An old acquaintance came into town for the All That Matters conference. We started to talk about web comedy in Asia and I told him about Diors Man (屌丝男士), a funny web series in its third year. It's extremely popular in China and mainly targets the domestic market (hence, no official English subtitles).
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2SbiYPz4bs&w=854&h=480]
How popular is the show? Johnny Galecki, more famously known as Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory, guest starred on the web series (see the video on the right).
Japanese AV actress Akiho Yoshizawa (吉沢明歩) has also guest starred on the show. Don't let the view count fool you as the show is extremely popular and it's not limited to just YouTube. If you do an aggregate view count, where you tally viewership from all the different platforms in China, I'm sure the show is in the millions. And yet there is no English wikipedia page for the show.
I'm bringing this up to show that there's a lot of amazing, original content in China, but Chinese producers are mostly interested in the sizable domestic market. Netflix acquired the popular Chinese drama Empresses In The Palace for its U.S. audience but I'm not sure of the demographics that would watch Empresses In The Palace in the US.
On the other hand, a funny, irrelevant show like Diors Man has a much wider appeal since these guys are lovable losers/geeks, much like the appeal of The Big Bang Theory. The title - Diors Man - is a play on the idea of the lovable loser. Dior is, of course, the name of the luxury brand. A popular Chinese slang is 屌丝 (diǎosī) which means loser so the idea is that these guys think they're high-end, but in reality they're just charming losers.
It's shows like these that Netflix or other video platforms should try to acquire.
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