*Meteor Garden* Is Coming Back After 16 Years. Can Taiwanese Idol Dramas Still Catch Fire?

In the 2000s, Taiwan's "idol dramas" bloomed. But a thin, repetitive production line soon burned itself out in Asia's much larger market for girlish romance.

Sixteen years on, it was "Shan Cai" who broke the news that Meteor Garden is being remade.

On April 11, Barbie Hsu posted a photo of herself with the original producer, Angie Chai, on Weibo, with a bit of sentimental teasing: "In a flash, Meteor Garden is already 16 years old! Shan Cai is a mother of two! Talking over old times with Sister Chai really got to me... She knows perfectly well I can't keep a secret, and she told me one anyway — I'll let her tell you all herself!" Chai reposted and replied, "...Yes! Meteor Garden is being remade!" and tacked on Shan Cai's old catchphrase as a hashtag: "Shan Cai is the weed you can't knock down."

The details came out quickly. Chai, producing the new version, had bought a second set of remake rights from Yoko Kamio, who wrote the original Japanese manga. The old series ran 27 episodes of 60 minutes each; the new Meteor Garden will run 48, at a total production cost of NT$720 million (about 160 million yuan).

No cast has been announced, but the nostalgia pitch from the original leading lady and her producer worked on plenty of old viewers. Within days Hsu's post had drawn more than 20,000 likes and over a thousand comments.

Sixteen years, almost to the day: the Taiwanese idol drama Meteor Garden premiered on April 12, 2001. Like other commercially successful pop stories, the manga has been remade since — in Japan in 2005, in South Korea and by Hunan TV in 2009. But for a lot of mainland viewers, the version filed under "the collective memory of our youth" is still the Taiwanese one.

Sixteen years later, if you're short on idol dramas, Meteor Garden still holds up

Douban carries 145 long-form reviews of Meteor Garden, 74 of them posted after 2010. Most are less criticism than commemoration — of "the youth I lived through" alongside Taiwanese idol dramas.

The show reached the mainland the year after its Taiwanese run, airing on provincial and municipal stations from early February 2002 and becoming a sensation almost at once. For many viewers it was an initiation. A user called Die Wu Bing Qing wrote: "My first Taiwanese idol drama. The first time I understood what handsome meant, and what it meant to chase a star."

Today the "female-oriented" Mary Sue idol drama is the most common genre on mainland television. But on the barren screens of that era, young viewers had few options. Through the whole of the 1990s, the dominant romance form was still the Qiong Yao period melodrama, by then twenty or thirty years old.

The Meteor Garden craze was a jolt, and the censors' response measures how big a jolt it was. A few days after the show began airing, on March 8, 2002, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered it pulled immediately, on the grounds that it was "liable to mislead young people."

Strip away the notoriety of the ban and what Meteor Garden is left with is a plain 8.1 rating and a reputation for being fun to watch. As an adaptation, its success rests on the success of the manga. Long before anyone played these parts on screen, the premise had been tested on readers: Yoko Kamio serialized Hana Yori Dango — Boys Over Flowers — in the shojo magazine Margaret from 1992 to 2004, and Taiwan's Tong Li Publishing ran it under the title 《流星花园》, Meteor Garden. According to Wikipedia's list of best-selling manga worldwide, the 37-volume series had sold 60 million copies as of 2014, the top-selling Japanese shojo manga of all time.

Well before Chinese web fiction took off after 2000, Japanese comics and animation had been exported abroad since the 1970s, and the popular stories their artists turned out were wildly inventive. Shojo magazines such as Margaret and LaLa, aimed at girls from 6 to 25, manufactured the fine feelings and beautiful romances those readers wanted, and handed film and television a deep well of material. They got to every theme now in fashion first — time travel, gender swapping, and boys' love, which became a genre of its own. And, of course, the one Meteor Garden tells: the campus Cinderella, the most hackneyed plot there is and also the most durable.

The story is set in a school society with a rigid class order. Shan Cai, a girl from an ordinary family, is living her ordinary life when she lands, by accident, at Yingde Academy, "a school founded to raise superior offspring." There she meets four boys her own age from the upper class: Daoming Si, Huaze Lei, Ximen and Meizuo. They are the heirs of "the four great families," known at school as F4 — Flower 4, the flower quartet — and they enjoy every privilege.

Early on, Shan Cai takes her humiliations with her hair in two braids, staying as cheerful and healthy as she can, true to "the weed you can't knock down." But the Cinderella arc goes down before it goes up. She carries a quiet crush on the mysterious, princely Huaze Lei while playing a cat-and-mouse game of bullying and being bullied — noticing and being noticed — with F4's leader, Daoming Si. Kamio first wrote Huaze Lei as the male lead, but as Daoming Si's popularity climbed over the course of the serialization she ended up pairing him with Shan Cai, letting the two of them realize one day that, actually, the other one isn't so unbearable... and might even be a little bit cute.

QDaily has looked before at why Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, written by an Englishwoman 200 years ago, still works on modern readers: a dramatic plot stuffed with satisfying payoffs, characters with full and varied personalities, a romance that unfolds like a fairy tale without ever floating free of what female readers actually want in life. Compare the two and Meteor Garden ticks every box. Shan Cai and Daoming Si are a teenage, modern-day Elizabeth and Darcy: hers is the prejudice (pride in herself), his the arrogance (childishness), and the love that crosses rich and poor rests on shared values — simplified down to truth, goodness and beauty.

The ban did not cool it. Meteor Garden kept spreading on pirated discs. On Baidu's list of 2002's ten hottest search terms, "F4" ranked first among celebrities and Meteor Garden first among TV series.

Taiwanese idol dramas in the 2000s

After Meteor Garden succeeded, the producer who drove it, Angie Chai, picked up a grand nickname, one she has since written into her verified Weibo bio: the mother of the Taiwanese idol drama. The flattery does rest on a fact. In Taiwan, Chai got there first.

The show was shot and broadcast at the same time on Chinese Television System in 2001. Nobody expected anything of it, and it was buried in a late-night slot. The station gave it 150,000 yuan per episode. Chai borrowed the sports cars from friends. The actors wore T-shirts and track pants from wholesale markets, nothing close to fashion. There were no stars: Barbie Hsu was known then as a comic variety host, and F4 were complete unknowns. (Fans still like to recite how Chai cast them: "I met Ken Chu at a barbecue place. A colleague spotted Vanness Wu at the gym. Zai Zai — Vic Chou — came along to keep a friend company at the audition. And when Jerry Yan was shooting Spicy Teacher (《麻辣鲜师》), I already thought this boy was something special.")

When it aired, Meteor Garden set a Taiwanese ratings record with an average of 6.99 — a record that stood until 2006 — and turned the idol drama into a genre for the island's TV industry.

Wang Weizhong once explained Meteor Garden this way: "She picked the thing she felt most for and worked on it at the right moment. That's why it worked."

Chai had no production experience in film or television, but she knew the TV market. Born in 1962, she joined Fulon Production in the 1980s — the predecessor of Golden Star Entertainment, the company of Kangsi Coming producer Wang Weizhong — to make variety shows, and by the 1990s she was general manager.

In 2001, after a new variety show she launched on Formosa TV, Love Lectures (《恋爱讲义》), flopped in the ratings, she switched to drama and adapted a comic she loved, Meteor Garden, into a romance.

Taiwan's television industry badly needed a new genre around 2000. Taiwanese drama had lived through the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s on Qiong Yao, Jin Yong and other traditional forms; then the economy turned, and exports took a hit after the 1997 financial crisis.

There was a second pressure. After Taiwan opened up cable licenses in the 1990s, the number of stations jumped from three, all with party backing, to more than a hundred. Competition turned savage, and production resources ran short.

Formosa TV, a fast-growing newcomer, went after the local adult audience with long-running homeland dramas — Stars Know My Heart (《星星知我心》), Wealth in Heaven (《富贵在天》), Life Between Heaven and Earth (《人生天地间》). Other stations bought Japanese and Korean series in bulk, which hit the existing market hard.

Feng Jiarui, the other producer on Meteor Garden, remembered the climate: "Taiwanese television drama was already in decline... the road kept narrowing, it could no longer meet what audiences wanted, and in the end it was beaten by Japanese dramas, which were polished and briskly paced. Taiwanese stations had to change if they wanted any room to grow."

The label "idol drama" itself came from Japan's trendy dramas, the fashionable romances made for young viewers from the late 1980s to the early 1990s — the ones the internet has since canonized. There is 1991's Tokyo Love Story, adapted from Fumi Saimon's manga and the breakthrough for the screenwriter behind this year's hit Quartet; 1996's Long Vacation, with its wedding-dress dash by Takuya Kimura and Tomoko Yamaguchi; and, also from 1996, Mischievous Kiss (Itazura na Kiss), which made Takashi Kashiwabara the beautiful boy of the century's end.

Meteor Garden arrived as an imitator and proved the form could travel. It opened overseas sales for Taiwanese serials; by 2005 it had aired in 16 countries and territories. It took the top ratings spot in South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. More than 15 Japanese stations broadcast it, and it prompted a Japanese remake.

Chai said her target was simply young people: "Almost everything on the mainland and in Taiwan was costume drama. So I thought, if we make a show for young people, somebody will watch it, because young people today don't think the way the older generation does. There were no shows for young people back then, so there were no young actors, and certainly no young good-looking ones."

On screen and off, F4 became a phenomenon. The money from Meteor Garden never reached the production team or the actors, but it did hand them an idol career. In August 2001 Sony Music released F4's first album, Meteor Rain — recorded, reportedly, in 11 days — which sold 4 million copies across Asia in its first year. In 2002 and 2003 the group ran a four-month world tour, 19 shows in 12 cities. By 2005, Chai reckoned at least 500 million people had watched F4 perform.

That same year, 2001, Chai founded her own idol-drama company, Comic Ritz. Between 2001 and 2010 it made close to 30 series, among them Peach Girl, Mars, Devil Beside You and Corner with Love, winning Golden Bell Awards for actors like Show Lo and Rainie Yang.

Feng Jiarui left Chai and reorganized as Comic International in 2003, producing The Rose, It Started with a Kiss, the KO One series and Hana Kimi. Following the F4 template even more closely, he built a second Taiwanese boy band, Fahrenheit — Wu Chun, Calvin Chen, Jiro Wang and Aaron Yan.

Stations including Sanlih and GTV opened slots dedicated to idol dramas. From 2002, about 20 were produced a year; by 2010 the total passed 200. Ethan Juan, Joe Chen, Joe Cheng, Ariel Lin — a generation of Taiwanese stars came out of them.

Yet even before 2005, the genre had slid into formula, and its reviews said so. Most stories were lifted from Japanese manga, and costs kept them confined to the contemporary city. In 2005 GTV's KO One series tried mixing idol drama with fantasy, but the point was to reach viewers of elementary-school age and younger. After 2008, chasing new audiences, the biggest hits — My Queen, Fated to Love You, Autumn's Concerto, Black & White and In Time with You — all reached for a more realistic style.

The idol drama was the last thing holding up Taiwan's television industry, and around 2010, along with the island's music, variety shows and idol business as a whole, it faded as the mainland market rose.

The mainland counterattack

At the 47th Golden Bell Awards in 2012, In Time with You, starring Ariel Lin and Bolin Chen, took seven prizes — more artistic recognition than any idol drama before it.

In that same year, Chai told the press she was dissolving her idol-drama company and would put her energy into film and talent management.

Taiwanese idol dramas were heading downhill. Lo Shih-hung, a professor of communication at National Chung Cheng University, put it this way: "The situation in which Taiwanese dramas held the advantage gradually changed. The mainland's appetite for Taiwanese dramas ebbed while mainland dramas caught up fast, and the two started to trade places — you could even call it a counterattack on Taiwan."

Import approvals published by the broadcast regulator show that over the ten years from 2004 to 2013, 163 Taiwanese dramas were brought into the mainland, an average of 16.3 a year, or 19.7% of all imported dramas. The number peaked in 2009 at 33 series and 695 episodes, then fell steadily. By 2013 it was three.

Traffic in the other direction started around 2000 and picked up after 2010. Imported dramas now make up more than half of all series shown in Taiwan. In 2011 Taiwan imported 151 dramas from the mainland, against 49 produced locally that year. After 2013, The Legend of Mi Yue and Nirvana in Fire set off ratings booms one after the other.

Behind the rise of the mainland idol-drama market sits a change in who pays: video sites had replaced traditional broadcasters as the main buyers and investors, and young viewers' tastes mattered more than ever before. By then mainland web fiction had also had several years to develop on Qidian and Jinjiang, supplying material to adapt. Starting with Hunan TV's Scarlet Heart in 2011, the industry saw what a Mary Sue property could do. Production teams that had specialized in historical drama and "serious" work joined in. Zheng Xiaolong's Empresses in the Palace, directed in 2012, was rerun again and again on mainland satellite channels; Taiwan's CTS imported it in 2013, where it broke a rating of 3 and set the highest mark in years for the 8 p.m. slot.

The root of the reversal in cross-strait cultural exports is Taiwan's weak economy. From 1951 to 1988, Taiwan grew at an average of 9.57% a year; from 1988 to 2008, 6.1%; from 2008 to 2015, 2.8%.

"Since 2000," Lo said, "the rising mainland drama industry has exerted a powerful magnetic pull, drawing a good many veteran Taiwanese screenwriters and actors across to develop their careers, and their mainland work sells back into Taiwan without any obstacle. At the same time, with Taiwan's economy in a long slump, a weak advertising market split among too many players, and government subsidies for drama amounting to a drop in the bucket, a vicious cycle has formed: mainland dramas keep climbing and Taiwanese dramas keep sinking."

Figures from Taiwan's Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics show 724,000 Taiwanese working overseas in 2015, nearly 60% of them on the mainland. Experienced film and TV people went north looking for room to work — cross the strait, double your salary.

That was exactly the reason Chai gave in public for quitting idol dramas: "So much of Taiwan's production talent has drained away that it's very hard to find screenwriters, directors or actors."

Chai went north herself. Film came first. You Are the Apple of My Eye, which she produced and executive produced and Giddens Ko directed, was Taiwan's highest-grossing film of 2011, and took 76.5 million yuan at the mainland box office when it opened there in 2012.

In 2013 she became an executive producer and one of the investors on Guo Jingming's coming-of-age series Tiny Times. The films were attacked as money-worshipping trash — this time the rejection came straight from the audience — but riding the coming-of-age wave, the four of them grossed more than 1.8 billion yuan.

After F4, Chai's new idols worked the mainland market. Kai Ko, who starred in both You Are the Apple of My Eye and Tiny Times, had endorsed 19 brands before a drug arrest in 2014 removed him from public view. In 2015, Our Times, a coming-of-age film by Chen Yushan — a former Sanlih producer who made Fated to Love You — took more than 300 million yuan, the highest mainland gross of any Taiwanese film. Its leading lady, Vivian Sung, is now the idol Chai pushes hardest.

Proud of Love, a two-season web drama Chai executive produced with Sung in the lead, went up on Youku in September 2016 and January 2017. Adapted from the novel of the same name by the Jinjiang author Sui Houzhu and produced jointly by Youku Tudou and Mango Entertainment, it turns on a male and female lead who swap genders.

Chai and Sung have also finished shooting a film, The Three-Good Underachiever (《三好差生》), adapted from the web novel Peking University Underachiever (《北大差生》) by the writer Po Naodai. Its main investor is Alibaba Pictures.

What the mainland market gave Chai first was money. A Taiwanese drama costs an average of about NT$2.5 million an episode, roughly 560,000 yuan; a mainland drama averages more than 1 million yuan an episode, and a hit costume drama can run past 10 million.

The 160 million yuan going into the new Meteor Garden includes mainland investors who have not yet been named. By that measure, it is not a Taiwanese idol drama anymore either.

So is the new Meteor Garden worth waiting for?

Under the Weibo posts in which Chai and Hsu announced the remake, between the waves of nostalgia, people were also saying they were afraid a classic would be wrecked.

Can the story still work? On its own terms, its clichés have not entirely expired. The Heirs, the 2014 Korean drama with Park Shin-hye and Lee Min-ho, drew its campus hierarchy even more crudely and with less embarrassment, and still became one of the year's biggest Korean hits on the strength of the same campus Cinderella outline.

Look at it from the producer's side and the answer is less encouraging. The Meteor Garden of 16 years ago was Chai's first idol drama, and it is still the best television she has made.

For Chai, that is probably not a reason to leave it alone. As for the original viewers, they may not even expect a new version that satisfies them more — they have aged out of caring that much. But 16 years later, romance is still the most popular subject there is, and a new wave of viewers has arrived.

On Weibo, Chai is still promising "a brand-new Meteor Garden that belongs to your youth." The youth she actually has to please is a brand-new one.

Chart: Feng Xiuxia

Images: television stills