General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Lucky's First Love (世界欠我一个初恋)

Lucky's First Love (世界欠我一个初恋, also translated as The World Owes Me a First Love) is a 2019 Chinese idol romantic-comedy web series about a young sketch artist at a mobile gaming company and her boss, whose workplace rivalry turns into a slow-burn first love. It was adapted from An Siyuan's (安思源) novel of the same title, premiered exclusively on iQIYI on September 25, 2019, and ran for 24 episodes.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	世界欠我一个初恋； English titles Lucky's First Love and The World Owes Me a First Love²
Premiere and run	September 25 to October 18, 2019, exclusively on iQIYI; 24 episodes¹^•³
Source	Adapted from An Siyuan's novel of the same title¹
Lead cast	Xing Zhaolin as Xia Ke; Bai Lu as Xing Yun; with Zhai Zilu, Chen Haolan, Liu Ruoyan, and Huang Jidong⁴
Production	iQIYI with Helichenguang; director Chen Shiyi, supervisor Chen Mingzhang; chief producer Dai Ying⁴^•⁵
Ratings	Douban 7.1; Viki 9.4 from about 76,000 users; IMDb 7.5 from 408 votes⁶^•²^•⁷
Genre positioning	A "sweet-and-sour" (糖醋) romance combined with a workplace growth storyline, marketed as a new formula for the sweet-pet (甜宠) drama genre⁸

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story is set at TIG, a mobile gaming company. Xing Yun (Bai Lu), a 24-year-old sketch artist who dreams of becoming a product architect, is the company's hardest-working employee and a longtime supporter of its president, Xia Ke (Xing Zhaolin). When the company holds an open internal competition for a love-themed game project, Xing Yun signs up, but Xia Ke argues that someone with no romantic experience cannot design a dating game. To strengthen her case, she enters the blind-dating market, where she soon meets a man named Chu Nan (Huang Jidong).⁹^•¹⁰

Her luck turns when she discovers that Chu Nan is the former boyfriend of Shen Qing (Liu Ruoyan), Xia Ke's older sister, and that this connection affects her standing at the company.¹⁰ Meanwhile Xia Ke, who has spent years teasing and testing her, realizes his own feelings as he competes for her attention with Chu Nan and the free-spirited He Yu (Zhai Zilu).⁹ A second conflict arrives when profit-driven investors clash with Xia Ke over his insistence on making quality products; he breaks with them and the company falls into crisis, and the young team pulls together to save it. Through the ordeal, Xing Yun and Xia Ke build trust and end the series with both career and love fulfilled.⁹

The series follows three couples in the workplace rather than one: the main pair, He Yu with the independent Yao Qing (Chen Haolan), and Shen Qing with Chu Nan.⁷^•¹¹ The show's tagline redefines its subject: "loving the right person is what makes a first love."⁸

Production and creative approach

The drama was produced by Beijing iQIYI with Helichenguang International Culture Media and Shanghai Heli Film and Television, with iQIYI founder Gong Yu as executive producer and Dai Ying as chief producer.⁵ Chen Mingzhang supervised and Chen Shiyi directed.⁴ Sun Qijun, the script director and producer at Helichenguang, said in interviews that the original novel's workplace framework and three-couple structure attracted the team, but that its workplace detail was thin and the characters underdeveloped, so the development team rebuilt those elements.⁶

Dual narrative lines. The series runs a sweet-and-sour romance line and a workplace advancement line in parallel, with arranged-marriage pressure as a secondary topic. The writers insisted, against the initial view of most of the creative staff, that the heroine needed a concrete short-term career goal, on the grounds that even a newly hired young woman has one; Sun Qijun credited this choice with much of the show's market reception.⁶^•⁸

The setting itself was chosen for audience fit: a topical mobile gaming company whose staff are developing a romance-raising game, a premise aimed at young viewers' own interests.⁸

Reception

The drama premiered on September 25, 2019, with VIP members able to watch the full season early and non-members receiving two free episodes each Wednesday through Friday at 20:00.¹² In its first week it reached first place on iQIYI's internal search and drama rankings, first on Weibo's drama chart and on Guduo's heat index, and second on Maoyan's.¹³

During the October holiday week it recorded 930 million reads and 4.076 million discussions on its main Weibo topic, 530 million plays on Douyin, and top-three placements on trending lists.⁵ More than twenty days after the full season opened to members, it still ranked second on iQIYI's drama heat list on the October 18 non-member finale day, with a Douban score that held steady at 7.1 and a fifth-place position on Weibo's topic trending chart.⁶

The "corporate drone" resonance. What surprised the production team was that the earliest widespread social-media discussion centered not on the romance but on the heroine's overworked office life; the hashtag about a corporate drone's daily routine trended on the premiere day.⁶^•¹⁴ Xing Yun's persona as a "007 girl," working around the clock while dutifully flattering and complaining about her boss, drew repeated comments such as "diligently working overtime, conscientiously roasting the boss, isn't this exactly my daily life."¹⁵ Sun Qijun also found, while reviewing viewer comments, that many young people watched the series together with their mothers, which she read as the show crossing an age barrier.⁶

Aggregator scores have remained favorable: 9.4 on Rakuten Viki from about 76,000 user ratings, 7.5 on IMDb from 408 votes, and 7.1 on The Movie Database.²^•⁷^•¹⁶ The series is available internationally with subtitles on Viki, iQIYI's international service, and other platforms.²^•¹⁶

Place in the sweet-pet drama wave

The series aired at the peak of the "sweet-pet" (甜宠) genre, a category of light, high-romance Chinese web dramas that had grown rapidly since 2017. Most entries in the genre were criticized for feeling detached from real life, and Lucky's First Love was positioned as a deliberate alternative: instead of pure sugar, it offered a "slow-sweet" pace in which romance is a small diversion from serious work, and it grounded its love story in realistic workplace detail.¹⁴^•⁸

Trade coverage framed the show as a sample of Helichenguang's strategic shift. After the company became known for the Tiny Times films and then watched the IP market overheat, it rethought what young audiences wanted and began building market and marketing considerations into early development. For Lucky's First Love, the marketing team extracted the workplace-resonance angle that the creators had genuinely built into the script, a match between content and promotion that the coverage cited as a reason the show found its audience.⁶

The drama also moved the genre's setting from campus to office. Coverage at the time noted that Chinese treatments of first love had mostly stayed in school settings, and that this series shifted the scene to the workplace while folding in widely discussed topics such as marriage pressure and workplace stress for young women.⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles Iv to My

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

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