Comedy Variety Shows Took Off This Past Year, But They Can't Fix the Market | QDaily's 2016 Year in Review

Once they took off, though, they followed the path Chinese variety television has worn smooth: copycat shows piled up, competition sharpened, and as the novelty wore off, the audience drifted away again.

QDaily's variety show of 2016 is Top Funny Comedian (《欢乐喜剧人》). With licensed reality formats running out of steam, it drew on a wave of market-bred comedy troupes to make homegrown television comedy young again. But the big problems facing China's variety business are not ones a comedy show can solve.

By the end of the first quarter of 2016, the order among the satellite channels had changed.

Dragon TV, on a 0.34% all-day rating, jumped from sixth in 2015 to first in 2016; Hunan TV, which had held first place, dropped to third.

What moved them was the differing fate of their two prime-time variety shows.

Hunan TV's old ace, I Am a Singer, got the cold shoulder from viewers in its fourth season, finishing only fifth among the quarter's variety shows.

Ever since Zhejiang TV launched The Voice of China in 2012, reality and music formats licensed from abroad had been a ratings guarantee for the first-tier satellite channels. But the industry has a rule of thumb called the "three-year decay": a show that stops innovating after three seasons usually runs out of steam. The Voice of China and Running Man have both found it harder and harder to keep up the "myth" of a 4% average rating.

Meanwhile a homegrown show on Dragon TV, Top Funny Comedian, took off. Its second season averaged a 2.79% rating and peaked at a 3.67% audience share, making it the only "phenomenon-level" variety show of 2016.

Behind Top Funny Comedian is a production company called Huanle Media.

The company's name only became loud again in 2016, thanks to comedy variety, but back in 1999 it had made a popular show close in format to Happy Camp: Happy Extravaganza (《欢乐总动员》). That was the first time private production houses tasted success in Chinese television, and Huanle Media, Enlight Media, Paige Taihe and Tanglong were known together as the "Four Princes" of private production.

Because broadcasters inside the state system held more of the say, the Happy Extravaganza brand ended up firmly under Beijing TV's control. Huanle Media fell out with the station, quit variety and moved into the more market-driven film and television business.

But over the past five years the domestic variety market has run hot. Private companies like Canxing made as much from the rise of reality TV as the film and television studios did. Huanle Media chairman Dong Zhaohui decided the opportunity had come back around: "We've been watching this market all along. Making shows is what we're good at. The market has gotten better now — other companies are making money, one show can have influence nationwide, and I figured we could come back and give it a try."

Dong decided to stay on the comedy-variety road of Happy Extravaganza. He argued that at the macro level comedy is something audiences simply must have: "The film market proves the same point — so many of the top-grossing films are comedies, and they aren't even dented by big Hollywood productions, because comedy has to make people laugh, it has to feel down-to-earth, its content has to stay close to ordinary people's lives." And although no successful template had appeared yet, Dong believed that spending heavily on production could make comedy feel "high-end."

That kind of cost also made the money harder to earn back. Season one of Top Funny Comedian cost more than 100 million yuan and lost money.

It lost money because the advertising was sold before the show aired, and at the time no advertiser thought Top Funny Comedian would be a hit. They were wrong.

You can hardly blame them. Mention comedy, sketches and crosstalk on television and what comes to mind first are the acts that ran on the Spring Festival Gala — Zhao Lirong, Chen Peisi, Zhao Benshan, names that stand for an era.

But these shows, which in the 1980s and '90s rode galas like the Spring Festival Gala to become a byword for "family fun," have been in a precarious spot in recent years. Between a shortage of talent, gala themes built around singing the country's praises, and material both vulgar and stale, young viewers have left in droves. Ratings research in 2015 found the audience for comedy variety was mostly men aged 45 to 54.

Television advertisers care about where the young people with the most spending power are. TV advertising has been sliding since 2015, but it still came to 120 billion yuan. A successful variety show charges more than 100 million yuan for title sponsorship. The four largest dairy companies alone spend over 10 billion yuan a year on television, chasing buyers aged 18 to 40.

If Top Funny Comedian got one thing right, it was that the way it packaged itself found a new, younger audience for old comic forms like crosstalk and the sketch.

Three words describe its format: stars, talent contest, comedy. Just as I Am a Singer set a roomful of "serious" singers against each other in PK rounds and challenge spots, Top Funny Comedian put comedy stars on one stage and let the studio audience vote.

Who it signed up is the reason you would be interested in the first place: the theater companies Mahua FunAge and Baimei Studio; the cast behind the comedy show Laughing Conference Room; the crosstalk performers of Deyunshe, along with Jia Ling and Bai Kainan; and Xiao Shenyang and Song Xiaobao, who came up through sketch comedy at Benshan Media.

These troupes and stars are not the gala performers produced by state song-and-dance ensembles. They had already succeeded in film, television and theater alike. Take Mahua FunAge: a theater company aimed at the urban white-collar market, it has staged more than a thousand large-venue performances a year since it was founded in 2013, and two comedy films adapted from its plays, Goodbye Mr. Loser and Mr. Donkey, carried it into cinema as well.

That became the foundation of the show's success. The champions of its two seasons were Shen Teng and Yue Yunpeng. Beyond their own performances, much of their popularity came from two hit comedies, Goodbye Mr. Loser and Jian Bing Man.

The routines performed on Top Funny Comedian were nothing brilliant, but they at least escaped the awkwardness of Spring Festival Gala patter. The comedians all worked to win young viewers over. Yue Yunpeng sang his "Ode to the Fifth Ring Road" in nearly every episode; Jia Ling specialized in sending up idol-drama goddesses and cosplaying anime characters; Xiao Shenyang got Huang Xiaoming to cameo in a costume-drama sketch; Shen Teng's Tropic Thunder was an anti-war stage piece that won on sound and light.

Another thing Huanle Media's production team worked at was "de-sketching" the show: getting away from the small scale and staleness of the traditional gala sketch, and making the stage worth watching through more urban material and lighting and set design closer to a stage play. They had gone to South Korea specifically to "study" — "right down to detailed research on how big the stage should be and how the cameras should be placed."

In that sense Huanle Media went through the same "import" step as Canxing and Hunan TV — using what young people like to package old comedy — and young people do seem to be buying it.

In September 2016, new ratings data on comedy variety showed that viewers under 30 already made up 86% of the audience, and 77.2% held at least a junior-college degree. The second season of Top Funny Comedian, streamed exclusively on Youku, passed 1.4 billion views. According to Youku's own user data, most of those viewers were between 22 and 39.

As young people became the audience for comedy variety, its commercial value rose with them, and Dragon TV was the first to benefit.

Dragon TV has been lukewarm for years. The last show it could call an ace was China's Got Talent, five years earlier — the Chinese version of Britain's Got Talent, whose season-two final topped a 5% rating.

Television advertising has a widely accepted "snow mountain effect": the money goes only to the top content, the way snow settles only on the peak. A twofold gap in ratings often means an advertising gap several times as wide. In July 2015, Yuan Chunjie, head of Dragon TV's advertising department, told an interviewer: "Dragon TV's regular hard-ad sales haven't made much of a breakthrough month to month. Our biggest problem is that we have plenty of shows with decent ratings but not one phenomenon-level hit, which puts a lot of pressure on the whole platform's pricing power and revenue."

Before season one aired in 2015, Top Funny Comedian had not found a single title sponsor and had to go on air "naked." Even so, its premiere broke 1% and the season averaged over 2% — yet it brought in only 25 million yuan in advertising. Advertisers' doubts about comedy variety were one reason; Dragon TV's weakness in variety programming was another.

In 2014, Shanghai's broadcasting system was restructured and a new Dragon TV Center was set up. SMG's target for the channel was the "first tier" — a top-three finish in ratings. Top Funny Comedian delivered it: as noted at the top of this piece, Dragon TV went from sixth in 2015 to first in 2016 on a 0.34% all-day rating.

Advertisers followed. Dragon TV took 200 million yuan in advertising from season two. And the "first tier" standing it gained lifted what it could charge across the schedule.

The comedians who appeared on the show gained as much.

Zhao Benshan, who made his name at the Spring Festival Gala, ran into trouble starting in 2012: he pulled out of the Gala, his errenzhuan act was attacked as vulgar, and his television drama Dad and Mom's Full House, due to run on Zhejiang TV, was halted. After his protégés Xiao Shenyang and Song Xiaobao appeared on Top Funny Comedian, their Baidu Index scores climbed steadily, peaking when the second season aired in 2016.

Jia Ling has always had a good name with the public, but outside the satellite channels' galas she was rarely on screen. After she joined the first season in April 2015, she got much bigger. In 2016 alone she appeared on more than a dozen variety shows, from Running Man to Tonight at the Paramount. And in July 2016 she announced a company, Dawan Entertainment, set up with Beijing Culture, saying she wanted to "take comedy into every field in the future — stage, television, film, variety, the internet and more."

After Top Funny Comedian, these comedians turned up again and again on comedy shows across the satellite channels. This young wave of troupes, along with the writers and crews behind them, found room to live outside galas and theaters.

The show pushed their careers along too. Wei Xiang appeared on it as a supporting guest for Mahua FunAge, and he is now a regular on several web variety shows. Comedians who had been little known got a shot at more work.

Comedy variety looks like a genre not yet fully worked out, and the scene looks busy enough. But some recent trends suggest the variety market as a whole is still in poor shape.

Huanle Media teamed up with Zhejiang TV on a third show, Comedy Extravaganza, built around "crossover collaborations between comedy stars." At almost the same time, Beijing TV put out Crossover Comedy King. Its producer was Xin Weijia, Huanle Media's former deputy president and the chief producer of Top Funny Comedian. He took part of the team with him to the post-production company Qianqiusui and made the new show for Beijing TV — widely read as a head-to-head challenge to his old employer.

On January 8, season three of Top Funny Comedian went on air. Apart from Guo Qilin, the main guests were all unfamiliar faces, and its Baidu Index fell from more than 2 million during season two in 2016 to under 1.5 million.

Comedy variety has now begun to draw the same crowd of look-alike competitors, a pattern that surprises no one any more. The Voice of China was followed by music shows like I Am a Singer and Sing My Song; Dad, Where Are We Going? by Dad Is Back and First Time in Life; and Running Man set off a run of outdoor game shows.

Whenever one kind of variety show catches fire, every company and station piles in. Underneath, that means the variety world's shortage of creativity has never been solved: with no new ideas, the industry can only keep repeating itself.

The industry seems to have pinned its hopes on web variety and livestreamed variety, which use channels traditional television does not — video sites and livestreaming apps. Done well, they might build an edge over satellite-channel programming the way web dramas have, with fast-paced seasonal formats and ACG (anime, comics, games) subject matter.

That hope has not really come true.

Web variety shows have multiplied, but apart from U Can U Bibi, no new hit has appeared. Some of the most-watched variety of 2016 — season four of Dad, Where Are We Going?, Mom Is Superwoman, Super Girl 2016 — moved from Hunan TV to Mango TV because of rules such as the ban on child stars. Stepping "down" in scale cost the station advertising money instead.

Other exclusive web shows, such as Mars Intelligence Bureau, I'm Going to School Season 2 and Please Take Care of My Refrigerator, all came from traditional television teams and hosts. Their main battleground is still the satellite channels.

In livestreamed variety, meanwhile, the number of companies and individuals equipped to compete is enormous. Fragmented short video and live programs, unlike the carefully cut variety show, have almost no barrier to entry for an ordinary person. The biggest talk-show hit of 2016 was Papi Jiang's short videos on Weibo — and that was as far as it went.

Miwei Media's new 2016 show, Dinner Party Temptation, was promoted around livestreamed games of Werewolf, but its reach fell far short of U Can U Bibi. Tencent Interactive Entertainment co-produced Please, Fans, a livestreamed show hosted by Chen Handian and Xiao Xiao, which averaged only about 3 million views an episode.

What makes an already idea-poor industry harder still is the "question of limits." Nobody knows what the phrase means or where the line sits, which only leaves everyone more nervous.

On July 7, 2016, Tencent Video put up the web show Roast! (《吐槽大会》). It was made by Xiaoguo Culture, which also writes and produces Dragon TV's weekly The Post-'80s Talk Show Tonight. Its host, Wang Zijian, hosts that show too.

The format copies a classic American program on Comedy Central, the roast. That show invites divisive celebrities like Justin Bieber and subjects them to a barrage of crude jokes about everything from hair and clothes to sexuality and age. For the Chinese version, the producers brought in Zhou Jie, the actor known for playing Erkang in My Fair Princess.

The Chinese Roast! had the makings of a genuine online hit. At 5:30 p.m. on July 10, its official Weibo account said the show had passed 30 million views — and not long after that post went up, Roast! was taken down. The reason was widely assumed to be "vulgarity": many of its jokes dealt directly with sex.

Xiaoguo Culture believed the climate could already take a show like this. The real limits turned out to be far tighter than they had imagined.

It was not the only show to stumble in 2016. Beauty and the Oddballs, made for Youku by Meng Fei and the team behind If You Are the One, was pulled on December 7 after passing 300 million views, likewise for "incorrect values."

These limits keep tightening. At the start of 2017, three finished web shows — iQiyi's Sis Is So Hungry with Xiao S, Black and White Planet from Youku and Miwei Media, and Hello! Goddess from Panda TV and Tencent Video — quietly disappeared from the video sites. None gave an official reason; the talk was that all three traded on being "dirty" and "over the line," which had drawn the attention of the authorities.

Variety television seems to have reached an impasse: everyone knows there are lines, and no one knows where they are.

Top Funny Comedian is no exception. The routines Yue Yunpeng and Shen Teng perform lean toward whatever is trending online, but they never step over anything; as satire, harmless self-mockery outweighs any real engagement with social questions. Each week the show also runs one or two segments steered as far as possible toward "positive energy" and mainstream themes.

Roast! came back online on January 8 after an overhaul. The numbers looked decent enough — the first episode alone drew more than 80 million views — but against a Baidu Index that had once topped 140,000 before the overhaul, the new version peaks at 64,000 and then falls away. And on Douban, "awkward" and "not funny" were the words that came up most often in reviews of the relaunched show.

None of this is surprising. Comedy with real life in it mostly comes from insight into society, politics and human nature. Audiences laugh at what is true, not at what is merely in fashion.

This is not peculiar to comedy variety, of course; it holds for every cultural product. Sincere work appears only in an environment free enough to allow argument. In 2016, China's market moved further from that standard, not closer.

Cover image and images in the article are from Top Funny Comedian's Weibo account and Douban Film.