118 (TV series)

Hong Daming (Chew Chor Meng) is a positive and generous man. As his coffee shop and house number are both "118", the people around him gave him the nickname of "118" (or 要要发), much to his delight. Together with his wife, Liu Meimei (Pan Lingling), he makes a living by running the coffee-shop, and are well known in Tiong Bahru. Whenever someone is in need, they would always seek Daming for help.

His family lives in a 3-room flat, which was built in pre-war years, above the coffee shop. He has 4 children. The children are named Hong Shunfeng (Dennis Chew), Hong Shunshui (Xu Bin), Hong Jinzhi (Ya Hui) and Hong Yuye (Hong Ling).

Having 6 people living in a 3-room flat is cramped-up enough, yet he also rents out a room to "Ah Niang", a middle-aged man whose original name is Li Weiliang (Chen Hanwei). Weiliang studied fashion design in France, but circumstances led him to simply run a stall in 118's coffee-shop, selling dumplings with the recipe that his mother left for him.

Weiliang was not the only addition to the cramped flat. Later, Meimei's elder sister – Liu Jiejie (Liu Lingling) and her family also came to live with 118 when her husband, Zhang Tiancheng's (Chen Tianwen)'s business failed. Daming's own younger sister, Hong Shanshan (Sheila Sim), and her daughter also came to live with him "temporarily" when her husband disappeared mysteriously. Kind-hearted by nature, Daming felt that they must have come to him because they were at their wit's end. He would rather make room for them by having his own sons sleep in the living room, than to chase them away heartlessly.

As such, the story unfolds with this myriad of personalities living under the same roof and hanging around the 118 coffee-shop, where many dramatic yet comedic events took place...

"118" presents the positive side of a Singaporean – passionate, practical, caring, resilient, faithful, tolerant and forward-looking – while also touching on the lesser side of our personalities. Through the dramatic play of events, we are able to see ourselves in the many characters, who are in fact a mirror of the good and bad sides of all of us.

The storyboard for the series, Ang Eng Tee, said in an interview with My Paper that the show may need to be re-scripted even after the script for all 255 episodes has finished writing. This is because speculations that the general elections may be held in 2015 is trending, and that the political parties are already introducing its candidates progressively. If the elections are held in September, the show will need to re-insert the GE buzz, and the director and cast will need to do re-takes.[3] The election dates were announced on 25 August, and the GE buzz was inserted on episode 225 (7 September 2015), where Dennis Chew and Sheila Sim mentioned the election campaigns. However, as the show was pre-empted six times during that period, episode 225 could have been aired on 28 August if there were no interruptions, causing the campaigning period, which were held on 2 to 9 September, to have happened earlier than usual.

In 2016, the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore criticised the drama having advertorial segments shown before the programme's end credits. The segments showed actors from the drama advocating sponsors' products on the same set for the drama.[4] However MDA also praised the drama for its "down-to-earth depictions of social issues" and "celebration of the Singaporean identity".[4]