Picture the pitch meeting. “So there’s a guy. He’s murdered ten people. Chopped some of them up. He turns himself in, does his time, and years later agrees to his first-ever interview — for a documentary. The journalist meets him, and that night she has a dream where they’re lovers.” Somebody in that room should have said “absolutely not.” Instead, Taiwan handed the project to the creative team behind Someday or One Day — one of the most beloved, tear-jerking romances in the country’s TV history — and told them to make it beautiful. They did. That’s the problem. Had I Not Seen the Sun is a show where you spend twenty episodes trying to remember that the moody, soulful man on your screen is a confessed serial killer, and the show keeps making that harder on purpose.
The Setup Is a Trap, and It Knows It
Li Jen-yao is 25 when he walks into a police station and confesses to a string of murders so gruesome the press nicknames him the Rainstorm Killer, because he only strikes when it’s pouring. He tells them everything about how he did it. He tells them nothing about why. That silence is what eventually gets him his prison interview with Chou Pin-yu, an insomniac documentary production assistant chasing her first real story — and the moment she sits across from him, the show stops being a crime procedural and starts being something much stranger.
Pin-yu starts dreaming about Jen-yao. Not nightmares — the other kind. She also starts seeing a girl in a school uniform who shouldn’t be there, a presence tied to a name from Jen-yao’s past: Chiang Hsiao-tung. The series splits its runtime between Pin-yu’s unraveling present and a 2007 high school flashback where Hsiao-tung and Jen-yao are the ones who find each other first, before a violent classmate connected to a powerful, politically protected family enters the picture. What actually happened to Hsiao-tung — and why Jen-yao’s victims all trace back to that one incident of institutional cover-up — is the real engine of the show, dressed up in a murder-mystery structure and a doomed romance.
It’s less “solve the crime” and more “understand the wound,” which tracks with a writing team that has made a career out of turning grief into something you want to sit inside of rather than escape.
Screencaps from ‘Had I Not Seen The Sun’
The Talent Behind the Moths and Butterflies
The series comes from director-writer Chien Chi-Feng and co-director Jiang Ji-Zheng, working from a script Chien co-wrote with Lin Hsin-Hui. Chien’s résumé includes Someday or One Day, one of Taiwanese television’s biggest crossover hits, along with Rainless Love in a Godless Land and Marry Me, Or Not — shows built on the same instinct for turning heartbreak into a puzzle box.
Tseng Jing-hua plays Li Jen-yao, and Chiang Chi — in her first major leading role — plays Chou Pin-yu, the documentarian who gets pulled somewhere she shouldn’t go. Moon Lee, previously the lead of Netflix’s The Victims’ Game, plays Chiang Hsiao-tung, the schoolgirl whose story threads the two timelines together. Lyan Cheng rounds out the main cast in a role the show deliberately keeps vague going in. Filming ran across real school campuses and prison facilities in Taiwan starting in December 2023, and the production leans hard on a recurring visual: moths and butterflies, both drawn to light, one only ever appearing after dark.
Critical reception has landed exactly where you’d expect a “sympathetic serial killer romance” to land — divisive, with even fans admitting the back half tips into telenovela territory — but it topped charts across Taiwan and Southeast Asia anyway, because a show doesn’t need to be tasteful to be compulsively watchable.
Title: Had I Not Seen the Sun (如果我不曾見過太陽) Directors: Jiang Ji-Zheng, Chien Chi-Feng Cast: Tseng Jing-hua, Chiang Chi, Moon Lee, Lyan Cheng Release Date: Part 1 — November 13, 2025 · Part 2 — December 11, 2025 Streaming: Netflix
