This Company Deserves Attention, and Not Just for *Nirvana in Fire* and *The Disguiser* | QDaily's New Companies of the Year

Daylight Entertainment, a new company built by a veteran team, has given a crew of skilled makers of serious drama some charm and some young, fresh stories. In doing so it has changed how people see traditional film and TV producers, and has slightly raised what they expect from Chinese television.

On the last day of 2015, Wang Ke set up the "Daylight Universe Fan Club" on Weibo.

She is a researcher at a university in Beijing and used to be a fan of American TV. Over the past two years, though, she has fallen for the Chinese dramas Nothing but War in Beiping (《北平无战事》), The Disguiser and Nirvana in Fire, and even for the company that made them, Daylight Entertainment.

The production company, founded in 2011, chose to step into the spotlight this year. Its contracted actors Wang Kai and Jin Dong became famous, and the names of producer Hou Hongliang and directors Kong Sheng and Li Xue became familiar to ordinary viewers.

On December 28, the night of the Flying Apsaras Awards for television drama, Wang Ke and a few like-minded friends made 200 wristbands for the team. The wristbands brought luck. Daylight's three dramas, Nothing but War in Beiping, Nirvana in Fire and Romance of Our Parents (《父母爱情》), took every major prize, including best series, screenplay, director, actor and actress.

Few Chinese film and TV production companies have ever become brands that audiences love to talk about. But Wang Ke and fans like her clearly believe that a drama from the Daylight team, like an animated film from Pixar, cannot fail to be good. The fan community grew steadily over the past year. Wristbands went by post from Beijing to Chengdu, and Wang Ke rented the 282-seat hall of the Beijing Coal Mine Art Troupe to hold an unofficial "Daylight Annual Party" for fans on February 27.

Wang Ke was excited. The date she had picked at random, she said, turned out to be the birthday of the team's central figure, producer Hou Hongliang.

Producer Hou Hongliang

Director Kong Sheng

In a sense, Hou, who has nearly 220,000 followers on Weibo, is Daylight Entertainment's public face. Directors Kong Sheng, Li Xue and Sun Molong founded the company and registered it in Dongyang to take advantage of local tax breaks. But until Hou left Shandong Film and Television Media Group (Shanying for short), the company did only post-production and special effects.

Hou spent his last stretch at Shanying pushing the state-owned group to operate on market terms. He gradually built it the structure of a listed company and brought in new businesses such as artist management. When he left in September 2014 to become Daylight's chairman, all he had to do was flatten the same functions (development, production, distribution, artist management, business partnerships and publicity), since the new company had only a dozen or so full-time staff.

The new company brought new freedom. Shanying planned to open cinemas and theme parks, which held little interest for Hou. He wanted to be a professional "craftsman" and to give craftsmen more power. He made Kong Sheng and Li Xue, his frequent collaborators at Shanying, shareholders. In an interview last October he put it this way: "In the United States, say, the six big content companies all have independent production companies they want to work with. We shouldn't try to be one of the six. I want to be an independent production company."

Last year that independent producer, Daylight Entertainment, took Series A investment from China Media Capital (CMC), yet it kept a steady working relationship with Shanying. This, too, resembles Hollywood, where independent producers often sign long-term distribution deals with the six major studios so they need not worry about production money. Shanying has invested in every drama Daylight is now making.

Those dramas are not cheap. Nirvana in Fire cost about 110 million yuan in total. To give the picture a more polished look, the crew shot on ARRI ALEXA, RED EPIC and Sony PMW cameras, and built a new set for Su Mansion, home of the hero Mei Changsu. These habits carried over from Nothing but War in Beiping, for which Hou raised the budget from 70 million yuan to more than 100 million and rebuilt the story's main setting, the Fang family house.

Nirvana in Fire

Nothing but War in Beiping

Ke Liming is general manager of Ruyi Xinxin Pictures, which co-produced Nothing but War in Beiping and Nirvana in Fire with Hou's team. Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek (Chinese edition) last year, Ke said of the team: "They have a small industrial system of their own." That, he said, is why they control costs and workflow so well.

This is of course not the whole reason Daylight seemed to be playing with cheat codes over the past year. If it were, the team would have taken off years earlier, when Chuang Guandong (《闯关东》) and Life Line (《生死线》) aired in 2008 and 2009. Yet it was not until last September that Nirvana in Fire aired. Its Baidu search index peaked at 2.4 million; by the end of its first run it had drawn 1.93 billion views on the video site iQiyi, a figure that later climbed to nearly 3 billion.

Hou was told the show had caught fire because it "struck a nerve on the internet." He was pleased. The team had meant to use Nirvana in Fire to change course and to establish how the market saw it commercially. Given that "the industry is getting younger," the effort can be put another way: Hou's team, known for "serious drama," wanted more young people to find its shows good and fun to watch.

As a producer, Hou must keep finding good scripts, and over the past four or five years he has taken an interest in online novels. In April 2011 Shanying bought the rights to Nirvana in Fire, and later bought the rights to several romantic mysteries by Ding Mo, a writer on Jinjiang Literature City. A producer must also choose actors, and viewers have noticed that in the team's latest, younger-skewing dramas, idol actors have become more common, alongside the occasional veteran character actor.

The Disguiser

But the team clearly could not grasp the youth market overnight. While The Disguiser was airing, viewers talked endlessly about "CPs," the on-screen couples they wanted to pair up. Hou said he found this strange and had to go and read up on it. Director Li Xue grew visibly angry the first few times he was asked about such things. In handling negative rumors about its contracted artists, the team's publicity work looked green; it lacked the experience to deal with fans online.

Should the team tie itself to young audiences? Hou had to work hard to persuade Kong Sheng and Li Xue to take on Nirvana in Fire and The Disguiser. When Hunan TV approached him to premiere The Disguiser, he hesitated. The show was already less straight-laced than Daylight's earlier war and spy dramas, but Hou still worried that Hunan TV's young, entertainment-driven image did not suit it.

Hunan TV tried to put the team's mind at rest. The channel does target young people, it explained, but young people grow up, and "they need to be shown something fresher, something of higher quality."

Without fresher, better content, China's TV drama market would be in a sorry state. Production companies spend their large budgets on hiring star actors, and that is roughly as far as their idea of a "big production" goes. Viewers who have watched American, Japanese and Korean shows are losing patience with domestic ones.

Hou wants to win those viewers back. "The people who left are our most valuable audience: the ones with the most spending power and the sharpest minds. The result is that our whole TV drama industry slides downmarket, and that is wrong," he said. Past success has taught him that "we should be shaped like a pyramid." By selling rights again and again, production and distribution companies earn far more from the dramas at the top of that pyramid than from those that are "just a TV drama product."

On the other hand, Hou said, the team's long run of success has caused some problems. As a producer he used to be sure of where a story's focus and pace should lie; now he is less sure. He even regrets not following the ideas of the original author and screenwriter, Hai Yan, for the opening of Nirvana in Fire: "It would have been better that way."

Much else took Hou by surprise. Viewers turned out to love the slow scenes of everyday life inside the households. Reading the script, Hou had worried that audiences would find them dull. Instead they became the most popular part of the shows. Hou's conclusion: "You have to have charm." Director Li Xue has a gift for finding charm in daily life, and the atmosphere of the two households in The Disguiser and Nirvana in Fire is partly his doing.

Still, people point out, without mercy, that both shows have plenty of plot holes. A Zhihu user named Wang Shuai called The Disguiser "a second-rate spy drama, not really a spy drama at all, but a Republic-era romance in modern dress." Wang Ke enjoys both shows but still compares them with Nothing but War in Beiping: the two newer dramas, she said, are like a kaiseki meal, while Beiping is more like a pot at Huige Hotpot, "hearty and satisfying." Asked how they compare with American TV, she thought for a moment and said the scripts are still a weak spot and the range of subjects too narrow.

Hou believes it is worth trying new things, both in subject matter and in where the shows are released.

When he bought the rights to Love Me If You Dare (《他来了，请闭眼》), Hou already had a new genre in mind: the mystery romance. Its author, Ding Mo, had become a hit on Jinjiang Literature City with this fairly novel "detective story plus love story" formula.

Love Me If You Dare

At the end of 2013, Sohu Video approached Hou, hoping to persuade his team to turn the novel into a web series that the two sides would co-produce. Video sites were drawing viewers away from the TV screen, and the drama ratings that TV stations track were falling year after year. But the sites still needed traditional production companies to help with content, and companies including Tangren Media and Ciwen Media had already moved into the field.

Hou had never made a web series, and he was curious. He had also come to see one thing: "Nothing can stop TV as a platform from going into decline. Its best days are over." He added: "I won't agonize over it. I'd even say that one day I might make video and content just for the phone screen."

He had bigger plans, too. He intends to turn these online novels into films (Nirvana in Fire already has a film in the works). Film audiences and video-site audiences are close in age, both on the young side, and making web series is a good way to get to know them.

The web series eventually drew 1.2 billion views on Sohu Video and also ran weekly on Dragon TV, becoming the first series to travel from the internet back to a TV channel. But fans were mostly lukewarm. Hou admits it fell short. His traditional instincts clashed with the video site's over where the creative focus should lie: Hou wanted to play up the fast-paced detective work, while Sohu wanted to spend more time on the delicate feelings between the two leads.

That has not stopped Daylight from working with more video sites and gaining more experience, some of it perhaps good and some perhaps not. Penguin Pictures, which Tencent set up this September, will make two of its eight in-house web series with Daylight, including Candle in the Tomb (《鬼吹灯》), a popular franchise already adapted into several films and TV shows.

Ode to Joy

People used to assume that, for the Daylight team, even making a city drama like Ode to Joy would be a big deal.

Now this new company built by a veteran team has given a crew of skilled makers of serious drama some charm and some young, fresh stories. It has changed how people see traditional film and TV producers, and has slightly raised what they expect from Chinese television.

As for Daylight's fan clubs, they can now fairly ask more of a good drama: the production is excellent, but online novelists are still not as rigorous and thorough as professional screenwriters. They can also say, harshly but out of a wish to see the company do well, that Love Me If You Dare may have cost Daylight some face.

The team once saw the gap in industrial standards that separated it from American TV and Hollywood films. When the first season of the American series 24 came out, Hou and director Li Xue stayed up all night and watched it in one sitting. Both were stunned.

But 2015 showed that, beyond its progress in craft and process, the company has more commercial options ahead. It does not need to shoot more dramas to maximize profit; instead it turns its series, and the company itself, into brands. According to one figure, which may be slightly off, the 54-episode Nirvana in Fire earned 300 million yuan from a single round of rights sales, and after Daylight sold it to iQiyi, the show brought in another 80 million yuan.