Wayne Lai on “No Reserve” Violent Scenes: “It’s Actually Not That Much”
The much anticipated No Reserve <巾幗梟雄之諜血長天>, the third installment to Lee Tim-sing’s (李添勝) Rosy Business <巾幗梟雄> franchise, will finally be showing on myTV SUPER after three years in the dungeon.
The World War II epic, which sees the return of Wayne Lai (黎耀祥) but has Myolie Wu (胡杏兒) replacing Sheren Tang (鄧萃雯) as the female lead, was allegedly deemed too violent for broadcast on a primetime network. The drama was shot in 2013.
According to news reports, No Reserve contains many rape scenes, and the plot involves some dark subject matter. Myolie, who plays a spy, gets raped multiple times throughout the show. A lot of the drama’s violent scenes also revolve around Edwin Siu (蕭正楠), who plays a mentally unstable secret agent.
Promoting No Reserve at an event for myTV SUPER, Wayne said he’s glad that the show is finally getting a release to the public. While he acknowledged the show’s violent theme, he said it’s actually not as extreme as the public is making it seem.
“Boundaries were being stepped on, that’s for sure,” said Wayne. “There are scenes showing the Japanese army invading the Chinese. Myolie gets raped. I don’t think I’ve seen scenes done in that way on TV before.”
There is also a scene in the show where it talks about Wayne’s character, a Chinese soldier, getting sodomized as a child. Wayne said, “We all know TV can’t get too extreme. More often than not, such violent scenes are only mentioned through dialogue, and not actually performed right in front of you. Or maybe you see a few scared faces and a silhouette.”
But is the show actually as explicit as the people were making it seem? “No!” said Wayne with a laugh. “There are some bold scenes, but you can’t get too far when it comes to TV.”
Mentioning that both Lee Tim-sing and Myolie have already left TVB, Wayne joked, “I’ll commemorate them through this drama. I’ll anticipate it even more!” (Have a meal with Lee Tim-sing to watch the show together?) “I’ll see what happens. Myolie is very busy right now and Tim Gor is too busy traveling the world. But I think now is the perfect chance to meet up again. It’s been a long time waiting after all.”
Source: Oriental Daily
This article is written by Addy for JayneStars.com.
Are rape scenes now considered entertainment for TV viewers?
@msxie0714 That’s why it was banned on TV. Only the net. Bad screen writing, I think. Rosy Business 1 have no extreme sex scene, but did very well.
@dramadrama Honestly, the media is grasping at straws trying to justify why No Reserve was warehoused all these years. I’m sure everyone who works in the HK television industry knows what the “rules” are when it comes to broadcasting programs on a free-to-air channel (no doubt that TVB knows, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to exist in the business for 49 years). The rape scenes and other so-called ‘too violent’ scenes in No Reserve really aren’t that different from what has been done in the past….and to be honest, there is really no such thing as “too explicit” when it comes to HK (especially TVB) TV series because the restrictions put in place through the Broadcasting Ordinance have always been on the ‘conservative’ side and therefore doesn’t allow anything that even remotely crosses the line. Unless a series’ producer never intended for the series to air on regular TV channel in the first place (i.e. the series was produced exclusively for internet broadcast) – otherwise, it’s hard for me to believe that there would be any “too explicit” scenes in any TVB series that would prevent it from being broadcast on their regular Jade channel because of ‘sensitive content’. If anything, the reasons for TVB not airing No Reserve earlier are likely due to internal politics as well as the earlier legal dispute between the series’ scriptwriter and management.
@llwy12 Yeah. Most likely cos of political issues within tvb. Wonder why they just choose to focus on the rape scene, rather than the whole plot itself. But anyway, I am not very keen to watch it. Last few year of tvb product is bad. So bad that my family and i actually gave up tvb series. Only recent year their production have improvement.
@dramadrama Well, this article IS from Oriental Daily and they are notoriously pro-TVB, so not surprised that they would take the easy route of blaming the rape scenes (and indirectly blaming HK audiences for being pricks who don’t want “sensitive content” to appear on their screens) rather than seeing the issue for what it really is (which is that TVB’s screwed up internal politics was likely the ‘culprit’ preventing the series from airing previously).
I don’t plan on watching the series either, as I’m not keen on the cast (except for Wayne pretty much) or the genre, plus in my mind, the Rosy Business franchise died already the minute they replaced Sheren Tang with Myolie Wu. I don’t care if this is Lee Tim Sing’s last production with TVB (I like Tim Gor well enough as a producer and many of his past series – mostly the classics from the 70s/80s and early 90s – are still on my list of favorite TVB series even to this day)….I would rather go pull out one of those older productions and re-watch that…..
@msxie0714 I’m against the rape scenes in TVB scripts normally but No Reserve is based on the war where Japanese army invaded China. So the rape part is just a small part of history of what actually happened during that war. War is horrible.
I highly doubt such scenes will be shown. Maybe hinted and thats about it. Wont be full on game of thrones mode.
Watched the promo clip and it was rather explosive. Rape. Betrayal. Gore. Definitely looking forward to this even though I think some performances and likely cringe-worthy scenes might be painful to watch.