General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

If There Is No Tomorrow (我是余欢水)

If There Is No Tomorrow (我是余欢水) is a 2020 Chinese web drama in 12 episodes, produced by Dongyang Zhengwu Yangguang (正午阳光) and iQIYI, directed by Sun Molong, and starring Guo Jingfei as Yu Huanshui, a downtrodden middle-aged salesman whose life collapses after a false terminal cancer diagnosis. It is adapted from Yu Geng's novel If There Is No Tomorrow (如果没有明天) and is told in a style of absurdist black comedy grounded in social realism.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	我是余欢水; also released as 余欢水 / 如果没有明天 / If There Is No Tomorrow¹
Format	12 episodes, about 44 minutes each; premiered April 6, 2020 on iQIYI, with simultaneous release on Tencent Video and Youku¹^•²^•³
Main cast	Guo Jingfei (Yu Huanshui), Miao Miao (Luan Bingran), Gao Lu (Gan Hong), Yue Yang, Gao Ye, Feng Hui¹
Source	Yu Geng's novel If There Is No Tomorrow, which began as the 2011 novella The End Is Coming (末日降临)¹^•⁴
Reception	Douban score opened at 8.5, fell to 7.4 after a dialogue controversy, and later settled at 7.4; total views exceeded 1 billion²
Awards	Nominated for Outstanding TV Drama at the 30th China TV Golden Eagle Award (September 2020); named one of iQIYI's Scream Night top ten dramas of the year (December)²

Spoilers

Plot

Yu Huanshui is the worst-performing employee at his company, and his survival strategy is to endure and get by. His wife Gan Hong, who considers him spineless, asks for a divorce; he is humiliated at work and at his father-in-law's home, and a friend who owes him money avoids repayment. After drinking to drown his sorrows he is diagnosed with cancer, and believing he has nothing left to lose, his personality changes. Through a series of accidental events he becomes a hero celebrated for a brave act, reaching a peak in his life, but his reversed fortunes continue to bring crises until he finds genuine dignity and happiness.¹

The early episodes compress an unusual amount of plot: within the first six episodes the protagonist divorces, is diagnosed with cancer, attempts to sell an organ, performs a brave deed, and learns the cancer diagnosis was a misdiagnosis. A parallel thread has Yu Huanshui stumble onto his superiors' scheme to falsify accounts with fake cables, and, mistaken for someone holding key evidence, he investigates and turns the situation to his advantage.⁵ The story also satirizes the media machinery around him: after his accidental heroism a television station makes him a national celebrity, and the program director courts the dying man as long as he supplies news material, then visibly loses interest once the misdiagnosis removes his "eyeball value".⁶

The novel's different ending

The television ending, in which Yu Huanshui finds happiness and the villains are punished, reverses the novel. Author Yu Geng explained that in the novel the protagonist's apparent rise comes from a chain of accidents set off by his not caring whether he lives, so once the misdiagnosis is revealed he is bound to fall back into his old life; the novel's darker close strengthens its irony. He called the two endings features of their respective forms, noting that television generally requires a bright resolution.⁴

Adaptation and production

The source novel took shape in 2011 as a novella titled The End Is Coming, published in Novel Monthly, Original Edition. Author Yu Geng (real name Wang Bing) wrote it to depict the condition of the "Beijing drifter" (北漂), and expanded it into the full-length If There Is No Tomorrow after experiencing setbacks of his own. The novel won the adaptation-value prize of the 17th Baihua Literature Award, and the film rights were then signed with Zhengwu Yangguang.⁴

The novel runs only a little over 80,000 characters, and the adaptation was positioned from the start as a "super web drama": short, fast-paced, and told in exactly 12 episodes.⁷ Screenwriters Wang Sanmao and Lei Zi, credited with All Is Well (都挺好), wrote the script, with Hou Hongliang and Yang Bei producing.¹^•⁸ Director Sun Molong described the story as one moving "from realism to romanticism".²

Guo Jingfei treated the role as a study in a man undone by his own lies, sketching a backstory in which a failed entrepreneur's first lie triggers countless others. He considered the work an absurdist realist piece rather than a comedy, with the director adding comic color while deliberately removing easy crowd-pleasing elements. In the scene where the pre-diagnosis Yu Huanshui collapses in the street, Guo Jingfei insisted on falling for real, without a double or camera trickery, on a floor padded with boards and green cloth for post-production.⁵

Reception and the rating controversy

The series opened to strong reviews, with a Douban score of 8.5 in its first week, and the phrase "everyone laughs at Yu Huanshui, everyone is Yu Huanshui" (人人皆笑余欢水，人人皆是余欢水) became one of 2020's most-quoted internet lines.⁵^•² Reviewers praised its tight pacing for a 12-episode format and its realistic set dressing, down to the small advertisements covering apartment buildings and bicycles stacked in stairwells.⁹

The score fell from 8.5 to 7.4 after the finale. In episode 12, a kidnapper holding the characters captive tells Liang Annie, who asks to be released because she is a woman, "Don't give me that, men and women are equal; aren't you always crying out for feminism? Here it is." The line was criticized on Weibo as mocking feminism, and a campaign of one-star ratings followed.¹⁰ The Beijing Evening News reported that the controversy did not produce sharply polarized ratings: nearly 60 percent of viewers gave the show three or four stars out of five, and the score settled at 7.4.¹¹ Critics also noted structural weaknesses independent of the line, including flat female characters who serve mainly to advance the protagonist's story, and an open ending in which Yu Huanshui's transformation may all have been a dream, which one reviewer argued undercut the show's real-world meaning.⁶^•¹¹

Later adaptations

The story was first staged as a play before the web drama was made; the stage version, directed by Yan Yongqi, has been performed more than 500 times with continued added shows.¹¹^•² In July 2026 a vertical-screen short-drama version, produced by Ju Xing Qianli with Shandong Film and Television Group, began filming in Quzhou, planned as 70 episodes of about 2 minutes each, with Ma Ruize as Yu Huanshui and Feng Yiran as the female lead.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026