TVB Brings 'War and Beauty' to China's Short-Drama Boom
Hong Kong's flagship broadcaster TVB is making its first vertical-screen drama — a spinoff of its 2004 palace classic 'War and Beauty' — with ByteDance's Hongguo, the mainland platform whose short-drama audience has redrawn what a television series can look like.
Hong Kong's oldest television institution is going vertical. On Thursday TVB announced a partnership with Hongguo Short Drama, ByteDance's free short-drama platform, and began filming the first co-production at Hengdian's Ming–Qing Palace studio: War and Beauty: Willows at the Palace Wall, a vertical-screen spinoff of its 2004 palace classic, due online in November.
For Chinese-speaking audiences, War and Beauty (金枝欲孽) is the ur-text of palace intrigue — its scheming concubines and doomed loyalties predate the mainland's palace-drama boom by years, and its lines still circulate. The spinoff brings back Moses Chan as Kong Wu, the imperial guard he played two decades ago, opposite Zhao Xixi, one of the vertical-drama world's leading ladies; TVB regulars including Katy Kung and YoYo Chen fill out the court. The casting is the partnership's thesis in miniature: TVB's nostalgia, Hongguo's stars.
TVB's drama production executive Wai-hung Man framed the move as an experiment the broadcaster intends to win. Vertical drama demands a pace, he said, that happens to match his taste for taut, unbroken tension; the series would be made "to the exacting standards of a full-length flagship drama," meant to prove TVB can "stand out in the premium micro-drama lane" on script and craft alone — drama that lands, as he put it, 拳拳到肉, with every blow connecting (@梨视频).
The platform it is landing on needs little introduction, though Weibo keeps supplying one anyway: Hongguo charted there this month in memes warning friends not to download it, lest they lose a week inside it — its catalog of one-to-three-minute episodes is engineered for exactly that (The App China Warns Its Friends About). Tencent this month began answering it with short dramas inside WeChat itself (Tencent's 'Green Bubble' Gambit). The prize is an audience of nearly 200 million daily users and the advertising that follows them; vertical screens are where the mainland's viewers, and the money, have moved.
For TVB the calculation is blunter than prestige. The broadcaster whose dramas once set the template for Chinese-language television across Asia has watched its home audience thin; Hongguo's feeds, not its own prime time, are where a Hong Kong studio can now reach a mass mainland audience. Hence a classic palace drama rebuilt for a phone-shaped frame, with the production standards of a flagship and the running time of a cigarette break.
"The days of staying up past midnight for War and Beauty feel like yesterday," one fan wrote under the launch announcement. "Seeing Moses Chan play Kong Wu again pulls you straight back" (@TVB剧评社). Whether palace scheming survives the crop to vertical is the gamble both sides have staked their November on — and Hongguo will keep score in a currency TVB has never reported: not overnight shares, but completion rates.