Again venturing a little outside our usual TV fare, this is a Taiwanese series based on the scam centres of Cambodia with a supernatural twist. I wasn’t expecting too much but it starts out strong with the titular resurrection happening early and moves at a good pace. Unfortunately while it would have been perfectly satisfying to have it play out as a straightforward revenge story, the writers insist on sudden, dramatic twists, resulting in an awful mess of ambiguous character motivations. They even flub the finale by angling for a second season that will likely never happen. It’s good in parts but still not really worth watching.

Notorious scammer Zhang Shikai has been convicted and sentenced to death in Benkha, Southeast Asia. This is largely due to the efforts of two women Wang Huijun and Zhao Jing, both mothers whose daughters were victims in Shikai’s scam center. Zhao Jing’s daughter was found dead when the police raided the center and Huijun’s daughter Zhen Zhen is comatose. They are assisted by a lawyer Huang Yizhen whose daughter An Chi was also a victim but survived. The two mothers are unsatisfied with the result and push for financial compensation but Shikai’s assets have all been transferred to his mother who is the head of a religious organisation. They find a shaman in the countryside who is seemingly able to temporarily resurrect the dead provided the corpse is intact. They bribe a police officer to gain access to the corpse after Shikai has been executed, have him resurrected and keep him imprisoned in order to torture him and further enact their vengeance. Flashback scenes reveal what happened in the scam center and the relationships between the three girls.

I knew that the series is called The Resurrected going in but I was still taken aback that yes, the resurrection is very real, no tricks or body swaps. It’s satisfying too that the two mothers are so very serious about their vengeance and want to inflict the maximum possible of pain on Shikai, physically and psychologically. The flashback scenes expose how the scam centers actually work, how the victims are kept as slave labor and physically and sexually abused. It isn’t too graphic but it’s bad enough to be disturbing and realistic. It’s quite smart that they open the series with Shikai already arrested and put on trial so we know that he is certain to face justice. That makes it easier to watch the full extent of his crimes. I’m also impressed that the series expands the scope to include how the money Shikai stole is laundered through a religious organisation and his family reinvents themselves as respectable figures in society with the connivance of politicians. This may actually be the best media representation of the industrial-scale scam centers that for a while were so prevalent in Cambodia.

The story starts getting twisty when it reveals that not all of Shikai’s victims are themselves innocent. That’s a promising angle as a sad fact of the scam industry is that there is some percentage of the workers there who really are voluntarily in it for the money. But it jumps the shark by drawing ever more spurious connections between the supporting characters and Shikai’s operation as well. The show even breaks the tacit compact with the audience by actively misleading us. We’re led to believe at the beginning that Huijun is closer to Pong, the Thai man who runs the shop next to hers. In fact, he’s an ally of Zhao Jing. It’s one thing for the characters to deceive each other. It’s another thing entirely when the only party being deceived is the audience. There are also way too many dumb moments that were included just shock value or show some action scenes, like when Shikai attempts to escape or when his mother stupidly shows up at a meeting without being armed or having security of her own. The series ends with an especially silly twist to tease the possibility of a second season. This would have been so much better if they had contented themselves with making a single good season so that they can cleanly resolve everything.

For those of us who live in Southeast Asia, the issue of the Cambodian scam centers is especially topical so even a fictionalized account is intriguing. But this show is also unintentionally amusing to us for its very warped portrayal of the region. Its makers obviously didn’t want to actually say that the scam center is in Cambodia and so invented the fictional city of Benkha as its setting. We can see for ourselves though that it’s mostly shot in Thailand so it makes sense that many of the extras speak Thai. But the main characters are meant to be Taiwanese and the actresses are Chinese-speakers so it’s fine that this is they use among themselves and their family members. But they often speak English to the Thais and yet the lower-level staff, such as the grunt and file police officers, speak Malay? What’s going on here? What kind of country is this meant to be? Anyway that’s a production detail that threw us out on a loop a bit. I wanted to like this show and it starts with so much promise. But its makers veer so hard towards cheap thrills and dramatic reversals that I find it difficult to give this my stamp of approval.