Am I going to watch it?

　　Thanks, but no.

　　Actually, I have never watched a Chinese TV drama that was produced on the Chinese mainland. Correction, I have never finished watching a Chinese TV drama series because they are too long, and I have too little time and patience.

　　How long is too long? Compared to Korean and Japanese TV dramas, which usually have 10 to 20 episodes, Chinese dramas are famous for telling long stories. In the Name of the People has 52 45-minute episodes. The longest TV drama, Daughter-in-law, tells the story of an old Chinese couple’s culture clash with their foreign daughter-in-law. It has aired 3,100 episodes in the past 16 years, and the director said it will continue.

　　How do the directors make the stories last so long? Here is an example: Person A is killed by a Japanese soldier. Even though the audience might have seen how A was killed, character B would come and hold A’s body and repeat the story of how A was killed by a Japanese soldier. B then would tell C that A is dead and ask C to take revenge. In this way, the message that "A was killed by a Japanese soldier" is repeated three times.

　　What is the point of making such a long dialogue? A friend of mine who used to be a TV drama writer told me that the longer the story lasts, the more money he would get.

　　So I was not surprised when The Legend of Zhenhuan, a hot TV drama that swept China off its feet in 2011, was aired in the US and its original 76 45-minute episodes were shortened to only six 90-minute episodes.

　　Another possible reason for the length is the target audience. Some of the shows target senior citizens like my mother. A 58-year-old housewife, she is a fan of Chinese historical TV dramas, and since many Chinese TV stations run two or three episodes every day, she could finish a drama within a month. When I asked whether she prefers the American TV drama format with less episodes, she said long TV dramas remind her of chapters in a novel, similar to those from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that began each chapter with a summary couplet.

　　"The story is long, but it has many layers," she said.

　　Over the years, the Chinese TV drama industry has been trying to win young viewers. They produced a lot of fantasy dramas with pretty and handsome actors. But the most popular ones are those that have characters people can relate to. For example, the 2016 50-episode drama Ode to Joy has become one of the most popular dramas because it reflects China’s current economic and social realities.

　　Will I watch it? Probably not. It would waste 2,250 hours of my time.