General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Miss in Kiss (恶作剧之吻)

Miss in Kiss (惡作劇之吻) is a 2016 Taiwanese idol drama (Asian TV genre with pop-star casts and romance plots) adapted from the Japanese manga Itazura na Kiss (淘氣小親親) by Kaoru Tada, starring Dino Lee (李玉璽) as the genius student Jiang Zhi Shu and Esther Wu (吳心緹) as Xiang Yue Qin, the ordinary high school girl who secretly loves him.¹ It premiered on December 8, 2016 on LINE TV in Taiwan and on the mainland Chinese platform PPTV, and it was the tenth screen adaptation of the manga.²

Key fact	Detail
Original work	Itazura na Kiss (淘氣小親親) by Kaoru Tada, a manga with over 35 million copies in circulation³
Premiere	December 8, 2016, LINE TV and PPTV; new episodes Thursdays through Saturdays at noon²
Main cast	Dino Lee as Jiang Zhi Shu, Esther Wu as Xiang Yue Qin, Gong Yi Teng as Jin Zhi Zhu, Riko Xi (席惟倫)¹
Directors	Lin Qingfang (林清芳) and Cai Jiying (蔡季瑛)⁴
Episode count	39 episodes per DramaWiki; the Japanese broadcast version aired as 13 episodes⁴^•³
Production	Jointly produced by Shanghai Zhichuan (JuJiao Group), Japan's SPO Entertainment, PPTV, and Taiwan's Ace Entertainment⁵
Reception	PPTV views passed 900 million by episode 9 and 1.3 billion within a month of the finale, but Douban users rated it 3.8 with over 50% one-star reviews⁶

Spoilers

Story and characters

The drama follows Xiang Yue Qin, a cheerful but clumsy high school student who confesses to Jiang Zhi Shu, an all-around genius with an IQ of 200, and is rejected in front of the whole school.² After an earthquake destroys her house, she and her father move in with her father's college friend, who turns out to be Zhi Shu's father, so the two end up living under one roof.⁴ Living together, Yue Qin gradually brings warmth into the cold genius's life, and Zhi Shu slowly changes.³

The character names differ from the 2005 Taiwanese version, which renamed the leads Jiang Zhi Shu (江直樹) and Yuan Xiang Qin (袁湘琴); in this version the heroine is Xiang Yue Qin (向月琴) and the hero Jiang Zhi Shu (江植樹).² Gong Yi Teng plays Jin Zhi Zhu (金支柱), the lively admirer of Yue Qin, and Riko Xi plays the heiress Bai Sha Sui.²^•³

Production and broadcast

Filming ran from the opening ceremony on April 21, 2016 to the wrap on August 31, 2016, a total of 131 days.⁶ The production was a cross-border venture: Shanghai Zhichuan of the JuJiao Group, Japan's SPO Entertainment, mainland China's PPTV, and Taiwan's Ace Entertainment.⁵ One of the producers, Wang Xin Gui, had also produced the 2005 Joe Cheng and Ariel Lin version.²

Release schedule. LINE TV streamed one new episode at noon each Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from December 8, 2016, three per week; Eastern Television's Super TV channel began a weekly broadcast on December 11.²^•⁵ The series later reached Netflix, which lists it as a 2016 Taiwanese romantic teen comedy based on a comic.⁷

Adaptation history and reception

The manga had already been adapted nine times before this version. The first screen adaptation was the 1996 Japanese drama starring Takashi Kashiwabara and Satoko Sato; the 2005 Taiwanese version with Joe Cheng and Ariel Lin became a pan-Asian hit, and Korean, Japanese, and Thai remakes followed.² Esther Wu said her portrayal would differ from Ariel Lin's, since the internet-era Yue Qin trusts online information and embarrasses herself with it, unlike the instinct-driven earlier heroine.⁵

Viewership and criticism. On PPTV the series performed strongly by click counts: it passed 900 million views by episode 9 and exceeded 1.3 billion within a month after the finale, and by April 2017 it had passed 22 million views on LINE TV, ranking second in the platform's first-quarter overall chart.⁶ Critical reception was poor: Douban users gave it 3.8 stars with more than 50% one-star ratings, and some reviewers called it the worst remake of the story, criticizing the lead actors' performances and plot changes from the original.⁶^•⁸ Commenters noted that the earlier versions were so deeply embedded in audiences' memories that frequent remakes mainly deepened attachment to the originals.⁸

Japanese release. Fuji TV broadcast the series in Japan under the title Itazura na Kiss: Miss In Kiss from 2017, with the run ending January 8, 2018, in a 13-episode cut with Japanese voice acting by Nana Mizuki and Daisuke Hirakawa.³ A Japanese-dubbed DVD was released in June 2017.⁶ Japan's Ministry of Culture trade survey records the program as broadcast across all of Japan in 2018.⁹

Later reuse of the title

In September 2026, Mango TV announced with producer Angie Chai (柴智屏), known as the "godmother of idol dramas" for creating Meteor Garden, a project called the "Love God Theater" to develop seven classic Taiwanese idol drama titles, including Miss in Kiss, as new mid- and short-form series. According to TVBS, the deal does not remake the original scripts; classic titles were licensed and new writing teams are creating fresh stories that may not keep the original characters or plots.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026