Amusing Ourselves to Death, Even in First Grade

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. … In the classroom, entertainment is a means to an end; on television, entertainment is an end in itself.” — Neil Postman

Whether you have noticed it or not, whether you turn on the television or not, an unprecedented number of reality shows have already encroached on your inner life.

In the 1980s, Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Disappearance of Childhood, arguing that television was erasing the boundary between childhood and adulthood and impoverishing the culture. He warned that it took printers 60 years after the invention of the printing press to think of numbering a book’s pages. Who knew what television might become?

Sure enough, 10 years later, a new form of television entertainment—the reality show—emerged in the United States, then swept the world.

Today, reality television is enjoying a new spring in China. Hunan TV, for example, is trying to use the format to follow a person through every stage of growing up. Its latest hit, First Grade (《一年级》), follows Where Are We Going, Dad?, centered on preschool children; X-Change, about rebellious middle school students; and Divas Hit the Road, about maturing during the university years. It fills the missing link in that chain: elementary school, the “first lesson in life.”

The original reality show, on which Hunan TV has pinned high hopes, records the first semester of a first-grade class at Hunan’s Xiangjun Future Experimental School. It follows everything from the children’s daily eating, drinking, and bathroom trips to their lessons. Two stars, Song Jia and Chen Xuedong, serve as the class’s teacher responsible for daily life and trainee homeroom teacher, respectively.

Despite competing in Friday’s prime-time slot with star-packed competition shows based on established imported formats, such as Running Man and The Amazing Race, and despite starting an hour later, each of First Grade’s first two episodes drew ratings above 1%. Some credit may belong to the Changsha Municipal Education Bureau, which instructed every first grader in the city to watch the show attentively.

If “above 1%” means little to you, the numbers that follow may show how a reality show featuring 36 first graders and 2 stars gets made.

200–36–7

Even Hunan TV producer Xu Qing did not expect Ma Haoxuan and his Hunan-dialect catchphrase, “search with abandon,” to become a sensation after First Grade’s first episode aired. Xu and the team she leads conceived and produced the original show. Hunan TV has more than 20 permanent teams of this kind, each led by a producer.

Xu sounded excited when she discussed the process with QDaily. “At the media screening before the first episode aired, reporters told me this child would become famous, and so would his ‘search with abandon.’ And then it happened,” she said.

Though Xu is from Changsha, she had not realized during filming what was so special about the phrase. Choosing Ma as the “male lead” among the class’s 36 pupils, however, was part of her team’s early planning.

The whole class could be called a carefully assembled cast. The production team even took part in the school’s admissions interviews, selecting 36 children from more than 200 applicants and signing filming agreements with their parents. From those 36, it chose 7 as the show’s “main characters.” Xu repeatedly stressed that the team “only made suggestions; the school had the final say.” Still, some things had plainly changed.

Each of the 7 “lucky” children met at least one of the producers’ requirements in appearance, expressiveness, or family background. What interested the team about Ma, of “search with abandon” fame, was that he had boarded full-time since kindergarten. There was also Lu Yulin, raised largely by grandparents; Chen Sicheng, who grew up in a single-parent family; and Xi Mengzi, a child of mixed heritage. Such labels would follow them through every appearance, generating conversation and drawing attention.

“We chose children who were representative; we didn’t just look at their faces,” Xu told QDaily. “If they were all from the same category—say, both parents worked and had no time to look after them—their backgrounds and stories would be much the same. Their personalities wouldn’t be so varied. The different stories also give us more to work with in post-production.”

Unlike their classmates, the 7 main characters received star treatment: each had a dedicated camera operator following them throughout the day, ensuring that no small detail was missed between waking in the morning and falling asleep in the dormitory at night.

120 Camera Positions, More Than 130 Staff, 16 TB of Footage a Day

Those figures give a more direct sense of what happened to the school during filming.

Xu’s team specializes in programs about young people and school life; it also makes X-Change. Xu describes producing that show as painstaking handwork. “I need that setup and that many people in place before I dare take it on,” she told QDaily. She put the workload for First Grade at “the equivalent of 10 X-Changes.”

Children are unpredictable. No one knows where they will be or what they will do a moment later. To capture a “panoramic” record, the team installed around 100 fixed cameras across the campus and used more than 20 mobile camera positions. Every camera recorded without stopping, 24 hours a day for 60 days.

“The show’s production costs aren’t particularly high. Most of the money went on equipment,” supervising producer Xia Qing told QDaily.

The directors could not possibly watch every camera themselves. Instead, the team used fiber-optic cables to transmit the footage in near real time, much as a live television broadcast does. Images reached a monitoring room at the station after a delay of a few minutes, where staff watched the feeds one by one. Known in the television industry as camera loggers, they described worthwhile or amusing moments in text and entered them into a footage database, creating an electronic index that editors could search later.

All the day’s footage had to be processed that same day. “There’s just so much of it,” Xu said. “On the busiest days, we had 16 TB of footage.”

With so many cameras and so much material, more than 130 people worked on First Grade across production and post-production.

To help the pupils act more “naturally” before all those cameras, the crew also replaced the glass in classrooms and offices with one-way mirrors. To camera operators filming from outside, they were transparent windows. To the children in class, they were mirrors that hid the equipment beyond them.

At Hunan TV’s advertising sales conference on October 29, Lü Huanbin, head of Hunan Broadcasting System, said: “The footage First Grade brings back each day exceeds the daily footage of any entire television station in China. By the end, the show will have recorded more footage than other stations produce in a year.”

1:1000

Even after such careful casting, each minute of First Grade shown on television is cut, on average, from 1,000 minutes of footage. That ratio set another record for Chinese television.

In other words, every laugh, tear, moment of worry, and pang of distress has been distilled into a show, even though the people and events are real.

(The monitoring room)

Xu considers the program a “planned new kind of documentary.” But documentaries generally strive to present reality with restraint and objectivity, while this team went to great lengths to make its show entertaining. Producers studied first-grade textbooks from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Education Press. They spent time in kindergartens to see whether today’s children could be maddening enough to watch. They interviewed education specialists and psychologists to understand “what elementary school is actually for.” And they worked with teachers to compile a handbook of daily routines as a “script” for the 2 stars playing teachers.

“It laid out the specific work for each day—what to do and when. We mapped it all out,” Xu said. “So later, we had a fairly clear idea of what we were looking for.”

2 Stars

Even with the production team’s detailed script, actress Song Jia cried 8 times in front of the cameras in a single day. “If you’re looking for the most miserable star in history, you’ll find her on our show,” Xu said.

During filming, except on holidays, the 2 stars worked the same hours as the school’s teachers. The pupils got up at 6:40 a.m.; the teachers had to rise at 6 to prepare. Their day ended only after the children had settled down at 10 or 11 at night. The stars’ assistants were told they could not stay in hotels near the school, and makeup artists could not enter the campus. The stars had to do their own makeup.

Song had never appeared on a reality show before. Chen, who played Chongguang in Tiny Times, was born in 1990. Neither seemed likely to bring a vast, devoted fan base. That was precisely what the producers wanted: stars who would not overshadow the children but could still help make the show entertaining. Xu hoped they would give viewers someone through whom to experience the class and make the program easier to relate to. Their presence also made it easier to market. The show had already secured advertising sponsorships from Xiang Piao Piao and Luolai Home Textile.

The work could bring the stars greater rewards, too. Chen and Song have each appeared across Hunan TV’s major variety shows, from Day Day Up to Happy Camp. The channel routinely puts its full resources behind a program.

“After tomorrow’s episode, he’ll gain even more followers,” Xu said, referring to First Grade’s second episode. “He carries a child to the infirmary, then carries the child back to the dormitory. He seems so caring, and people think very highly of him now. Even if he’s acting, he does it well. He’s only 24.”

At press time, Chen had 1.29 million followers on Sina Weibo and Song had more than 3.31 million. The #First Grade# topic had prompted 330,000 discussions and been viewed 1.27 billion times.

8 Years of Experience, 1 Year of Preparation

Xu said she and her team had reason to expect the show’s popularity. Its scheduling in the gap between 2 of Hunan TV’s flagship programs, Where Are We Going, Dad? and I Am a Singer, suggested the channel shared their confidence.

Part of that confidence came from experience. Xu’s team had made X-Change for 8 years, and the show was in its tenth season. At Hunan TV’s advertising sales conference in Beijing on October 29, the channel announced that X-Change would move from Monday nights to a prime Sunday variety-show slot in 2015.

“The start of the school year was good timing, and children are naturally a promising subject,” Xu said. “Parents, pupils, and teachers can all see something of themselves in it.” Drawing on the experience of Where Are We Going, Dad?, she added that programs centered on parenting and education reach a much wider range of viewers and cities than racing competitions do.

Hunan TV holds at least 1 large call for original program ideas each year, open to the public. The channel sets out areas such as daily life, schools, and workplaces, and teams choose a field that suits their interests and strengths before submitting proposals. Creators then pitch their ideas to station executives and producers, who score them. Projects that clear the threshold receive funding to make a pilot. Those finally selected proceed to advertising sales and production.

Good ideas are rewarded. “If you submit a proposal when we open the call, we pay a submission fee,” Xu told QDaily. “If you get through to the pitch and place well, you get a creative fee. If you make it to the pilot stage, you get money to start the pilot. Once it goes on air, you get the full investment.”

First Grade spent almost a year in preparation under this system. Xu said that, following the success of Where Are We Going, Dad? and X-Change, many teams had proposed programs about young people the previous year. Her team ultimately won the commission, perhaps because it had 8 years of experience making X-Change.

Xu first planned to film at a middle school, a setting she knew better, but practical preparations showed it would not work. “At middle school, grades and admission rates matter so much that the pressure to teach the curriculum is too great,” she told QDaily. “Most students wouldn’t agree to be filmed for so long.” Early talks with schools went nowhere. Their concern was less the effect on children’s development than the risk that filming would expose flaws in school management and hurt future admissions.

Xu then took the advice of education specialists and teachers and decided to try first grade instead.

Once the team had settled on the children’s age, it looked for a school. Xu said they visited schools in Beijing, Changsha, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and other cities before choosing Xiangjun Future Experimental School in Changsha. “Partly it was practical,” she said. “Working in our home base of Changsha made it much easier to move people and equipment and transmit footage. The school is also new, part of a well-known local education group. It has attractive grounds and many fresh ideas about education, and it’s very popular in Changsha.”

(Xiangjun Future Experimental School)

As a television production, First Grade can be seen as a successful product. Its original format, experienced team, and lavish production helped make it a phenomenon. No other Chinese station had stationed more than 100 cameras and more than 100 production staff inside a school for 2 months as Hunan TV did.

Ma’s “search with abandon” was quickly used in Hunan TV’s latest advertising sales promo, “Search With Abandon” for New Breakthroughs (《“放肆找”到新突破》). That is hardly surprising. A television entertainment program’s first job is to please viewers; its ultimate aim is to make money. The show’s 7 main characters have also appeared on Hunan TV variety programs, becoming little stars greeted by cheering fans.

At the end of The Truman Show, the 1998 film starring Jim Carrey, Truman rejects the trappings of television stardom and the producer’s threats and inducements, then walks out of the town of Seahaven. When a semester of filming ends for the 36 first graders living in their own vast soundstage, how many will be able to return to a real life that seems, by comparison, rather dull?

Xu said the scale of the production reflected her hope that the program would amount to more than a “show.” “Without the show, we’d simply be recording reality,” she said. She hopes it will draw attention to school education and help people understand teachers’ working lives.