Talent Shows Are Restricted Again. What Keeps Them Alive as a Product?

What is it, exactly, that "the people love to see and hear"?

The news is finally confirmed.

On July 10, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) posted a Notice on Properly Handling the Broadcast of Online Audiovisual Programs During the Summer Vacation on its website, telling every audiovisual site to give prominent placement to content that promotes core socialist values. The document was explicit: "idol-cultivation programs and singing and talent competition shows that select contestants through broad public participation ... may be broadcast only once it is confirmed that the program's orientation is correct and its content is wholesome."

The notice arrived less than two days after the rumors started circulating on social media. That so-called "strictest talent-show ban ever" had a lot of people guessing at the future of entertainment programming. According to the rumors, the second season of Tomorrow's Idol (《明日之子》), then on air, would be put on hold, and The Rap of China: New Season (《中国新说唱》), due to premiere on July 14, would be pushed to September.

The Economic Observer Online reported on the evening of July 10 that Tencent Video would announce any news as soon as it had some, while iQiyi said it was still looking into the situation. The official Weibo account of The Rap of China: New Season was still counting down as scheduled, which led some people to predict it would air on time after all.

Plenty of articles brought up how things ended for The Rap of China (《中国有嘻哈》), the show that blew up last summer. Its first season crowned two champions, PG One and GAI, and around New Year's both were dropped by mainstream platforms. PG One, banned outright, tried at one point to come back; the Weibo posts announcing it were all eventually deleted.

Twelve Years of Talent-Show Television

Rules for big variety shows go back to 2006.

In 2005, Hunan TV's Super Girl set off China's first wave of talent-show mania, and some of the stars it made are still working in entertainment today. Over the next few years a whole crop of similar shows appeared at once, among them My Show (《我型我 show》), My Hero (《加油！好男儿》) and Flowers in Bloom (《花儿朵朵》).

In March and April 2006, with the major talent shows still in preparation, SAPPRFT ruled that contestants had to be at least 18, that hosts could not show bias, and that shows had to promote officially approved themes. A year later it required that talent shows run no more than two and a half months, that satellite channels build public-service content into them, and that no shot show a singer in tears or fans screaming.

From that year on, talent shows seem to have sunk into a slump. My Hero was dropped after two seasons; Hunan TV switched to alternating years of Super Boy and Super Girl; other satellite channels turned to shows about ordinary people's talents, such as China's Got Talent and China Dream Show (《梦想秀》). In 2011, Hunan TV ran the last season of Super Girl — though the genre's momentum had in fact collapsed back in 2008.

What pulled talent shows back to the center of attention was The Voice of China, launched in 2012. It took a more professional approach, played down the star-packaging gloss, and used a coach system to raise the competitive stakes. At its core it was still a talent show.

After that, talent shows split into every imaginable format. Compared with the Super Girl years, today's shows have far stronger social-media backing. Television plus the internet lets anything — a contestant's facial expression, gossip from inside the production team — reach every kind of audience in almost no time. That information keeps mutating and carries several identities at once: entertainment gossip, product plugs, marketing, cultural commentary. No other kind of content has ever been this dominant; even refusing to take it in has become "a way of taking a position on it."

So all sorts of people take from it whatever they need, even if it is only noise that lasts a week.

In a sense the producers of Produce 101 cannot fully control the talk around their own show — or perhaps they are happy to let it ferment in whatever form it takes. Because by now talent shows have grown two features nobody expected in the Super Girl era. First, they lock into commercial conversion almost instantly. Second, they have turned huge numbers of entertainment consumers into entertainment creators: the best examples are the way fans of Wang Ju sorted themselves into self-declared insiders and outsiders of her fandom, and the way "debuting in the C position" — the center spot in a group — became internet slang.

Talent Shows as a Product: Where Does the Staying Power Come From?

Talent shows have proved so durable as a variety genre that they have outlived one wave of rival genres after another.

Dad, Where Are We Going?, which premiered in 2013, briefly set off a boom in parent-child variety shows. Then came SAPPRFT's scrutiny: the show moved from Hunan TV to Mango TV and Youku, and its reach dropped sharply. Add the sameness of the imitators, and parent-child shows now carry nothing like their old buzz.

Reality shows such as Running Man (《奔跑吧！兄弟》, later renamed 《奔跑吧》) followed a similar curve. When the first season of Running Man aired in 2014, its Baidu Index reached nearly 1 million; by the second season of Keep Running, which finished airing recently, the figure was only about 200,000. For a show now in its sixth season, staying fresh is hard.

The staying power of talent shows lies in how much they can hold — almost any content fits into the talent-show basket. That is why other talent shows could step straight into the space The Voice of China left as its influence faded. The "talent show" is really just a frame. Drop in comedians and you get The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (《笑傲江湖》) and Top Funny Comedian (《欢乐喜剧人》), both of which pulled decent ratings through 2016. Drop in hip-hop and you get The Rap of China, the biggest hit of 2017. Drop in actors and voice actors and you get The Birth of an Actor and Voice Immersion (《声临其境》), both of which drew a lot of attention not long ago. Graft the frame onto the idol industry and you get Idol Producer and Produce 101.

One obvious pull of a talent show is the suspense that comes with any contest. Anything that raises that suspense holds an audience.

I Am a Singer, for instance, replaced ordinary contestants with long-established stars, and replaced celebrity mentors with audience votes. That made it more exciting, not less: anyone Hunan TV picked for the studio audience got a say in which star stayed and which one left. Another detail — the way host and director Hong Tao would deliberately stall before announcing the singers' rankings — became a fixture of every episode.

More important, a talent show offers a way in: what The Atlantic has called the feeling of a dream coming true.

That feeling is what had fans in 2005 eagerly thumbing text messages to vote for Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and Zhang Liangying, and what has fans in 2018 anxiously holding up iPads and iPhones to cheer for Cai Xukun, Chen Linong, Meng Meiqi and Wu Xuanyi.

This is how the entertainment business now works. What you like becomes part of who you are, so voting for a contestant, or backing one, becomes a way of defending yourself. Seen that way, it is not hard to understand why Wang Ju took off. Supporting her — unfamiliar, not fair-skinned, without the features of a conventional beauty — struck many people as an act of resistance against the standard idea of beauty. In the same way, liking or disliking Yang Chaoyue was a statement about a way of life: whether you can accept someone winning status, honor, attention and money on her looks alone.

Idol shows lean harder on audience participation — which is why the industry started calling them "cultivation" (yangcheng) shows — but the same is true to some degree of talent shows in general. Whether they are backing Li Jian on I Am a Singer or Song Xiaobao on Top Funny Comedian, audiences put a piece of themselves into every preference they express.

Since the internet makes every metric measurable (and, of course, correspondingly cheap to inflate), numbers can make the hype around a talent show more thrilling still.

Take the voting on Produce 101. Fans could like a contestant through the "Produce 101 Rankings" on Weibo, or by logging into Tencent Video — ordinary users up to 11 times a day, VIP users up to 121. The final tally showed that Meng Meiqi, who debuted in the C position, had close to 200 million likes, and the 11 debuting members more than 1.3 billion between them.

The show's brand partners copied the model at once. Buying Zhonghua toothpaste online earned you extra likes to hand to your favorite contestant. And when Rocket Girls 101, the group Produce 101 produced, made their debut, their first endorsement deal, with Yili's Guliduo, worked the same way: buy a certain amount of milk and you helped your favorite member land an official endorsement slot.

Almost nobody can resist the money these entertainment shows throw off.

An Inseparable Tie to Commerce Lets Talent Shows Go Further — Barring Surprises

Audiences know the talent-show playbook by heart, so success now depends on whether the particular talent a show puts on display happens to catch the mood of the moment. Judging by the past few years, there is a great deal of uncertainty in that.

Korean stars produced by the trainee system have been popular in China for more than a decade, and the "cultivation" idol concept that AKB48 brought over already had a Chinese imitator in SNH48 — yet idol-cultivation variety shows took a long time to find their moment.

In 2015, Long Danni, the woman who created Super Girl, launched an idol-cultivation show called X-Fire (《燃烧吧少年》), hoping to build another TFBoys. It did not work. STAR48, the company behind SNH48, made The Nation's Girl (《国民美少女》) with Dragon TV and Youku Tudou; that one sank without a sound. Not until 2018 did Idol Producer and Produce 101, episode by episode, work their way to the center of public conversation.

Hip-hop went the same way. China's hip-hop scene had spent years warming up on its own, but nobody saw The Rap of China suddenly catching fire in 2017 — and it needed none of the long runway the idol shows did.

What came after was easy. Once one talent show has introduced audiences to a field, the commercial value of the shows that follow keeps climbing. According to public reports, the title-sponsorship fee for Idol Producer reached 200 million yuan, with total sponsorship revenue above 300 million yuan. Produce 101, which aired right after it and rode its momentum, reportedly took in as much as 700 million yuan.

Likewise, after The Rap of China taught audiences what hip-hop was, street dance — another part of hip-hop culture — went onto the video platforms' agenda. Street Dance of China and Hot Blood Dance Crew, rival shows on the same subject from Youku and iQiyi, each pulled in more than 600 million yuan in sponsorship. Every one of these numbers set a new sponsorship record for web variety shows.

These new web shows still trail traditional TV variety in view counts — Running Man and Ace vs. Ace logged 8.4 billion and 4.2 billion views on video platforms, against 4 billion for the best-performing web show, Tomorrow's Idol. But because they carry more influence than TV variety and because making stars is what talent shows do, they can earn far more outside the show itself.

Take Nine Percent, the nine-member group Idol Producer ended up assembling. The brands that signed deals with them at one tier or another include Innisfree, Pizza Hut, I Do perfume, Weikezi and the mobile game League of Eliminators (《消除者联盟》). Produce 101's Rocket Girls 101 have their own partners, among them Yili's Guliduo and McDonald's.

Then there is Xiaohongshu. According to iResearch data, the app — which sponsored both Idol Producer and Produce 101 — grew its monthly unique devices by 20.9% month over month this February, and by 38.4% in March.

What Does "Restricting Talent Shows" Mean?

Nobody can answer that, just as nobody can say what "correct orientation and wholesome content" looks like in practice. All anyone can spell out is what you may not do.

None of this differs in substance from the restrictions of 12 years ago, and the effect looks just as predictable: strip a show of its competitiveness and its fun and it will struggle to hold its audience, and then it will lose its commercial value.

When The Rap of China aired in 2017, the energy of its contestants came as a relief to audiences who had grown used to, and then tired of, the tear-jerking talent show. Even after regulators quietly reined it in, some people still defended the anti-mainstream streak that was so rare at the time.

For its "second season," The Rap of China became The Rap of China: New Season, charged with "speaking positive energy and singing grand sentiment." Director Che Che defined it as "a new program, a new look, a new format, new contestants, a new way of expressing culture." Kris Wu wrote a China-themed promotional song for it, Chinese Soul — this idol, who emigrated to Canada at 10 and took Canadian citizenship, then spent years as a trainee in Korea, sings: "You see that I'm Chinese, you know I have a Chinese soul."

This is indeed a talent show too. What it is after is more than the audience's participation.

Graphics: Zheng Shuya

Cover image from: Douban Movie