He Directed Plays at Beijing Renyi for 10 Years. Now He's Made the Hit Web Series Medical Examiner Dr. Qin

From The Sorrow of Comedy to 12 Citizens to Medical Examiner Dr. Qin — what new problems has Xu Ang run into?

"Great to watch while eating!!! Goes best with beef jerky and chicken rice." That comment, left by the Douban user "Prettiest Girl in the Universe" under the web series Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, is meant sarcastically.

Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, produced jointly by Sohu Video and Boji Tianjuan Pictures, is adapted from Qin Ming's novel The Eleventh Finger. Since it went up on Sohu Video on October 13, the platform has featured it on the homepage.

Two episodes air every Thursday at 8 p.m. The 14 episodes released so far have drawn 700 million views.

Since the premiere, the talk about the show has fixed on two words: "forensic examiner" — and the gruesome scenes that come with the job. The first episode opens with the main characters fishing a "body" out of a slop bucket. The camera holds a close-up on a "finger," but the prop isn't convincing enough and ends up looking more like a chicken foot.

The male lead, forensic examiner Qin Ming, played by Zhang Ruoyun, follows the "genius" template: in most scenes he wears a sharply pressed suit and a cocky expression, and sees through everything at a glance.

Most viewers come away from this forensic drama entertained rather than frightened, and with plenty to mock. More than 10,000 users on Douban have given Medical Examiner Dr. Qin a score of 7.4. By popularity, it ranks second among domestic dramas, behind When a Snail Falls in Love.

Web-series audiences know this way of watching well by now: exaggerated character traits and a fresh, lurid gimmick carry them into a screen world with little connection to reality. The film and TV industry has its own shorthand for this kind of popularity — "anime-style," "internet sensibility," "the post-90s generation."

Director Xu Ang may not care for such a simple reading. In an interview with QDaily, he offered another way to understand it: "What we call 'commercial,' I think, really just leans toward the popular — your audience starts to grow bigger, the demographic gets broader … Being commercial is really about thinking across different groups of people, about what common knowledge and common sense you can actually use to talk to them. If you can find that point, we generally consider a commercial work a success. If you can't find it, we consider it a failure."

Viewers who know Xu Ang's background will better understand where the remark comes from.

Xu Ang is 36. By output, this was the year he completed his "transition" into commercial film and television: he made two shows, the web series Medical Examiner Dr. Qin and The Hunter, a period TV drama that aired earlier in the year. The first one succeeded.

Before that, Xu Ang was a director with an art-house bent, known for two works: the 2011 stage play The Sorrow of Comedy and the 2014 film 12 Citizens.

Xu Ang had spent his whole career in theater. He graduated from the Central Academy of Drama's directing department, 1997 undergraduate class, and then joined the Beijing People's Art Theatre — "Beijing Renyi" — as the youngest director at this state-run company. He climbed slowly, from "directing assistant, assistant director, associate director, executive director, co-director, independent director for the small stage" all the way up to independent director for the main stage, and stayed 10 years.

Theater was Xu Ang's original dream, and he made a real success of it. The Sorrow of Comedy, starring Chen Daoming and He Bing, took 4.37 million yuan at the box office in its first run and another 5 million yuan in 2012 —

setting a box-office record for Beijing Renyi and making it the most commercially successful stage play in Beijing in 20 years.

The play was adapted from University of Laughs, by the celebrated Japanese screenwriter Koki Mitani. The story is simple, with only two characters: a newly appointed censor in charge of approving scripts, who has no sense of humor, hates comedy most of all, and blocks every comic script that crosses his desk; and a comic playwright who has spent his career dealing with censors like him, and who lives to make audiences laugh. The two spend a full seven days in a tug-of-war over whether a comedy script called Zhumiou and Luoliye《朱密欧与罗丽叶》 will pass review.

But the success of The Sorrow of Comedy came as a surprise both to Xu Ang and to the theater world. In a talk at Yixi, Xu Ang once told a slightly absurd story about it: "After we staged that play in 2011, the box office was extremely good. You know, back when we'd just joined Beijing Renyi, the scalpers outside would come and watch our shows. Scalpers are a bit like people betting on horses — they'd come watch these directors, watch your plays bit by bit, and then come tell you about them afterward. It happened to me all the time: I'd walk out of the theater and a scalper would say, 'Kid, this show is too serious, your audience can't sit still for it, you should put on something funny, and cast a bigger name too.' Not until the day we staged The Sorrow of Comedy did the scalper outside pat me on the shoulder and say, 'Heh, kid, ten years, and you finally get what I've been telling you.'"

The play brought Xu Ang wider attention, including from investors in film and television. In 2012, Wang Luna, CEO of Juben Media, approached him and proposed making a film together. Juben Media had been founded only in early 2012, backed by Xu Xiaoping, Wang Qiang and Sequoia Capital's Neil Shen. In the years since, the company has also co-produced American Dreams in China and Guns and Kidneys, an unreleased new film by Zhang Meng, the director of The Piano in a Factory.

Xu Ang got roughly a million yuan in production money from Juben Media and remade the classic 1957 American film 12 Angry Men as a "Chinese version," 12 Citizens. He had wanted to adapt the story since 2005 or 2006, originally as a stage play.

One mark of the film version of 12 Citizens is still its heavy "stage feel." From start to finish it takes place in one space: twelve jurors, one conference room, a few hours of argument over whether the suspect is guilty, and a verdict that flips. Xu Ang pulled off an adaptation that could clear censorship: he turned the jury system into a "mock trial" that parents stage to help a group of law students.

12 Citizens finished shooting in 2013 but wasn't released until 2015. It followed the path every art-house Chinese film has to take: in 2014 it made the rounds of festivals first and won the top prize in the main competition at the 9th Rome International Film Festival. When this starless "stage play of a film" finally opened, it got, unsurprisingly, fewer than 5% of screenings, and made 13 million yuan.

But the film's "citizen" theme gave people something to argue about, and it drew more attention online: after it left theaters it went up on all the major video sites, and clicks on iQiyi, Tencent and Youku together came to nearly 30 million. Today it holds a Douban score of 8.2, from more than 100,000 raters.

That set the course of Xu Ang's career.

Next to the tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, who watch film and television, live theater is seen as a small, non-mainstream market — and therefore one that looks a little like people amusing themselves.

Starting in a small market and moving to a bigger one is usually considered a respectable path. But for a while Xu Ang enjoyed staying in theater and resisted "going out."

Before 12 Citizens, people had invited him to direct TV dramas, or to make a film version of The Sorrow of Comedy. He turned them all down, feeling "the timing wasn't right."

Theater and film were two different things, he thought: "The first thing is, I felt like I was the one serving the staple food back then" — he calls theater "the staple food," which may help you understand his conflict — "and now suddenly you're telling me to stir-fry, and I'm thinking, how do I even do that? I don't even eat spicy food and you want me to be a Sichuan chef. I don't know how. There was a kind of fear in there, and that fear is what kept me turning it down."

After 12 Citizens, "the right timing" pulled harder. From 2015 on, more producers came looking. Two or three scripts landed in Xu Ang's inbox almost every day. That response also gave him some "courage" to consider more ambitious moves: "I felt like we had the desire, and the ability, to learn some new things, so why not do it?"

Xu Ang began facing rules completely unlike theater's.

Last year he first said yes to a producer he'd known for years, and made The Hunter, an espionage drama set in the Republican era. It starred Huang Xuan, but the response was flat.

In early 2016, Boji Tianjuan Pictures, one of the producers of Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, approached Xu Ang. He found himself very curious about "web series": "I'd never touched this before — being online, communicating with the audience that way, I'd never dealt with it. I was curious. Where's the difficulty in it? Is it even possible to do it well, and if not, why not? That's the part I was really curious about."

Web series had gone from niche a few years earlier to mainstream. From 2013 to 2015, total output of web dramas grew more than sevenfold, and by 2015 annual output was close to that of traditional TV drama. In web series Xu Ang could reach a bigger, more "mass" market than ever.

But in this field a director's say can be limited. By the time Xu Ang decided to join Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, the writers had largely finished designing the characters. Working from what makes web series popular, Sohu and Boji Tianjuan had already framed the elements they thought would catch fire — the "gimmicks" mentioned at the start of this piece: anime-style personalities, viral-hit formulas.

Xu Ang is of two minds about it. He doesn't agree with packaging a show so crudely: "What's it like? It's a bit like a pyramid scheme — you come in and frame the thing a certain way first, because that makes it sell better. Whether it's actually true is another question."

A more reasonable explanation is that what really leaves him "uneasy" is that he has stayed clear-eyed about "product quality." Medical Examiner Dr. Qin has drawn mixed word of mouth. The lead's one-note personality won some fans and put off plenty of others, who complained online that this was "a Huang Xiaoming version of a forensic examiner," and "too cringeworthy."

Xu Ang tried to make up for it by building character relationships with some substance to them — he says this is what actually interests him — but with the personalities drawn this thinly, it's hard to take the three leads' interactions seriously.

Fortunately it didn't get worse, because Xu Ang meant from the start to push the characters toward comedy: "Most shows in this genre run one road all the way into the dark — the characters lean toward the rhythm of the case itself, in a heavier, blacker way. Can we balance that out a little from the comedy side, and see if we can arrive at a new look for it?"

Xu Ang has worked out why he favors comedy: deep down, he says, he has a "clown-type" personality. "What's inside me wants the world to be a comedy, a bit warmer. I don't much like things that are especially bleak."

On a web series like this, part of a director's job is execution — or, put another way, compromise.

In fact,

Xu Ang has been through the slow grind toward a "goal" before. During his ten years working his way up at Beijing Renyi, he rehearsed plays that were essentially propaganda assignments, and he also, in bursts of resolve, put up his own and his friends' money to stage plays in small theaters outside. He is mild in speech and manner, but he had to go from being afraid to give notes to his elders to speaking up. When he made 12 Citizens, the problem on his mind was censorship. Now he has to deal, more than before, with the platforms, the capital and the audiences he chose to take on.

At least at this stage, though, Xu Ang has drawn himself a "zone of authority and responsibility" that sounds more like a comfort zone: he defines the director as the "creator," and distributors and platforms as "sellers." That lets him keep a psychological distance from them: "That's a racket between the seller and the buyer. It isn't the logic of the maker in the middle."

In front of a mass audience, Xu Ang still counts as a newcomer. And in learning to accept that audience, the newcomer keeps a safe distance. He says he doesn't read the comments that sting: "I'm afraid that reading them affects me — I come away either really insecure or really full of myself. If the write-up is too flattering I skip it; reading it too easily affects you. A person's traits aren't necessarily their strengths, really. Knowing roughly that the audience this time didn't curse you out, didn't really dislike it — a general sense is enough."

He has a few new plans. After Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, he will "get more say in what he chooses." He didn't go into detail. But for a while yet, he has no plans to go back to theater.

Xu Ang Had More to Say

(Q: QDaily, X: Xu Ang)

Q: Compared with 12 Citizens or your earlier stage work, is the "stuff to mock" you're offering this time with Medical Examiner Dr. Qin a different kind of thing — something more purely entertaining?

X: Let me put it this way. The comparison isn't very elegant, but here it is: bees and flies. There's one end that draws both of them in. What's that? Honey. But there's another end that attracts only flies, not bees. So what we're trying to do with this thing is attract as many flies and bees as possible, and that requires the thing to be sweet — it has to have some sweetness to it.

Take that chicken foot we mentioned earlier (the "human hand") — what is that? The chicken foot sits at the fly end. Some people look only at the chicken foot; that's exactly what pulls them in first, nothing else. But if you offer only what attracts flies, then flies are all you get — you'll see a swarm of them circling. What American series get right is that they give you everything. They attract flies and bees alike, everyone is drawn in, and it works.

If a work is born for that reason at its core, it isn't a noble thing — but if we criticize it only for not being noble enough as artistic creation, then we're the ones with a problem.

That's the point. If a creator doesn't understand this, you have to wonder whether their early education was ever complete.

Q: What's the difference between theater and film or TV drama?

X: Theater is a bit different. It leans toward starting from real life and then rising to the metaphysical. Without that, theater doesn't mean much. You need that sense of rising in the moment, of attaining enlightenment on the spot. You need that idea for something to be called theater. If it's only there to make people happy for a moment, to get a laugh, that's closer to a comedy sketch. It's not that comedy can't have that sense of rising on the spot. I'm just saying there are many ways to make people laugh, and rising on the spot is the best one.

Q: Artistically, do you think theater is the best form?

X: No, I think every form is different. It's just that some things are there to fill you up and some are there to make the meal taste good. Theater is there to fill you up. It has to provide something genuinely valuable, something that bears directly on whether you can survive, not an ornament for show. Philosophy isn't an ornament either; philosophy is the real driving force behind a person staying alive. If a person has never thought anything through, they'll die sooner or later without ever knowing how we're supposed to live. You can't understand life without understanding death, and that's what philosophy provides. What philosophy provides is a way of making everything cohere — it has to explain everything around you. If you haven't grasped that, that's the force that sends you off to read philosophy. And once you find it, people may keep attacking you, trying to tear down the philosophical ideas you now hold, and then you go looking for the holes in your own thinking, to see whether there's some new possibility. That's a game a person can play a whole life. Because you're going to die sooner or later, you first have to understand what we're living for, what's interesting about it and what isn't — and that's what theater is supposed to provide. It's like taking one breath right before you go under the water, and that, in fact, is the thing that fills you up.

As for tasting good: oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar aren't necessarily nutritious, but they add flavor, and that's the part that makes it taste good. Shark fin has a high lead content, but you still eat it — there may be some other factor in there, some added value. Maybe it makes you look more impressive, more of a big deal: "I can afford it," or "it's rare," just that one small piece.

Q: If viewers purely want to "eat well," what price might they pay?

X: Put it this way: once something is free — there's a book called Free, and I flipped through it. It says that inside the idea of "free," something has to be planted. If you get to watch for free, I have definitely planted something in it that's harmful to you and useful to me. The most basic harm is this: it takes up your time, and time is a cost. Your life is already the most valuable thing you have, so if I take up a little of your time, I'm killing off a little of your life, and that's the price at which I deliver something to you. That's a hell of a thing. That's what advertising does. There are many kinds of advertising, but the core meaning of advertising is killing off a little of your life through some device. That's pretty ruthless, and that's the cost.

Q: Video platforms have opinions about what a director has to shoot. What problem does that create for you?

X: Big data steers the direction our arts and culture are developing in. In reality this is never a buyer's market, it's a seller's market: whatever work we provide is what the audience sees, not you deciding what you want to see and us providing it. In a way, the arrival of big data amounts to the one boss, the one leader, under the old planned economy — someone with a very clear personal will. Big data delivers that kind of personal will: I want to see pretty boys, I want to see that cold, minimalist look, I want to see that pretentious, put-on look — and so we get those things. On top of that, the rise of pretty-boy stars has more to do with — look at the people working in the industry today, especially in production and in story development, look at the gender ratio, and it isn't hard to see why this is happening, because more of the people doing this work are women. Go to the project development department at any big company and it's almost all women, or gay men, which is why you get more of a preference for this type of actor and this type of work. Ten or fifteen years ago you rarely heard of a female producer — almost all of them were men, and back then female roles dominated, and the stars who came out of it were all major actresses. That's closely tied to this.

We also have to ask why more and more women are in these departments. In China's overall situation now, you'll find the share of women in the workforce has risen a lot, which also means working women have more time and money to spend on men. It used to be men spending on women; now it's the reverse. Talking about feminism in China is a bit of a false question, because I think China is in fact a feminist society — right now, or relatively speaking, compared with other countries. Look at Japan and Korea, look at Singapore, Malaysia, even some Western countries: we're in a relatively more equal state. And it's under exactly these conditions that another form of Chinese drama has taken root, the kind ruled by pretty boys. To put it plainly, there's a market and there's demand — when the buying stops, the killing can too.

Q: You have your own studio now. Do you have partners and a team?

X: I don't have partners right now, it's still just me. My studio is really only there for financial purposes. There aren't many people; I'm basically working alone.

Q: So the work you're doing now, you're basically thinking it all through and making the calls yourself?

X: That's right.

Images from Douban Movies.