Where Are We Going, Dad? (Photo : China Hunan TV Official Channel/YouTube)
The remake in China of a popular reality show in South Korea is breaking viewing records in Mango TV, an online streaming company in China. “Where Are We Going, Dad?” got 3.4 billion accumulated views on Mango TV when the show’s fourth season ended on Dec. 30.
Beijing Suspends Show
In the show, based on a reality program on MBC TV in South Korea, celebrity fathers and their children go to rural area on camping trips. The show’s first three seasons were with Hunan TV. However, despite the high viewership, China’s censor suspended the show because Beijing prohibited children of celebrities from appearing on TV, Yonhap News reported.
But even when it moved to Mango TV for its fourth season, the show also created controversy after Dong Li, a Rio Olympia, was seen kissing the lips of a young girl named Arale, who played his daughter in the reality show. Child protection activists in China protested “Where Are We Going, Dad?” for fear it could encourage pedophilia among Chinese families.
Broadcast Rules Do Not Apply to Mango
However, Mango TV is not affected by broadcast TV rules because it is online streaming. The show’s pilot episode on Oct. 7 got more than 40 million views in China.
One of the celebrity cast of the show was Hwang Chi-yeul, a South Korean singer, in season 4 of “Where Are We Going, Dad?” But the producers dropped him when China banned all South Korean celebrities from Chinese TV shows in retaliation for the deployment by Seoul of THAAD missiles despite the opposition by Beijing. He was replaced by a Chinese celebrity, but reports in China say the reason he was dropped was due to Hwang Chi-yeul’s language problem.
The original show in South Korea, “Dad! Where Are We Going?” premiered on Jan. 6, 2013 on MBC. But after two years, the show ended on Jan. 18, 2015 with a rating of 13 percent from the initial 7 percent.
