Looking for a new Friends

(L-R)Ying Da, director and actor, known for the sitcom I Love My Family; Wang Shuo, Chinese author, director, actor and cultural icon; Liang Zuo, playwright and scriptwriter; Song Dandan, a popular Chinese skit and sitcom actress. Photo provided to China Daily

A groundbreaking hit

In 1993, a year before the broadcast of Friends, Chinese cable stations aired the country's first sitcom, I Love My Family. The 120-episode comedy followed the lives of a Beijing family of six and their neighbors in 1990s. It was also the first Chinese-made TV drama to use a laugh track.

The low-budget sitcom, directed by Peking University-educated Ying Da, saw a record number of viewers in the first few months, according to a report by Beijing Evening News. Nearly 20 percent of the Chinese audience watched the sitcom on the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV channel.

"It might be unfair to say China has no excellent situation comedies. After all, I Love My Family was very popular in the 1990s and it still has numerous fans today," says Zheng Meng, author of a recent best-seller with the same title, which was published to mark the 20th anniversary of the show's nationwide broadcasting.

Zheng, who calls himself a decades-long fan of the sitcom, says he spent four months interviewing more than 30 members of the production crew. He says the original plan was for a 40-episode comedy. But because of the show's unexpected popularity - mostly for its fresh style and humor - it grew into a long-running series.

Director Ying Da, who studied theater performance at the University of Missouri, drew his inspiration from The Cosby Show.

"I interviewed Ying Da for several hours and was invited to have lunch at his home. He told me the key element of a sitcom is an excellent script," Zheng says in a telephone interview.

Ying Da persuaded his uncle to invest in the production, and his cousin Ying Zhuang co-wrote the script. The two spent more than a month working on the script in a remote hotel in Shanxi province in 1992.

"But they were not satisfied with the original script. Fortunately, Ying Da got a call from his friend Wang Shuo, who recommended Peking-educated Liang Zuo to join the writers," Zheng recalls.

Liang, a veteran in humor writing who understands everyday Chinese families, was the highest paid member of the production team, which is "hard to imagine" in today's entertainment business, says Zheng.

Lyu Xiaoping, a veteran director of sitcoms and a close assistant to Ying Da, says Liang's fee of 2,000 yuan ($327) per episode was double that of the leading actress Song Dandan, and almost eight times that of the leading actor Yang Lixin.

"Nowadays, it's impossible for screenwriters to be paid more than the stars. Most of them even have to call investors many times to get them to commit to a project," says Lyu.

"TV channels now always ask you which celebrity will star in your program and they hardly care about the stories."