A hit TV series in China skewers cranky old parents

IT IS NO mean feat to be one of the top-ten trending hashtags on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, for 20 consecutive days and counting. “All is Well”, a show on provincial television which premiered on March 1st, has done just that. The show tells the story of a fictional Chinese family torn by internal conflict. The female protagonist, Su Mingyu, is barely on speaking terms with her widowed father and one of her two brothers. The father is a nagging crank who expects his two adult sons to bankroll his lavish tastes. This leads to constant bickering between the brothers, neither of whom wants to be called unfilial.

Episodes of “All is Well” have been streamed more than 390m times. That exceeds the online viewership of the next most popular television series by 278m. From “The Simpsons” to “Game of Thrones”, dramas about bickering families are common in many countries. But in China, the Communist Party prefers entertainment to be unchallenging. So the questioning of blind attachment to traditional values in “All is Well” is causing a stir. Viewers are transfixed by its rare portrayal of middle-class life, warts and all.