Win in China!

You think TV is bad in America, and then you watch it someplace else. For all of its defects, American TV generally has high production values— attractive people to look at, sets and staging that don’t seem homemade—and it is often the place where new ideas get their start, just before they become worldwide clichés.

Right now the curse of Chinese TV, apart from its being state-controlled and de facto censored, is the proliferation of stupid low-budget “reality” shows. The oddest reality show I’ve come across while channel surfing was a “World’s Strongest Man–type contest between teams of midgets. The cruelest, put on by the state-owned China Central Television (CCTV), pitted young families against each other in elimination events. Each family team had three members—father, mother, elementary-school-aged child—and did coordinated stunts. Three families survived each show to appear in future rounds, and three were sent home, the children inconsolable and ...