Chinese streaming site iQiyi – which aired in early 2016 the blockbuster Hallyu “Descendants of the Sun” and in Oct. 22 the Chinese crime drama “Memory Lost” – began to air on Thursday, Nov. 3, the Chinese talk show “Welcome to Joy Town.”
The weekly show, which features a comedy dance, talk show, three sitcom mini comedies, spoofs of advertisements, is inspired by popular American-style talk shows, specifically “Saturday Night Live.” Cheng Yang from Pikaru Studio, producer of “Welcome to Joy Town,” said the program is set in Huantuo, a fictional city.
The fictional city’s mayor will host the show which would have a set team of 11 comedy stars and invite a guest star for its sit-com segment, Global Times reported.
“What we want to do is a ‘freshly squeezed’ comedy for online audiences only in China,” Cheng said of the new show on iQiyi, one of the streaming sites in China. iQiyi, home of “Welcome to Joy Town” and a movie streaming site in China, also wants Chinese productions to gain access to the U.S. market, said Yang Xianghua, senior vice president of iQiyi which was founded by Baidu, the largest internet search engine in China.
So far, the only one which has penetrated the American online audience is the Chinese TV drama “Empresses in the Palace” which Netflix aired in 2015. It is the only Chinese TV series available on the video streaming website, China Daily reported.
However, some experts think otherwise. They point to the differences between how Americans and Chinese tell a story. The latter has a much slower pace which mainstream American audience would likely not enjoy, Shane Maidy, vice president of MediaLink LLC, said at the Chinese American Film Festival Co-Production Summit in Los Angeles.
He cited as an example “Empresses in the Palace” which ran for 76 episodes in China, while the re-edited version aired by Netflix was reduced to just six episodes.