TVB thriller sets online viewership record in China

Hong Kong - What have Hong Kongers been doing in a city that has been partially paralysed by pro- democracy protesters?

Apparently, many of them have been watching the TVB police thriller Line Walker, which kept them guessing which of its stars were undercover operators.

Led by a cast including Raymond Lam, Charmaine Sheh and Michael Miu, the show is one of TVB's biggest hits in Hong Kong this year, and in China, the number of online views has shot up to 1.2 billion, a record for a TVB drama there, said Oriental Daily News yesterday.

The previous record was set by the airline drama Triumph In The Skies II, which had more than 600 million views in China last year and is being adapted into a movie starring Francis Ng, Julian Cheung, Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng.

And now there is talk of a Line Walker movie, said Oriental.

TVB executive Virginia Lok said the response to the thriller was "good", though the Hong Kong ratings of the finale of the show, which aired last Friday night, had not been released yet. Previous reports said one episode hit 33 points last month and was at the time the most-watched episode of a TVB drama this year.

She said: "Triumph In The Skies II is being made into a movie, so we're in talks about Line Walker too and we'll add roles for movie actors to meet market demand."

However, to accommodate the mainland market, the Line Walker movie will leave out storylines about police corruption, she added.

Following the success of 2009's E.U. and 2011's Lives Of Omission, Line Walker returns to the subject of undercover detectives but with a twist.

Its protagonists include low-life characters played by Sheh and Lam, who are caught up in a web of intrigue. A policeman, played by Miu, approaches Sheh and asks her to help him track down a group of informants, whose records have been erased to protect them from a crooked cop.

This article was first published on October 7, 2014.
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