"It's no coincidence that the programs selected to please a small, educated audiences are celebrated by the small, educated TV writers who ignore what everybody else is watching."
In China, what everybody else is watching is the same kind of easy-to-follow fare that works in the U.S. Although tracking what's popular here can be tough because China's government doesn't allow top 10 lists of movies and television, partly to discourage producers from endlessly copying the most popular shows in lieu of creating new ones, Sohu does release a list of its most popular streaming content. Its top seven TV shows: Diors Man, Village Love, Real Man, Heros of Sui, andTang Dynasties, The Heroes, The Ladybros, Love of Parents.
All those generate many multiples more viewers than House of Cards, but get little press in the West. Goldkorn says CBS's Big Bang Theory is the show to compare to House of Cards in China. Both are foreign and widely available. Unlike House of Cards, Big Bang doesn't get loads of press for its popularity in China. But Big Bang is easily more popular -- the latest season alone recorded 115 million views, according to Sohu, or 7 million per episode.
Most of my Chinese friends have at some point mentioned Big Bang to me; I haven't yet talked about House of Cards. But in the press, you rarely read this. "Big Bang doesn't seem to push the same buttons," says Goldkorn.
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