Online Review: Come On, Cousin (老表，你好hea！)

Come On, Cousin (老表，你好hea！) , a TVB comedy drama, was broadcasted in 20 October 2014. It is about the conflict between the environmentalist Lam Choi Yeh (played by Kwok Chun On) and the second generation of the rich Yau Tin (played by Wong Cho Lam).

Mass media plays an important role in stereotyping, especially TV drama which are still influential in our daily life. Dyer (2000) noted that 'Stereotype is taken to express a general agreement about a social group'. In this drama, there are a lot of stereotypes of different social groups in Hong Kong thought the dramatic and exaggerate portraits of characters.

 

Lam Choi Yeh is the significant example of stereotyping. People can associate Lam as the Hong Kong famous political activist Leung Kwok Hung by his appearance and hair style. Lam is ardent environmentalist who always takes the streets to protest against merchants. His personality is impetuous without consider other people’s situation and cranky since he has many romantic ideas. The official website introduces Lam that his protest is only the idle talk. Obviously, the local activists in Hong Kong are stereotyped as Lam’s character who are passionate toward social affairs but also are the group of impulsive troublemakers. On the other hand, Yau Tin is the lazy son of the tycoon Yau Cheung. He is selfish, greedy and treacherous who loves money very much and tries to exploit his employees in his supermarket. Yau Tin reflects the stereotype of merchants in Hong Kong who squeeze the labour and lower class heartlessly.

It can be seen that that the stereotypes from Come On, Cousin are mainly constructed by the membership categorization that producer selected the specific category-bound activities to identify a social group, since we can easily find the news of radical behaviors by social activists and the criticisms on unscrupulous employers in Hong Kong newspapers. However, are these images really representing the truth that all social activists are unreasonable and all merchants are 'vampires employers'? Absolutely not. It certainly ignores the complexities of a social group and naturalizes the identities through the production of this drama.

Besides, it seems that this drama humorously and sarcastically highlighted some social issues of Hong Kong, for example the light pollution from the advertising board and the district council elections. It did not really address and criticize the political issues of Hong Kong in fact, in order to avoid mentioning sensitive topics and being offensive to the established powers. Wong Cho Lam, one of the scriptwriters, states that he wanted audience can be relaxed for looking at Hong Kong society through the drama. In Wong’s idea, people should have relax time as the buzzword ‘hea’ but not put themselves in the tension of society. It reveals that the organization culture influences the drama production so as to avoid taking risk on audience measurement and dissatisfying the sponsors.

To conclude, Come on, Cousin does slightly touches on the social issues of Hong Kong, but it merely concentrates on the stereotypes of social group because there are several of considerations behind an organization. Although the themes of Come on, Cousin are ‘hea’ and making fun, the maladies of stereotyping can be found in many TVB dramas.

Reference

Dyer, R. (2000). The role of stereotypes. Media studies: A reader, 245-51.

《老表，你好hea！》王祖藍 笑聲救港[Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.ihktv.com/wang-zu-lan-xiao-sheng-jiu-gang.html

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Student Name: Cheung Yik Shun

Student ID: 10489220/21423656