dramabaobao

New Meng Zi Yi costume drama "Beautiful Lantern Festival," with ML Ge Qiu Gu, just passed review. It has a new title, also known as Shang Yuan Jin Xiu, and its episode count has been increased from 16 to 24.

Per "Marcus here!" it had a short 1-month film shoot a while ago, back in November 2022 (2 1/2 years ago!). And according to Baidu the production team had sued the investors for defaulting on payments, which might explain the delay. Maybe also why filming was only for 1 month (production ran out of funds?) which is unusual especially for a costume drama. But the episode count was increased by 8 episodes (50%). Looks like a lot of padding was added, or additional scenes were subsequently filmed. I guess we'll have to wait and see if this is a quality production.

Source: Marcus here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ATippNjQ04

Here's an example of an actress's management team taking legal action against malicious slanderers. This one's for Bai Lu. It's a rather long list
https://x.com/kpopsmileshop1/status/1940319776724983969

If you watch her in Wonderland you can see that she is a direct and straightforward person. One of the things I like about her.

Some of the fans in C-dramaland can also be toxic. See my reply to Onthemark62 below. After The Untamed some netizens accused her of paying to increase her screen time. Everyone associated with the show including the production team has denied these rumors and yet they persisted. The only recourse is for the management company to sue the people who spread malicious rumors. In an episode of Wonderland, Meng Zi Yi said that there a period of time when no one would hire her. It was probably around this time.

There's a user below ("S L") that goes on all the popular C-drama actress's MDL pages and disparages them while praising "Queen Zhao Liyiing." This includes going on Zhao Lu Si's page 6 months ago when she was battling her health crisis posting the following:

(S L): " 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂 Heard she wants to be queen Zhao Liying's so much, very jealous of her famous A4 ant waist. In order to copy queen, Zhao Lusi starved herself to death and ended up at the hospital. 🤣😂. "

Per her profile, she joined MDL last August and has 13 dramas on her "Currently Watching list" and have rated every single one of them a "1." Just ignore her, as most users have.

Zhang Ruo Nan was impressive saving herself and securing a win for her team. Loved her and Bai Jing Ting in The First Frost. Fan Cheng Cheng not so much in abandoning her. "...bro???"! The guy is 6'1". He also abandoned teammate Sha Yi in an earlier episode then the show (or drama?) had a silly segment right after showing how remorseful he was losing his drinking buddy and reminiscing about their time together

Oh, so all the episode numbers on MDL will agree with YouTube/ZJTV's, except MDL Ep 13 which is Ep1, part 2)?

Probably will still be confusing at first, but by the time viewers get to Ep 12, they'll know it's the final episode and won't go searching for Ep 13

English subs for this week's episode, Ep 9, is now available

Thanks for your efforts and others for trying to get this fixed.

MDL must have some limitations as to what it can do.
A two-part episode on the official sites doesn't indicate 2 separate episodes but two air dates. So the second part of Ep 1 on YouTube/ZJTV will be Ep 2 on MDL... and Ep 12 on YT/ZJTV, EP 13 on MDL?

Looks like you and/or another user came up with a great workaround though where each regular and guest members' episode listing corresponds with the official YT/ZJTV numbering and not MDL's, e.g. "Bai Lu (Ep. 4-12)"

We'll just call KR13's 13th episode on MDL the "phantom episode" with no cast members. Hopefully not too many users will go looking for the 13th episode.

Thanks for your advice to just ignore them.

This is the last time I'll comment on this topic. I have a fairly good idea why the casting director added MZY and LYR to the cast. The same reason why Zhang Zhen Yuan, Zhou Shen and Sha Yi, to name a recent few, were added. The mix of personalities make the show more interesting and fun to watch. It's as simple as that

Just to be clear, as I noted in some of my earlier posts I am also a Bai Lu fan and I brought her up to show how hypocritical some users are. The negatively was from other users and I chose to reply to some of them including the most recent one

I was simply responding to a user who just replied to a comment I made (about a week ago no less) how illogical some of these replies were. I didn't want to embarrass the user though by naming her/him.

You might've missed that I said "just kidding" after the "rumor" since Bai Lu "being replaced" was also a topic.

My point all along is that this is a celebrity variety program where most people watch it for fun, like myself, and that the producers know what they're doing to keep the show going. All this negativity towards Meng Zi Yi and obsessing about Bai Lu's screentime was a bit much though. And also early on that Meng Zi Yi and Li Yun Rui didn't add anything to the show

I just received a reply to a comment I posted about a week ago, where I pointed out Bai Lu also surrendered like Meng Zi Yi did during the name tag ripping segment - which I said I was okay with. The replier, apparently a huge Bai Lu fan, said that's not the only reason she doesn't like Meng Zi Yi. The first reason she gave was that the program had promoted her too much (!). As if that's Meng Zi Yi's fault. The program promoted her because she has a lot of fans. The same person had complained that the show disrespected Bai Lu at the press conference introducing the regular cast members, for which Bai Lu was absent, and later that her screen time was being cut. (No complaints about the current episode though.)

I heard a rumor that Meng Zi Yi was brought in to replace Bai Lu! Just kidding.
Bai Lu and her management company have enormous bargaining power and if she left the show it would be that she decided to, not the other way around.

The Episode listing and guests are still kind of messed up. Episode total is now back to 13. The guests listed for Episode #10 all appear in the current episode, #9. Bai Lu, Zhou Shen listed as appearing through Episode #11... etc.

Meng Zi Yi's MDL Flower ranking is now #148! This is up 7 places from #155 with only a few hundred flowers added, which indicates that around the 150 rank all the stars are bunched together.

Maybe with the success of The Princess's Gambit and upcoming dramas, and Wonderland and other variety shows, she'll be in the top 100?

As usual there are some who give a drama very low ratings only after several episodes. Some I suspect have ulterior motives. There's one review here where the user has been a member since 2019 but has only 2 reviews, both in the past month. She gives this one an Overall 5.0, Acting 3.5, Music 2.0 (?), etc. and says she has seen all 36 episodes (?!). The other review is for Feud, a competing drama, that she gives an Overall 10, Acting 10, Music 10, etc.

The same thing happened with Feud early on where raters giving a low score say they have seen all episodes when only a few have been released. It appears there are a small group of users that try to manipulate the MDL ratings. These typically are drowned out over time though by the majority who try to give an honest rating.

Yes, she was introduced by the program as a regular cast member along with Li Yun Rui at the beginning of this season. And they were listed as such on MDL.
A user must've made the edit for whatever reason.

LOL. Except when they're hiding during the name ripping segment such as in the bathroom (a favorite tactic of Sha Yi and Fan Cheng Cheng) 😂
Some are pretty athletic though, e.g. Zhang Zhen Yuan and Li Yun Rui. And elder statesman Li Chen, although he's getting older

If the episode listing is correct looks like Chen Zhe Yuan will be in the final episode - #1 in MDL flowers ranking. Bail Lu is now in the top 10, thanks to the lurongs and her other fans

FYI:
mm@MengZiyiFolder (X/Twitter)
Tencent's costume drama The Princess's Gambit is finally set to premiere on June 25th at 6 PM CST on WeTV. [drama's page on MDL now also has June 25th]

Data shows Meng Ziyi was the most talked-about celebrity during the Tencent’s Investment Conference, on all short video platforms and overall platforms in China.

Meng Ziyi promoted 5 upcoming dramas at Tencent's investment conference today! she's absolutely killing it 💗

Source:
https://x.com/MengZiyiFolder

The current episode (#8) now has English subs (typically around 3 days after airing)

Noticed the second most recent comment:
@meimo4017
1 hour ago
宋雨琦孟子义没了？😮
[ Song Yuqi and Meng Ziyi are gone? 😮]

Thanks for all your effort in getting this corrected!

For each cast member after Ep 1, if MDL can add "Ep 1 (pt 1 & pt 2)" that would let people know there are two parts. I noticed that you can add a tilde (~), so maybe this would also be possible.

This would also work for shows that have two parts each week. Using Wonderland as an example, the listing next to Xu Zhi Sheng would be (Ep 1-10, parts 1 &2). On YouTube In Chinese it's listed as 第1期上 and 第1期下
Then the total episodes can be changed from 20 to 10 agreeing with Tencent's episode count.

Also thanks to io_foxy for sharing useful and fun content with everyone!