Hotel (1976)
Original title: 狂潮
Hotel is a 1976 Chinese-language drama series created by Wong Tin-Lam and Selina Chow Liang Shuk-yee. It stars Chow Yun-Fat, Sek Kin and Cora Miao.
TVB's Hotel arrived in 1976 as the station's first drama with a fully modern setting, trading period costumes for the lobbies and back rooms of a working hotel. The ensemble threads the lives of staff and guests through a Hong Kong on the cusp of change, and the show became one of the decade's defining hits, drawing around two million viewers an episode against a city population of roughly four and a half million. It also lit the fuse on a young Chow Yun-Fat's career. Joseph Koo's theme song, sung by Susanna Kwan, remains part of its memory.
Quick answers
What is Hotel about?
TVB's Hotel arrived in 1976 as the station's first drama with a fully modern setting, trading period costumes for the lobbies and back rooms of a working hotel. The ensemble threads the lives of staff and guests through a Hong Kong on the cusp of change, and the show became one of the decade's defining hits, drawing around two million viewers an episode against a city population of roughly four and a half million. It also lit the fuse on a young Chow Yun-Fat's career. Joseph Koo's theme song, sung by Susanna Kwan, remains part of its memory.
When was Hotel released?
Hotel was released on 4 October 1976.
How many episodes does Hotel have?
Hotel has 129 episodes across 1 seasons.
Who made Hotel?
Hotel was created by Wong Tin-Lam and Selina Chow Liang Shuk-yee.
Cast
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A few thoughts on Hotel
Anyone drawn here by an early Chow Yun-Fat should follow him to A Better Tomorrow, the John Woo crime film that turned him into a movie star a decade later.
Soap operas where the workplace is the real ensemble cast
Hotel built its drama from staff and guests circulating through one building, letting the setting itself generate story after story. These soaps run on the same engine: a hotel, a country estate or a family compound where everyone's business becomes everyone else's, and loyalty gets tested by proximity as much as blood.
Workplace dramas told through the people who keep the doors open
Hotel followed the staff running the lobbies and back rooms as much as the guests passing through them, and these shows share that below-stairs viewpoint. A hospital ward, a set of legal chambers, a White House staff, a fashion magazine's assistants: institutions that only function because of the people nobody notices first.
Ensemble dramas where an organization's uniform hides a found family
Hotel drew its cast from people bound together by a workplace rather than blood, and these titles push that idea into genre territory. A police mecha unit, a special investigations squad, coast guard divers and a royal guard officer all discover that the uniform creates the same loyalty a family would, whether they asked for it or not.