Drama, “Under One Roof”
Japanese television drama, Under One Roof <同一屋簷下>, was a classic family series that aired in the 1990s. The first season aired to popular reception in 1993 and eventually paved way for a second season, which aired in 1997.
The family series revolves around five biological siblings and one adoptive sibling who were separated into different foster homes after their parents died in a car accident. After years of separation, the six siblings have already transitioned into their new lives. The eldest brother hopes to bring the family together again and reunite the siblings to live under one roof. Although the eldest brother is eager in uniting the family, his siblings, however, are apathetic towards his suggestion.
Hong Kong film producer, Stephen Shiu Jr. (蕭定一), recently announced his decision to remake the classic series. The 22-episode drama will star Chilam Cheung (張智霖) in the lead role as the eldest brother, Tatsuya Kashiwagi. Pakho Chau (周柏豪) is cast as the second brother, Masaya Kashiwagi, who was adopted by a wealthy doctor and is set to inherit the family’s private hospital. Justin Cheung (張建聲) stars as the delinquent third son, Kazuya Kashiwagi. In addition to having dropped out of high school, Justin’s character was also a delinquent who was sent to juvenile detention. Babyjohn Choi (蔡瀚億) portrays the youngest brother, Fumiya Kashiwagi, who has autism and is handicapped as a result of the car accident. Larine Tang (鄧月平) stars in the role of Koume Kashiwagi, the fifth child and youngest daughter. Shiga Lin (連詩雅) portrays the role of the adopted sister, Koyuki Kashiwagi, and is the third eldest in the family.
In addition to the main family, the drama will also star Myolie Wu (胡杏兒) as Chilam’s fiancé. Chrissie Chau (周秀娜) also takes a part in the series with a heavy role. While some may be excited for the remake, many are worried that the recreation will ruin the classic series. One netizen commented, “They must be joking to cast 30 and 40 year olds as teenagers and young adults!”
“Under One Roof 2” OST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbz_WT42tO8
Source: HK01
This article is written by Huynh for JayneStars.com.
Under One Roof is one of the best Japanese Drama I have ever watched. Not sure if this remake will surpass the old one.
Pakho Chau (周柏豪) caught my attention. lol…not aware of original but the casts do seem a bit old if they are portraying teens n younger adults.
Then what? Are they gonna remake Long Vacation, Beach Boys, Tokyo Love Story, Koori no Sekai, Majo no Jouken, Asunaro Hakusho etc. as well?
Seriously, TVB is sooooo lacking in the creativity corner that they should just fire everyone in their creative team and hire the Japanese/Korean instead. Then, just recruit some translators to translate those scripts to Chinese. :<
@rika Is this TVB?
@funnlim Not sure if it’s TVB since it wasn’t mentioned in the article. Just assumed it would be TVB since they have a history of ripping off other people’s works. Even the background music they used in dramas come from Japanese musicians like Kitaro, S.E.N.S. etc.
@rika It’s definitely not TVB — Stephen Shiu Jr. launched his own OTT network earlier in the year so most likely this series will be for his hmvod channel. Besides, as far as I know, his company is still in dispute with TVB (the lawsuit is still pending in court I think) and so most of his artists are still banned from appearing on TVB productions (with the exception of Pakho Chau of course) so pretty sure there won’t be any type of crossover collaboration with TVB.
With all that said though, remakes in general are always risky no matter which company tries to do it. I don’t watch Japanese series so not much comment on this one but I can understand why fans of the series would be concerned. For the sake of those fans, hopefully Stephen Shiu Jr doesn’t screw this up.
As a point of reference (for those who might be concerned what this remake might look like)….SSJ’s company also did the movie version of HKTV series The Menu and while it wasn’t a remake but rather a continuation from the series, they actually did a surprisingly good job — but then again, the original scriptwriter, director/producer and majority cast and crew from the series were also involved with the movie, so that probably played a huge role in the movie turning out well. Maybe those concerned can check out their previous movie remakes / spinoffs of other TV series and see if any of those lived up to standard?
@llwy12 Thanks for the information but nah, I have no interest in checking out remakes to “validate” their quality against the original. Time is too precious to waste it in watching remakes when I could spend it in watching more new originals from other countries.
@funnlim Stephen Shiu Jr is producing this, so right now it’s not a TVB production. It sounds like a web series and Shiu may produce it with some backing of Mainland money, which is the trend for Hong Kong dramas to make real money now.
TVB please don’t spoil it for me. This is one of my most fave japanese drama and Fukuyama Masaharu was sublime in here. The casting of Chilam Cheung is already wrong for the role of the eldest hot headed brother and a 10 episode arc is now 22 episodes? I suppose combining even the sequel? Please don’t. Go spoil another series.
By the way the original is still great. Yes it is a bit dated looking but the story is good. The sequel however is not good.
P/s each is too old for each role, And definitely story changed. Myolie as the fiancee means story has changed unless this series changes the 2nd daughter into the fiancee which also means a significant change.
Oh I miss Masha. Gonna rewatch Galileo and listen to his album. Well TVB remade Galileo without admitting it and it was a total farce.
@funnlim Chilam’s image is closer to Fukuyama Masaharu’s role instead of Eguchi Yosuke’s role but still, the cast is too old to play young adults.
TVB’s Galileo parody was soooooooooooooooooooo stupid.
p.s. I pray hard that they won’t start becoming funny and make a parody out of SPEC ~Keizoku~. I loved that weird drama to bits and Toda Erika x Kase Ryo rocked in it. xD
@rika Agree, Chilam’s image is closer to Masaharu’s than Yōsuke Eguchi. Character wise, the eldest brother, Tatsuya Kashiwagi, is a soft-hearted, self-giving, goofy big brother probably suits another actor better. If Chow Yun Fatt has been much younger, he will be my choice.
@bearbear I think drama actor wise……Gallen Lo might have been a better choice since he is versatile enough to play a hot headed character. Can’t really think of anyone else who could play Eguchi Yosuke’s character.
@rika Maybe if Gallen is younger? He looks very tired and haggard in his last TVB drama.
Regardless, not looking forward to this remake. The original was really good, Masaharu was so good looking, Eguchi and all the younger siblings were convincing in their roles, I didn’t even mind watching Noriko Sakai, lol.
TVB fans with the expectation of mediocrity.
LOL
The only thing I remember about the Japanese version was the second brother Fukuyama was so handsome !!!
no body beats Fukuyama…, tall and handsome. why they remake the drama with mid-age people. the original had a real young cast.
@m0m0 Fukuyama is still a hot ojii-san till now. xD
So….Stephen Shiu Jr posted on Facebook that the cast for the remake is actually not confirmed yet and that they will make the official announcement once everything is in place. Looks like he had been getting a lot of concerned phone calls about the choice of cast and so he felt the need to release a statement about it. Basically, at this point, the remake will definitely happen, but exact details, including cast list, will be forthcoming at a later date.
On a separate but related note….honestly, in this day and age, audiences need to stop assuming that any mention of a HK series must automatically mean it is produced by TVB. There are 2 additional free-to-air TV stations in HK now and even though one of those stations (Fantastic Television aka i-Cable) essentially has zero output in terms of series, ViuTV (NowTV’s free TV arm) has been consistently filming series (though of course their output is nowhere near TVB’s) and most of theirs are of much higher quality overall, at least the ones I’ve seen so far (speaking of ViuTV, they recently had their blessing ceremony for their next big series — the Detective Psycho Prequel, which will star Adam Cheng and Michael Tao with Bryant Mak, Brian Chan, and Neo Yau playing the younger versions of the 3 main characters from the first series originally played by David Siu, Vincent Wan, and Paul Che – people are asking if David Siu is going to have a cameo in the sequel so he can reunite with his “brother” and “dad” from The Greed of Man, lol). Also, let’s not forget that the trend in HK nowadays is filming web series and there are plenty of production companies (both HK and Mainland) on that bandwagon. Stephen Shiu Jr’s company is just one of many that are going the web series route and no doubt they are going to get a run for their money due to the number of quality web dramas out there (I honestly feel that Fox Asia’s 2 web dramas alone already blow SSJ’s dramas out of the water).
@llwy12
Any word when STAINED will be broadcasting? I’m looking forward to that.
@anon Haven’t heard anything about when Stained is going to air. Last I saw on their Facebook page, they’ve been screening the series at various film festivals around the globe (Patrick Kong basically took the 5 episode TV series version and turned it into a mini-movie). I think that might be why there’s no air date yet.
Some good news though for those who didn’t get a chance to watch Fox Asia’s other series The Trading Floor when it premiered in May. Latest news is that ViuTV bought the broadcast rights to the series so they are going to air it on their channel soon. I haven’t watched it yet because I can’t access Fox Plus here in the U.S. (didn’t want to bother with VPN) and I refuse to watch the Mandarin-dubbed version on Tencent. I’m assuming they will do the same thing with Stained later on. As much as I dislike Patrick Kong and his stupid rom-com movies, Stained is definitely a huge departure for him so hopefully it’s nothing like what he usually outputs…regardless though, even if the script (which he supposedly wrote) sucks (not saying it will of course), I’m definitely still going to watch because I know for sure that with Kara Hui, Anthony Wong, and Tse Kwan Ho leading the cast, the acting is going to be phenomenal!!
@llwy12
You can catch Trading Floor here. It’s the Cantonese version.
icdrama(dot)se/hk-drama/1064-the-trading-floor/
Would rather have the Japanese remaking their classics. This drama is one of my personal favorites (Masaharu, be still my heart) even though I have never been a fan of Noriko Sakai. The Japanese were very good at making heart warming and touching dramas.