After the New Rules, What Are China's Web Drama Makers Thinking?

Bottom lines, professional ethics, taboos: who, exactly, should answer for these grand questions?

Recently, the makers of a web drama called Taking Concubines decided at short notice to move the release of its second season from June to May. That means it will miss the summer slot it was planned for, but with luck it may still get aired.

Taking Concubines is produced by Dongyang Huahai Era Pictures & Media, and its second season is now being rushed through post-production. Adapted from an online novel of the same name, it tells the story of a forensic pathologist named Yang Qiuchi whose soul lands in a corpse in the Ming dynasty. He becomes a coroner's apprentice, and from then on he keeps handling bizarre cases and keeps taking concubines.

Producer Chen Lian has been weighing the show's prospects for some time. Between the end of last year and the start of this one, a string of web dramas became big hits: Guilty Mind, Wuxin: The Monster Killer, Go Princess Go, Addicted. These shows sidestepped the brutal competition TV dramas face inside the TV station system and found their own identity and opportunities on online platforms. At the same time, regulation of such shows has been getting stricter. If Chen Lian has anything to weigh, it is how to draw as many viewers as possible without stepping "out of line."

Now that calculation has suddenly become much harder.

On February 23, Addicted, a web drama adapted from a danmei (boys' love) novel, was taken down. It had been planned for 18 episodes; only 15 aired.

On February 27, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television issued a series of new rules on reviewing web dramas. Video reviewers would get more training, the people vetting content would have to meet a higher standard, and website managers would be held strictly responsible. Outstanding web dramas would get more guidance. Monitoring would run around the clock, 24 hours a day, and regulators would get to know major projects better and step in early. Dramas "heading in the wrong direction" were to be spotted in time, rather than pulled once finished. And the standards for broadcasting and regulating content on television and online were to be the same. In short, whatever a TV drama cannot air, a web drama cannot air either.

On March 2, another document, the General Rules for TV Dramas, stated explicitly that content involving reincarnation, witchcraft and spell-casting, teenage romance and homosexuality may not be broadcast.

"Calm. Everyone knew it was coming. It just came a few months early," Chen Lian told QDaily when asked how the industry was reacting to the controls.

Web dramas have already become an important part of the TV drama market.

By September 2015, 247 web dramas had gone online across the internet, totaling 3,334 episodes and 50,017 minutes. The number made in the first nine months of 2015 equaled the total for all of 2014, which was dubbed "year one of self-produced dramas."

Budgets keep growing too. In 2016, nearly 20 web dramas have budgets of more than 20 million yuan, among them a large batch of so-called "IP" dramas built on existing intellectual property, such as Journey to Find Past Lives, L.O.R.D., The Mystic Nine, Strange Tales of Muye and Tomb Raider's Talisman. Five "super web dramas," including the series The Lost Tomb, Guilty Mind and The Dark Hunter 2, cost anywhere from 50 million yuan to more than 100 million yuan to make.

The arrival of the web drama era clearly fired up some film and TV investors. Projects that had stalled because they could not clear the review bar for TV dramas finally had a new format in which to make a comeback. "Web dramas, and web films, which cost even less (the industry just calls them 'wangda,' short for 'web big movies'), have always been what small companies mainly make. They cost little, take little time and pay back fast. Plenty of companies make their money on a pile of web dramas and web films nobody has ever heard of. As conditions improved and everyone made money, mid-sized and big companies bought up a pile of IP, such as online novels. Subjects that would have struggled to pass TV drama review were all turned into sky-priced web dramas, and that heated up the market," screenwriter Huang Qingjiao told QDaily.

Go Princess Go gave many people even more hope. Producer A Tong has long had a project she was never sure about: a fantasy comedy about a man and a woman who swap souls. "After the Princess show came out, everyone felt it was no big deal. And even if questions remain, we can rework the story to give the plot a reasonable explanation," A Tong said.

Now the investors and producers in this market may need to be a little more careful.

The players in this game, who swallow their grievances in silence, have mostly met the change with "understanding."

"Having rules is better than having none. If you know what you can and can't do, you can avoid risk better. We welcome the Administration having a policy like this to regulate the industry. For a company like ours the impact isn't big. There may be teams out there that like to chase trends, and they'll be hit harder," Ma Li Lingshan, co-founder of Yiku Culture Media Co., Ltd., told QDaily.

Yiku is the distributor of Addicted. It recently received an investment of tens of millions of yuan from Matrix Partners China, and avoiding risk is also a way of being responsible to its investors.

Yiku is now working on Crime Eliminator and Bu Liang Ren at the same time. Although both shows differ, to some degree, from conventional "TV dramas that can air on TV stations," the company was clear: "Our content is unlikely to touch sensitive subjects, and it won't clash with regulatory policy."

Opinion in the industry is divided over the removal of Addicted. Some think it was what directly triggered the sudden new policy. Some of the show's supporters argue that loosening the "limits" has to happen gradually, that internet users are fairly accepting, and that they find it easier to treat slash and danmei culture as entertainment.

A producer from Youku Tudou's self-produced drama unit explained the earlier removal of the two dramas this way: "Actually, Addicted wasn't pulled because of its 'gay' subject matter but because of how it was shown, which was too sensitive. For example, two high school students in a relationship, and a bed scene too. So some shots had to be cut. There hasn't actually been much controversy about that."

Even those who voiced appreciation and support mostly understand one thing very well: restraint is the surest way to survive.

Chen Lian posted this on WeChat Moments: "Stop fussing. Even without pushing the edge there are so many interesting, fun things to do that we'll never get through them all. Congratulations to the companies making quality dramas. Your real spring has arrived."

Chen Lian's Taking Concubines went online in 2015. At the time it was one of the ten most popular web dramas on Guduo, a data platform. Several shows in that top ten with sexual or violent content had been edited, taken down or put back online, but Taking Concubines was the only one never taken down, even though it was also under close watch. "Our title alone should have put us on the watch list, but we held back as much as we could on the sexual and bloody content in the show."

Of the many companies QDaily interviewed, Wanhe Tianyi also said the policy would not affect it much.

A web drama pioneer, Wanhe Tianyi made web sitcoms such as Surprise and Report to the Boss that were warmly received, and took a "positive energy" route from the start. "Actually, the policy will hit web films harder than web dramas. Web films in China are especially unregulated. They're more on the level of what 1990s video halls showed, and the Administration is actually more sensitive about those," said Shen Qirun, a producer at Wanhe Tianyi.

For now, web dramas are still mainly reviewed by the platforms that air them. But platforms must hold two licenses from the Administration, the Information Network Audiovisual Program Transmission License and the Program Production License, and their reviewers must be certified.

Producer A Tong walked us through how video sites generally review content. From the moment a project is approved, you have to think along several lines: traffic; revenue (if you take it on, whether it is exclusive or a partnership, and where the money comes from); and policy (whether there is risk, whether promoting it could be controversial, or even whether it is unsuitable to promote on the homepage). The Administration usually issues the channel a set of broadcast numbers. A project under review must be uploaded to a designated official website and submitted for inspection, and only once review is complete does it get a number. That number must appear at the start of the video for about three seconds. "If anything goes wrong, the regulators can find you through the number."

Since 2015, Youku Tudou has pursued a PGC (professionally generated content) strategy, under which several hundred professional film and TV companies can set up their own accounts and upload their own work. The platform assigns promotional resources to content that passes review and splits revenue with the producers by clicks and payments. Because some platforms have not invested in projects of this kind, most of them take a wait-and-see attitude and "trial broadcast" some content. If it hits the review bottom line, the worst that happens is that it gets taken down.

This is a process of steady subtraction. With no clear rules of the game, everyone can only guess where the line lies from the content that "fouled," and once a taboo is found, they simply stay away from it.

The problem is that even the rules of February 23 and February 27 spelled out only a limited range of banned content. Suppose someone "got around" the written rules and made a "shocking" drama: that kind of "shocking" would soon be added to the banned list too. In other words, the list of taboos may keep growing, and no one knows the underlying reason these things are taboo. Teenage romance, reincarnation, souls, homosexuality: these are perfectly normal creative elements all over the world and in every period of history, and they appear in all kinds of classic works.

In fact, one reason some companies like danmei and lesbian subjects is that such stories are good at making stars. Nianlun Yinghua earlier produced Like Love, a web film about a gay couple, and its two male leads became famous as a result. Later, Huang Jingyu and Xu Weizhou, the two male leads of Addicted, shot to fame as a new "CP" (on-screen couple).

Even so, companies will not take on bigger policy risks just to make stars. Producer Huizi said one of the projects they are currently negotiating is also about a gay couple, and with regulation in mind they are rethinking how to adapt it and how to make it, to see how they can avoid touching the bottom line as far as possible.

But for small companies hoping to take off fast on the back of a single hit, the news of February 27 came close to a fatal blow.

Quite a few interviewees told QDaily that most of the industry had in fact heard rumors at the end of last year; they just did not expect them to be "confirmed" so quickly.

Some players with projects under way have already gritted their teeth and pushed on. Nianlun Yinghua holds the adaptation rights to the novel Troll Man. The earlier licensed version of the novel was heavy on horror, so they have toned that down, repackaged the story as urban fantasy and given more weight to its romantic thread.

That has forced Nianlun Yinghua to make some artificial changes. In the series, for example, a character's schizophrenia causes hallucinations, whereas in the novel the protagonist is possessed by an evil spirit.

Huizi said the situation they least want to face is this: if review turns out to be really strict, they may have to turn it into a drama set in the Republican era. If they don't, it could end up a second Wuxin: The Monster Killer.

Yingli Entertainment has slowed down project development. Its two main projects this year, Tokyo Biker Gang and Crows, involve a range of sensitive elements such as school violence and the dark side of society. Since the policy came out, the pressure on the company has grown.

"Right now we're developing while watching how hard the online market is regulated. Of course, we still need to talk more with the video platforms and hear what they have to say. After all, the first cut, the power of life and death, is still in the platforms' hands," said producer Xu Jing. Both scripts already have a complete story arc and episode outlines, and stopping now would certainly mean losses.

In fact, part of the reason many companies are cautious is that a TV drama is only one form the "IP" in their hands can take. If a concept has enough imaginative reach, the project may end up as a game, or as something bigger, such as a theatrical film. In that case, unless a subject is especially hot, a producer will not want to leave the project exposed to risk for long.

Those who hold IP have now become the most anxious group of all.

On February 23, just four days before the policy came out, a Weibo user with the ID Huang Qingjiao, verified as a film critic, posted: lately film and TV companies have been rushing to ask about buying danmei, and twenty-odd IPs have landed in front of me. "Teach, take a look at whether these novels are worth adapting, we'll discuss them at next month's meeting." "No need, I'll tell you now: this one's no good, the writing is terrible." "Senior officials meddling in politics, hard to adapt." "This one's too raunchy." "You're sending me Tieba forum posts now? Where's your integrity?" Now everyone seems to look at me a bit strangely.

It is a small snapshot of the web drama "boom" of recent months. Huang Qingjiao has worked as a TV screenwriter and already knows how to adapt to review and cater to tastes. But she also hints that the arrival of web dramas could have spared writers like her so much agonizing.

"American screenwriters write Breaking Bad and The Vampire Diaries. You think Chinese screenwriters don't want to write that? Of course they do! We'd happily copy it out word for word."