2024 has been a bit of an odd year in our eyes so far, at least on the 花 hua side. No new actress has truly broken out yet, even though it’s already October (we’d argue that Wu Jinyan did have a mighty resurgence after The Double, but she’s certainly not new on the block). So this drought probably also partly explains why we’ve been so obsessed here at The Drama Meter with figuring out who this next breakout actress might be—and why we’ve zeroed in on one name in particular: Zhang Ruonan.
If we were gambling people, we might even place a bet on this year or next being her big year. From being mentioned nowhere to suddenly being mentioned everywhere, she’s cued up to star in (deep breath): The First Frost with Bai Jingting, Zhan Zhao Adventures with Yang Yang, and tons more in the future. And oh, The First Frost just happens to be the companion story to Hidden Love, 2023’s summer hit.
But as for Zhang Ruonan’s past filmography—that’s a bit of a trickier question to answer, because there isn’t that much of one.
In this series of posts, we look at an actor or an actress’ existing filmography, then put it through the internal meter we’ve developed to see which of their dramas come out on top in a battle royale. For those unfamiliar with why we started doing this, it’s because we wanted to develop a somewhat more objective way to rank dramas specific to the actor or actress, because we think that Douban and MyDramaList ratings can often be skewed by recency, fan wars, and reach.
In this case, we tried to determine an objective view of Zhang Ruonan’s best TV shows by using the underlying drama characteristics specific to her, including: (1) the show’s general audience viewership, (2) how important her role is in the drama, (3) what type of role she played, and (4) the show’s Douban rating.
Here are the results!
The top 3 Zhang Ruonan TV shows and dramas: a breakdown
To prep for the making of this list, we first looked at all of the dramas where Zhang Ruonan plays a significant role (not a guest star or minor supporting actress).
Out of those dramas, we usually then gauge the top five dramas that audiences will likely enjoy if you’re a fan of Zhang Ruonan. However, her body of work is a little smaller, to say the least! So instead we’ve picked the top three.
1. My Boss (2024)
The TV show that came out on top on our drama meter is My Boss, Zhang Ruonan’s recent workplace drama with Chen Xingxu. Three guesses as to what it’s about, and the first two don’t count! Yep, it’s about wide-eyed rookie lawyer Cheng Yao (played by Zhang Ruonan), and her unemotive wall of a boss, Qian Heng (played by Chen Xingxu).
But before we get to the workplace…oh my god, they’re also roommates! It’s a little less romantic this time around, however: Cheng Yao gets to enjoy absolutely no work-life balance simply because she’s, well, living with her boss, who keeps asking (i.e. forcing) Cheng Yao to make dinner and snacks for him.
So if we were to litigate (pun intended) the pros and cons of My Boss ourselves…
- Pro: You’ll get a level-headed female lead who you can watch grow into a fully-fledged lawyer.
- Con: You’ll also have to watch her deal with a male lead with limited communication skills who can honestly be pretty overbearing sometimes.
- Pro: You’ll get Chen Xingxu in a tank top, Chen Xingxu in a suit, etc etc…
- Con: You’ll also get Chen Xingxu in a bathrobe. But did he or other actors like Wang Xingyue wear it better?
- Pro: You’ll get a great supporting cast featuring likable co-workers and a hilarious mother-in-law, which is a change from the usual setup of schemers.
- Con: You’ll also get an unfortunately rushed ending and some unnecessary twists over the course of the series, and particularly in the last few episodes.
So if you’re not a fan of where the story is going around Episode 30 or 31, we suggest pretending it ended right before. But the bottom line is that this is a fun rom-com that doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and Zhang Ruonan in particular shines in its light-hearted storylines.
2. Born To Be The One (2024)
Next up is Born To Be The One, fresh off a successful 2024 airing. Headlined by Yin Tao and Lawrence Wang, Born To Be The One didn’t make a big splash internationally, but its domestic ratings topped the market while airing. Add in a strong Douban rating of 7.4 (the highest of Zhang Ruonan’s filmography), and you get her second drama on our list.
Just be aware that if you watched My Boss first, you might get a little bit of whiplash upon starting Born To Be The One. That’s because this drama, instead of being a classic rom-com, is an uber-realistic one featuring three couples trying to make it day by day. Here, you’ll have:
- The married couple with kids (played by Yin Tao and Lawrence Wang),
- The married couple without kids (played by Chen Haoyu and Qin Junjie), and
- The young unmarried couple (played by Zhang Ruonan and Zhang Zhehua).
Specifically, Zhang Ruonan plays the idealistic Li Xiaoyue, who’s paired up with her long-time boyfriend Na Jun. She’s perfectly comfortable job-hopping to find a workplace where she can enjoy life to stop and smell the roses. Her boyfriend? Not so much. He’s more of a “every second you spend smelling the roses is a second you could spend instead on figuring out your ten-year plan.”
Needless to say, they argue more than once over the span of the show—which takes place against a backdrop of Li Xiaoyue trying to figure out how to navigate society and the workplace in a way that’s authentic to her. So while we do want to warn that this is possibly the opposite of escapist television, it is nevertheless at its core a warm portrayal of ordinary people doing their best.
- 👀 # of episodes: 37
- 🥝Original network: iQIYI, Tencent
- 📺 Watch Born To Be The One on: YouTube, iQIYI, Tencent
3. Love Is Panacea (2023)
Love is Panacea is what emerged third on Zhang Ruonan’s ouevre after we ran it through the drama meter. If it vaguely rings a bell, it may be because you heard about it while exploring Luo Yunxi’s filmography, as he’s your male lead in it. As for its quality, here’s what you need to know: while a Douban rating of 5.80 and a mid-size viewership turned Love Is Panacea into the third place drama for Zhang Ruonan, it doesn’t even make Luo Yunxi’s list.
A bulk of the complaints tend to focus on the contrivance of the very premise of the show, in which Zhang Ruonan is Su Weian, a medical student who embarks on a series of unfortunate events in the span of a year:
- She finds out one day in university that she’s genetically predisposed to developing Huntington’s disease, a terminal illness.
- She meets brilliant, mature, and supportive Dr. Gu Yunzheng (played by Luo Yunxi), who is a bespectacled green flag that she nevertheless can’t date out of worry for his future grief.
Despite the angsty and cliché storylines, Love Is Panacea puts forth an honestly brave message in the face of romance fans: love is not panacea. Instead of love, you need strong, research-backed medical science to cure stuff (though that would make a much less sexy title).
That’s why we would hesitate to call this show a pure medical romance, but rather a medical research drama with romance on the side. Those who are fans of the latter (or of flirting that revolves around, yes, medical terms — we don’t judge!) may therefore enjoy it. Just don’t go in expecting a romance that will sweep you off of your feet.
The verdict
Finally, we plotted Zhang Ruonan’s best TV shows and dramas out onto a scatterplot to see where they fall against each other on purely a Douban rating vs. # of Douban users basis:
A few quick observations:
- Other than a stray historical drama way early in her career, Zhang Ruonan’s filmography to this point consists almost entirely of modern dramas only.
- You might have noticed the sole drama on this list with more than 50k ratings — Psychologist was a drama starring Yang Zi and Jing Boran a few years ago, where Zhang Ruonan was a guest star. Since her role was relatively minor, Psychologist didn’t make it onto Zhang Ruonan’s top three.
- Zhang Ruonan’s career really does look like it’s transitioning towards bigger things. The three dramas on this list, which we’ve determined are her best so far, are also her three most recent dramas.
So what’s next for Zhang Ruonan? Some dramas that we expect to generate a lot of buzz, like we mentioned. First up will likely be The First Frost with Bai Jingting, the much anticipated companion story to Hidden Love’s source material (we’ve also written about our take on Hidden Love for Zhao Lusi and Chen Zheyuan). She’ll also appear in two non-modern dramas soon: (1) her first xianxia as a supporting character in Liu Shishi’s Fox Spirit Matchmaker: Love in Pavilion, and (2) the wuxia drama Zhan Zhao Adventures with Yang Yang.
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