Skibbies

I excluded bl, also i think only immortality might qualify for s+? The others are S at most? Fated General as in ZRY's drama? baidu tells me it's slated for youku, its producers doesn't have any of the platforms, but it's stuck in perpetual license hell so uh lol.

s+: mirror twin city, liu yifei + chen xiao's, yang yang + zhao lu si's, then two i'm not sure if it's s+ or s, xiao zhan + ren min, wu lei + zhao lu si, then there's unfilmed JoL s2, MHH s2, yang mi's new historical

for youku, psychologist was meant to be the big gun, zhou xun and huang lei's drama is big too, but i think it's doing so so on viewcounts, it has zhao liying's rural drama in the line up i think. If you are thinking of historical, I think dilireba and ren jialun's got license, but idk if they finished the post productions.

for iqiyi, its two q3 drama both got stuck, li xian's drama still doesn't have a license, and huang jingyu + xiao zhan's is....well i think it was waiting for tv slot, now i'm not so sure. q4 originally only had mist theatre + luoyang iirc. It has Guo jingfei's cctv8 drama right now, but it's also doing so so, that's fine, at least it has exclusive, unlike in october and november lol.

I saw some list all the dramas platforms filmed second half of the year, and surprisingly, despite iqiyi being broke as heck, and tencent should have all the money, iqiyi had the most projects, tencent had the least, youku have a lot xianxia????

come watch win the future with me :P it's chen kun and xin zhilei's office drama, power couple aww yesss. there's no kissing yet and all they talk about is work, but the chemistry is pretty good :D (or you could wait till i see them kissing......idk when that is.....)

JOL s2's issue was due to script I think. from 2018, it was like JOL s1 (late 2017/early 2018) -> young blood s1 (? filmed mid 2018) -> DLDL s1 (filmed mid 2019) -> SSS (filmed mid 2020). So I assume he only started writing JoL s2 early or mid 2020, and if rumours for s3 is true, 2 season for a year and half is ok i guess. I sure hope the rumour is true.

Maybe they'll hand the SSS s2 script to someone else :P IF JoL S2&3 are filmed back to back, SSS s2 earliest would be 2022 Q4, enough time for a script if they start now.

yeah i counted the S+ they have left, there's only like 3? can't be more than 5? none of the S+ this year quite met the expectations, serves them right, idk what they were doing with some of the choices in drama productions. oh, except for you are my glory, that did pretty good, but it had help from game dept and other stuff.

They are doing it to extend the broadcast period + gain membership I think, it's also better for the tv ratings, but I don't think that's tencent's main concern.

tencent still have s+, mirror twin city! but it's for january or chinese new years lol. I heard liu yifei and chen xiao's drama is fighting for the slot too, but that drama doesn't have a license yet.

it doesn't need super good douban score to get a s2 honestly, the viewcounts are improving so it's fine.

Lower than I expected but the first two episodes made really bad imperssion on domestic audience (especially for a wuxia series which it has been heavily promoted as) and they had really high expectations for the series due to JoL. There's also a problem with SSS specifically that ratings keep getting deleted, which tends to piss douban users off, because people think the production company paid off douban so it tanks ratings.

It'll rise if the latter half draws in people, the viewcounts are doing okay. MHH is 6.5 or something and it started as 7.

ahh young blood is more plot twist and plot twist, the fight scenes are frankly terrible, so not a wuxia series, acting and story is decent, but it also have bright colours and such that puts off people. I have a particular taste too so I get you, even though we might not share them :P

I think tencent has the rights initially, let's see if wetv will put it up soon.

Yeah it's the one with Dylan Wang, not a huge deal if you dropped it, I mostly liked the FL and her friend and finally a watchable older woman/younger man cdrama.

If JoL and SSS is your thing and you are up for adventure friendship historical, you could try Young Blood as well, since they share the same scriptwriter, Young Blood is original script and much lower budget though. Other stuff i'd rec would be just friendship dramas lol.

Polygamy isn't portrayed positively because it's feudal and misogynistic, I don't think it ever was portrayed positively honestly. I guess there's no story if it's happy :P On crackdown, it's always been frown upon in society to have mistresses but it's regrettably too common in reality, it's odd to extrapolate that to mean banning polygamy. Celebrities get scruitinised and criticised for it because they have an image, and these scandals ruin their image, and it's seen as setting a bad example too, also cos yknow it's not actually legal in modern China.

As for why it's mostly monogamous in dramas, because dramas, especially historical dramas are for relaxation, there's little market for a drama aimed at women with harem, regardless if they are male or female centric. Male centric novels like SSS have more men viewers but it's still only half, sometimes 30%, and they are silent watchers half the time.

I'm not sure if SSS will keep the multiple wives thing, but JoL's was changed because he's a modern guy that transmigrate and promoted equality amongst everyone and it'd be hypocritical if he had multiple partners, MHH changed it because he started up due to his wife's wealth/business, so it'd just seem in bad taste if you give him multiple wives, MHH specifically added whole bunch of gags to make it more female friendly. It's also more interesting for ML to have different relationship that's not romance with these characters, since there's more room to explore the dynamic and develop the characters more.

One last note, most male centric harem novels adapted now were written circa early 2010s, harems generally speaking are less popular now, so are reverse harems (because you get slammed for being mary sue). These days you can get away with no romance partners, so some writers just straight up do without them. The harem novels still exist but their audience don't talk online so they are seemingly invisible.

You could try remembrance of things past too, similar to this with girls living in big city. That one is more slice of life and regular problems they encounter rather than about their love lives, the first two episodes is also depressingly real, but the drama itself is pretty heartwarming and uplifting generally speaking.

Bit more flawed but I also enjoyed Rational Life (on netflix I think?), since it had an FL who was good at her job but doesn't fit into power woman archetype, she handled the annoying characters with grace (her mum is very offputting at the beginning, it's toned down later but I know people that drop the drama cos of it). If you are interested in c-ent, I loved We Are All Alone, FL here is the power woman and deal with things snappily. Other than that, I really liked the Day of Becoming You too, largely for the hysterical scenes, btu there's some cute and touching romance too, heads up, the first episode isn't very funny. but 2 and 3 should be.

I haven't seen the wife, so maybe there's no wife in the drama? I'm not aware of love triangle, so his otp is the lady in the poster, who works for his competitor

yeah, it's airing on two channels + three platforms domestically, 2 ep/day except saturday i think.

tencent stole their best director (bad kid's) and production team too lol. youku stole bad kids + long night + burning ice's author, his story are much more suitable for adaptations than other scripts, but you need a strong production team to do so, good luck to youku.

rumour has it that it already has been (went through I think 3 or 4 times?), and it suddenly got delayed indefinitely, the word on the street is it has to go through the burner again, so i'm not optimistic....

Pretty different story and much lower budget, but you could try young blood

JoL and Young Blood s2 are both scheduled to film in Q1, at the very least JoL s2 has a script, he's been writing it for almost two years.

scriptwriter said there was four endings, light on was on a pause for a while, cos both this and gold planning had trouble getting license.

there's a novel version that have more details of the story too on iqiyi i believe, but i don't love the story enough to read it lol.

the initial plan was 3 seasons, it's unclear how many they might do now. Filming license was 50 episodes, never 60, they sent in 40 ep for broadcasting license and they cut 2.