ETCerye launches Endless Love over the weekend but I know I’ve already seen this in local teleseryes before.
Strong warning: Spoilers ahead
Kara Sevda (whose loose translation in English is Dark Love) is a 2015 turkish drama series that tells the tale of two star-crossed lovers whose fates are tested by obstacles conjured from human desires and an obsession on socio-economic challenges. One must remember that ditzis are similar to our local telenovelas where there’s a formula involved — one that is tried and tested to be a popular hit, although such phenomenon tends to change over time.
I had the privilege of watching the first three episodes (on free TV, as it is a privilege these days to do so) through ETC’s ETCerye slot at 8pm (usually on the weekdays) but it premiered the first three episodes.
Dizis have long conquered television years ago, and with the fact that one of the biggest television network in the country has closed, ETC is stepping up the game of free TV by including these supposedly addictive drama series from Turkey to keep us glued on the screen, despite the amass of streaming services around.
But I did give in to Everywhere I Go, which I found amusingly better than Emily in Paris (more to that later) and so I anticipated Endless Love a little bit too much that I forget the consequences of expectations.
Burak Özçivit plays Kemal, a hardworking college student whose working-class life doesn’t suit any of the glistening co-stars that live far away from his despot of a neighbourhood. Nihan, played by Neslihan Atagül, a free-spirited college student bumps into him on the bus but draws his eyes that seem to pierce on paper and onto the screen, this artwork makes its way on an exhibit where Kemal comes across to later on. Since this is 2015- Istanbul, there is no way that one can easily slide into their DMs and so he finds her in a nonchalant way of getting her name. But the stars, despite them being doomed to be together from the start, gives them the time of day to meet once again in the most dramatic way possible: he rescues her.
One daunting aspect of the first three episodes is that this is something we’re all familiar with in an afternoon telenovela: Man and woman meet but are doomed at the start, but the intense feelings they have for each other is reasons not to believe in the stars, because it is important to uphold the family’s need to survive. It’s definitely a tried and tested formula in all local telenovelas, but it could or couldn’t leave a foothold in the audiences of this generation that has more than one genres to choose from online. The choice of resurrecting a 2015 dramatic series such as this, is somewhat of amiss in the timeline of change in television. The conflicts of each characters are senseless, and has definitely not aged well.
Noteworthy performances to look out for would be from Burak Özçivit who plays Kemal with care, despite the theme of the show being an extravagant drama that focuses on the opulent winning. His boy next-door looks at the beginning changes cohesively with his character as he toughens up to win back Nihan and succeed against Emir.
The first two are worth the skip, as the strength of the series’ popularity lies on Episode 3 when everything suddenly turns on a different scenario for each characters.
