Quotes of the Day
All rise. The judge enters the court in a black robe. She's 25, loquacious and the cutest justice the show's producers could find. With a rap of her gavel, the first case begins. Standing before her is the defendant, a Beijing resident who keeps a pet donkey in his apartment. The outraged plaintiff argues that farm animals aren't allowed in city homes. The defendant retorts that his donkey has never lived on a farm so it isn't a farm animal. Well, says the plaintiff, Beijing residents aren't allowed to keep dogs bigger than a Pekinese. A donkey isn't a dog, answers the defendant. After 10 minutes of legal repartee, it's time for the judge to decide.
China's 340 million television households have never watched anything quite like this. The show, called TV Court, is a knockoff of America's popular reality courtroom series Judge Judy—and it's brought to you by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It's all part of the media titan's grand plan to captivate the world's biggest audience. News Corp. thinks it knows what must-see TV means to the Chinese people, and it's not the bland melodramas, giddy variety shows and propaganda classics broadcast on some 50 cable channels run mostly by the country's central and provincial governments. Nor is it the warmed-over Western cartoons and overseas dramas that are dubbed into Mandarin and recycled on the mainland by News Corp.'s main foreign competitor, AOL Time Warner (owner of TIME).
No, what China may want is locally produced cheese like TV Court—Chinese people starring in the kind of voyeuristic reality-show fare that has made News Corp. the planet's reigning king of schlocky but wildly watchable shows. "We wanted programming like they'd never seen," says Jamie Davis, president of News Corp. China. "We wanted that international format and energy—but you have to go local to succeed."
The delivery vehicle is a new Mandarin-language TV channel called Xing Kong Wei Shi (Starry Sky). Rolled out last year by News Corp.'s Asian subsidiary, Hong Kong-based Star Group Ltd., the new channel has already produced 700 hours of programming based on Western concepts. There's a real-life police show reenacting grisly mainland murders (Wanted! In China), China's first televised male beauty contest (Women in Control), a talk show with a wisecracking host à la David Letterman (Late Night Talk), and soon there will be Sang Lan, the gymnast who won hearts after a paralyzing fall at the Goodwill Games in 1999, who will host a sports-interview show.
Elsewhere, such fare has been gold for News Corp. In the U.S., Murdoch's Fox network owns several runaway hits including Joe Millionaire and American Idol. In India, the company's Star Plus is the leading cable channel, thanks largely to the popularity of a Hindi-language version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The success of Star Plus helped the Star Group, which is run by Murdoch's son James and reaches 53 countries, turn its first profitable quarter last year, after losing an estimated $1 billion in its previous 10 years of operation.
Murdoch's programming in China "is the same sort of strategy that our team took in India," says Davis. And the payoff is potentially huge, given that the mainland's TV ad market was a hefty $2.4 billion last year. Yet the chances of China contributing to Star Group's bottom line any time soon seem faint. That's because China's authoritarian government, fearing that foreign-produced entertainment will usurp domestic competitors and that racy shows will corrupt the citizenry, severely limits the distribution of Western programming.
A year ago, the government relaxed a bit when it let Starry Sky and AOL Time Warner (through its China Entertainment Television, or CETV) become the first foreign broadcasters to deliver Mandarin-language entertainment channels legally over cable. That gave them access to ordinary Chinese viewers. But the government restricted them to China's toughest TV market: Guangdong province in southern China, where viewers prefer Cantonese-language programs available from Hong Kong. In January, Starry Sky also gained approval for satellite transmission to luxury hotels and expatriates' apartments nationwide—the same deal enjoyed by about 30 foreign-language channels. Even with the new distribution deal, Starry Sky's total national audience probably doesn't top 3 million, says Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia.
Unless Starry Sky secures broader distribution rights, "there's no way it has enough viewers to make money in China," says Couto. Although Beijing is easing restrictions on foreign companies in many industries due to China's entry into the World Trade Organization, it's under no obligation to open up the broadcasting sector. "The government has no time line for granting more access," says a Western TV executive who often meets with Chinese broadcast officials.
Hoping to leapfrog this roadblock, Murdoch has been currying favor with Beijing ever since his Star satellite network, which runs nine channels in China, got a foothold on the mainland. The relationship got off to a rocky start in 1993, after Murdoch offended authorities by declaring that satellite broadcasting threatens "totalitarian regimes everywhere." Since then, Murdoch has chosen not to irritate the Communist Party. In 1999 he ordered HarperCollins, News Corp.'s publishing arm, to drop a book by former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten because it was critical of Beijing and, shortly after, dismissed the Dalai Lama as an old monk "shuffling around in Gucci shoes." Even so, Murdoch has found the path to China riddled with mines. For a start, regulations bar News Corp. from producing shows itself, so it must partner with locals instead. Making sure that censors are mollified and production values are maintained is an ongoing struggle. For example, Wanted! In China, which News Corp. pitched as "legal education" in order to win approval from the Ministry of Public Security, is made in a police-run production house. The host, a Beijing cop, sounded too Orwellian at first. "We had to explain to him that he should sound caring about the people," says Hao Fang, who oversees the show for News Corp.
Other restrictions mean some Starry Sky programs don't quite match the realism of their Western prototypes. Although the judge on TV Court is genuine, the government wouldn't allow Her Honor to rule on real cases for fear of ceding sensitive legal issues to foreign TV executives. News Corp. has tried to add a sense of the unexpected by using nonprofessional actors and basing the episodes on actual Chinese court cases, but compared with Judge Judy, whose apoplectic reactions to evidence give her show a fierce moral compass, TV Court seems heavily scripted. "Look, she shed a tear!" says a producer as a character suing her sister over an inheritance grows lachrymose.
Still, the show is one of Starry Sky's most popular. And at least it's on the air. Censors were not so generous with a situation comedy called Joyful Youth, which was modeled on the American hit Friends. During the review process, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television gutted most of one episode in which male characters bemoan the small size of a neighbor's breasts. The state agency then refused to issue the series a broadcast permit—although News Corp. had already shown several episodes without a permit, an embarrassing snafu that a company executive blames on "a paperwork problem" involving its production partner. Under censors' orders, News Corp. pulled Joyful Youth off the air.
Starry Sky's main competitor, AOL Time Warner-owned CETV, plays safer. Instead of trying to create lots of new programming for China, it relies on imported favorites, such as Tom and Jerry cartoons, a British cooking program and dubbed series from Korea and Taiwan. AOL also plans to expose the Chinese to American politics—Hollywood-style—by broadcasting the Emmy Award-winning White House drama The West Wing to its Guangdong audience. "We're not hemming ourselves in by copying Western formats," says Steve Marcopoto, president of Turner International Asia-Pacific, Ltd.
So far, neither Starry Sky nor CETV is taking the Guangdong market by storm. The channels ranked 14th and 19th among viewers in January, according to rating agency CSM. Both channels are probably more popular than the numbers suggest, however. Because they are transmitted by satellite, they can be viewed by almost anyone in China with a satellite dish. The government doesn't allow individuals to own dishes, but many do so illegally, and small cable networks routinely offer the channels to subscribers even though it's technically forbidden. By some estimates, there are more than 40 million households with access via illegal dishes to otherwise unavailable TV programs. "We don't encourage this distribution," says a News Corp. executive, "but we can't stop it."
At any rate, it doesn't do the company much good. The gray-market audience doesn't help sell ads, partly because the number of additional viewers can't be quantified and partly because local cable operators strip out advertisements from the media giants' clients and splice in commercials from local businesses, picking up a nice though illicit revenue stream in the process. Indeed, there is a noticeable dearth of revenue-producing ads on the Starry Sky channel.
News Corp. officials decline to disclose ad revenues. But Davis insists Starry Sky will be profitable in three years. For one thing, he argues, co-producing shows locally is relatively cheap. In addition, Mandarin content could attract a huge global market that has yet to be tapped. "We're building a library that will become the backbone for channels in Chinese-speaking markets around the world," Davis says. He also expects the company will ultimately be granted the wider distribution rights it needs to reach a larger audience. "If I thought we'd be in Guangdong forever, it wouldn't make sense [to invest in programming]," he says. "Over time—and I don't think that long—our distribution will continue to grow and expand."
Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether Chinese viewers will actually embrace the reality shows the company is trying to hawk. So far, the critical reception has been less than glowing. Rocky Liang, entertainment critic for New Weekly magazine in Guangzhou, offers halfhearted applause: "Regardless of whether it's good or bad, it's still nice to watch locally made content." As for that TV Court verdict on the donkey, the judged ordered the creature out of the apartment. As News Corp. may eventually discover, China can be a ruthlessly inhospitable place to make your home.
- Matthew Forney / Beijing
- News Corp. brings cheesy TV to China but can't reach a mass audience—yet