The Starry Night, the Starry Sea

In the modern Chinese fantasy-romance TV series The Starry Night, the Starry Sea, merman prince Wu Julan (Feng Shaofeng) travels onto land in search of his spiritual pearl, an object of magic and healing, and without which he is slowly dying. The pearl was stolen from Wu Julan over a century prior by a friend that betrayed him. His search takes him to an island where he meets Shen Xiao Luo (Bea Hayden), a descendant of the man who stole the pearl.

Believing that Shen Luo is the key to finding the pearl, Wu Julan stays close to her. As for Shen Luo herself, she is a cheerful young woman who doesn't believe in love and is uncertain about the direction of her life. Through various shenanigans, Wu Julan ends up living in Shen Luo's house, doing chores for her and helping with her money-making schemes. Feelings get involved, too, which is made complicated by Wu Julan's mission to get the spiritual pearl back. There's also another party, a black wizard, who is after the pearl for his own agenda.

It's a light-hearted though melancholy story told in 32 episodes, strongly focused on Wu Julan and Shen Luo's falling in love with each other despite themselves, the various antics they and their friends get up to, and a knotty tangle of love triangles. The story takes place almost entirely on land, and we don't see other merfolk, but Wu Julan has a network of human allies who know his identity and have been helping him for centuries. Wu Julan has special abilities as well, including super strength, super speed and enhanced hearing, though he also has weaknesses to the moon phases and the lack of his spiritual pearl. The love story itself features plenty of interspecies shenanigans, with Shen Luo having to grasp what it means to love a merman with a long lifespan.

Wu Julan is mainly seen in his fully human form, but he has a merman form with blue claws, heads fins and tail. There are a few brief underwater scenes towards the later part of the show after Shen Luo has learned about Wu Julan's true identity, and though Wu Julan's merman tail is CGI-enhanced, the scenes are dark enough and/or filmed far way enough that it's pretty decent for what it is.

The Starry Night, the Starry Sea got a second season of 34 episodes, which is actually a historical prequel that opens in a time when humans and merfolk were friends who lived and worked together. Although most of the cast is new, the two leads return, with Feng Shaofeng reprising his role as mermaid prince Wu Julan while this time Bea Hayden plays what seems to be a previous incarnation of Shen Luo, named Lu Li.

Where the original series spent most of its airtime playfully exploring the Wu Julan and Shen Luo's relationship, this follow-up prequel is on the whole more serious and has Wu Julan and Lu Li falling in love much quicker, because the point of the series isn't their romance; it's the deteroriation of human-merfolk relations, which turns friendship and multicultralism into prejudice, fear and hatred. Masterminding this turn of events is Lu Li's brother, who wants to destroy all merfolk as revenge for the death of their parents. It's his doing that has merfolk in hiding and distrustful of humans as in the original series, and the consequences to Wu Julan and Lu Li are tremendous.

Compared to the original series, in this series we see way more merfolk, as well as the merfolk's home in Blue Cave, and various aspects of their culture. Over the course of the series Wu Julan becomes king when his father is killed, and gains the spiritual pearl that becomes the key plot item of the original show. There are more swimming scenes with groups of merfolk, but most of these are quickly functional instead of indulgent, so although they look quite striking they're also brief (and hard to screencap).