Chill Chinese Reality Shows Rec List
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ladybusinessIn the last few years I’ve gotten into Chinese reality shows. I like them because they are relaxing, feature teamwork, and often have fun outfits and stage design. They are also helpful for my Chinese language study.
The term for all of these shows in Mandarin is zongyijiemu (綜藝節目) which I most often see translated as “variety show”, but seems to be a term for any kind of unscripted TV. I’ve used the term reality show here because that’s what I’m more familiar with and what I think will be more familiar to Lady Business readers.
Reality shows are a bit of a sidestep from my love of Chinese dramas. I got into these in part because I wanted to see my favorite actors in other contexts, and because I wanted something that worked for me to watch in short chunks, but was low stress. I have RSI problems with my hands and it helps to take frequent short rests, and these types of shows work well for me as things to watch in my hand breaks. These shows tend to have quite long episodes (over an hour) and I would have trouble watching an episode in one go but they work for me in smaller pieces.
There are a lot of Chinese reality shows but the ones I like are chill. I have dropped several reality shows that I tried that were stressing me out! I prefer shows where either there’s no competitive element or the contestants aren’t stressed out about the competition. I also want the contestants to look like they are enjoying themselves most of the time. It’s no fun watching people be miserable.
All of these shows feature celebrities rather than otherwise unknown people, unlike most english language reality shows I’ve seen. I enjoy seeing my favorite actors and singers hanging out with each other and playing silly games.
I love it when reality shows get people to team up and work together! There’s something very satisfying about seeing people learning about each other and developing friendships. There’s sometimes a mentorship aspect as well.
The outfits in these shows can be really fun! Chinese male celebrities seem to have different sets of expectations about what they can wear than Western celebrities. There are some very strong limits on what they can wear (including censorship), but they also have a lot more freedom in terms of color and cut of their clothing. So they wear colorful outfits, featuring things like giant buttons, ruffles and sparkles. The women wear some fabulous things too. And outfits inspired by historical Chinese fashions are common, so you’ll often see touches like dramatically painted fabric, cross collars, and frog buttons. It feels very colorful and vibrant.
One of the downsides of Chinese reality shows is product placements.The contestants will generally at some point stop and talk about how great the sponsoring product is. Sometimes it's funny but mostly it's annoying.
Most of these are available on youtube with English subtitles, though a few of them have been taken down since I watched them. Where possible I have provided links to youtube playlists. The subtitles can be a bit rough, and are occasionally missing. (Shows featuring singing rarely have subtitles for the lyrics, for example.) However, they generally have hard-coded Mandarin subtitles, which are helpful for language learning.
Our Song Seasons 1 and 3
The premise of this show is that up-and-coming singers form partnerships with established singers and sing together. This was the first Chinese reality show I watched, and the first season may still be my favorite reality show season I’ve seen. Unfortunately I've only been able to find these two seasons with English subtitles, so they are the only two I’ve watched.
My favorite thing about Our Song is the teamups. The singers always seem to enjoy their partners' company and learn a lot from each other. I love that both singers in the pair are generally excited to work with each other.
Our Song also has the best stage design of all the singing reality shows I’ve watched. I have no idea how they put together such complicated and beautiful sets in a week! But they do, and it really adds the performances.
I also learned a lot about the history of pop music in Chinese languages from this show! Many of the songs sung on this show are classics of Chinese pop and so it's fun to look them up, and learn about the the original version and its context.
Marvelous City
This a six-episode show where each episode focuses on a different city through the lens of someone who grew up there. It’s cool to see fairly ordinary parts of these cities. There’s noodle restaurants, public transit, bookstores, etc. There is a second season of this show but I wasn’t able to find it with English subtitles.
The Truth Seasons 2 and 3
This is a show where the contestants play a very elaborate game that's like a cross between a murder mystery dinner party and an escape room. There are sets with multiple buildings to explore, rooms to search for clues, and puzzles that need to be solved. Sometimes they have to crawl through the ducts or rappel down buildings. There are also occasional jump scares when they are exploring dark places.
I tried watching the first season of this show but didn’t really enjoy it. It's very slow. However they changed the format a lot for the second season, and I love that one as well as the third season.
In the second season, the cases took place in five different time periods starting in 1924 and moving forward until the last cases take place in the future, with two cases in each time period for a total of 10 cases. There were five core cast members and a rotating sixth person. In each era they had different costumes appropriate to the era. The costumes were all fabulous and super fun. I also loved the group dynamics!
For the third season they brought back the five core cast members from the 2nd season, as well as the longest running guest member. The group chemistry was fabulous! Also they gave us even more costumes, with at least one set of costumes per case. I especially loved the costumes that looked like they should be part of a modern production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and the historical Chinese dress inspired costumes! This season also had a tighter and better plotted overall story.
(content note: many of the offscreen backstories involve upsetting things like child death or queerphobic violence. In season 3 they discover a (fake) skeleton of a child in a suitcase.)
Keep Running: The Ancient Tea-Horse Road
Keep Running is a long-running travel variety show. So far I’ve only seen this one season, though I plan to watch more. In this special season the contestants travel along the ancient tea horse-road from Yunnan to Tibet, taking in the sights, learning about the history and also eating delicious-looking local food and playing silly games. It was very fun, and I loved all the historical info and beautiful scenery.
Melody Journey
This is a show that matches songwriters with original songs with singers. Unusually for reality shows featuring singing, all the songs are new music. The songwriters each demo their songs to a group of singers, then there’s a period of time when the singers can speak with the songwriters, and finally there is a matching process to pick who sings what song. (Not every song gets sung, and not every singer sings every week/) Then we get to see performances of all the songs that got matched! I enjoy the interactions – it's a fun mix of banter and serious craft talk. It’s also cool to get a sense of how songs are developed.
I’d love to hear about your favorite chill reality shows, Chinese or otherwise!
The term for all of these shows in Mandarin is zongyijiemu (綜藝節目) which I most often see translated as “variety show”, but seems to be a term for any kind of unscripted TV. I’ve used the term reality show here because that’s what I’m more familiar with and what I think will be more familiar to Lady Business readers.
Reality shows are a bit of a sidestep from my love of Chinese dramas. I got into these in part because I wanted to see my favorite actors in other contexts, and because I wanted something that worked for me to watch in short chunks, but was low stress. I have RSI problems with my hands and it helps to take frequent short rests, and these types of shows work well for me as things to watch in my hand breaks. These shows tend to have quite long episodes (over an hour) and I would have trouble watching an episode in one go but they work for me in smaller pieces.
There are a lot of Chinese reality shows but the ones I like are chill. I have dropped several reality shows that I tried that were stressing me out! I prefer shows where either there’s no competitive element or the contestants aren’t stressed out about the competition. I also want the contestants to look like they are enjoying themselves most of the time. It’s no fun watching people be miserable.
All of these shows feature celebrities rather than otherwise unknown people, unlike most english language reality shows I’ve seen. I enjoy seeing my favorite actors and singers hanging out with each other and playing silly games.
I love it when reality shows get people to team up and work together! There’s something very satisfying about seeing people learning about each other and developing friendships. There’s sometimes a mentorship aspect as well.
The outfits in these shows can be really fun! Chinese male celebrities seem to have different sets of expectations about what they can wear than Western celebrities. There are some very strong limits on what they can wear (including censorship), but they also have a lot more freedom in terms of color and cut of their clothing. So they wear colorful outfits, featuring things like giant buttons, ruffles and sparkles. The women wear some fabulous things too. And outfits inspired by historical Chinese fashions are common, so you’ll often see touches like dramatically painted fabric, cross collars, and frog buttons. It feels very colorful and vibrant.
One of the downsides of Chinese reality shows is product placements.The contestants will generally at some point stop and talk about how great the sponsoring product is. Sometimes it's funny but mostly it's annoying.
Most of these are available on youtube with English subtitles, though a few of them have been taken down since I watched them. Where possible I have provided links to youtube playlists. The subtitles can be a bit rough, and are occasionally missing. (Shows featuring singing rarely have subtitles for the lyrics, for example.) However, they generally have hard-coded Mandarin subtitles, which are helpful for language learning.
Our Song Seasons 1 and 3
The premise of this show is that up-and-coming singers form partnerships with established singers and sing together. This was the first Chinese reality show I watched, and the first season may still be my favorite reality show season I’ve seen. Unfortunately I've only been able to find these two seasons with English subtitles, so they are the only two I’ve watched.
My favorite thing about Our Song is the teamups. The singers always seem to enjoy their partners' company and learn a lot from each other. I love that both singers in the pair are generally excited to work with each other.
Our Song also has the best stage design of all the singing reality shows I’ve watched. I have no idea how they put together such complicated and beautiful sets in a week! But they do, and it really adds the performances.
I also learned a lot about the history of pop music in Chinese languages from this show! Many of the songs sung on this show are classics of Chinese pop and so it's fun to look them up, and learn about the the original version and its context.
Marvelous City
This a six-episode show where each episode focuses on a different city through the lens of someone who grew up there. It’s cool to see fairly ordinary parts of these cities. There’s noodle restaurants, public transit, bookstores, etc. There is a second season of this show but I wasn’t able to find it with English subtitles.
The Truth Seasons 2 and 3
This is a show where the contestants play a very elaborate game that's like a cross between a murder mystery dinner party and an escape room. There are sets with multiple buildings to explore, rooms to search for clues, and puzzles that need to be solved. Sometimes they have to crawl through the ducts or rappel down buildings. There are also occasional jump scares when they are exploring dark places.
I tried watching the first season of this show but didn’t really enjoy it. It's very slow. However they changed the format a lot for the second season, and I love that one as well as the third season.
In the second season, the cases took place in five different time periods starting in 1924 and moving forward until the last cases take place in the future, with two cases in each time period for a total of 10 cases. There were five core cast members and a rotating sixth person. In each era they had different costumes appropriate to the era. The costumes were all fabulous and super fun. I also loved the group dynamics!
For the third season they brought back the five core cast members from the 2nd season, as well as the longest running guest member. The group chemistry was fabulous! Also they gave us even more costumes, with at least one set of costumes per case. I especially loved the costumes that looked like they should be part of a modern production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and the historical Chinese dress inspired costumes! This season also had a tighter and better plotted overall story.
(content note: many of the offscreen backstories involve upsetting things like child death or queerphobic violence. In season 3 they discover a (fake) skeleton of a child in a suitcase.)
Keep Running: The Ancient Tea-Horse Road
Keep Running is a long-running travel variety show. So far I’ve only seen this one season, though I plan to watch more. In this special season the contestants travel along the ancient tea horse-road from Yunnan to Tibet, taking in the sights, learning about the history and also eating delicious-looking local food and playing silly games. It was very fun, and I loved all the historical info and beautiful scenery.
Melody Journey
This is a show that matches songwriters with original songs with singers. Unusually for reality shows featuring singing, all the songs are new music. The songwriters each demo their songs to a group of singers, then there’s a period of time when the singers can speak with the songwriters, and finally there is a matching process to pick who sings what song. (Not every song gets sung, and not every singer sings every week/) Then we get to see performances of all the songs that got matched! I enjoy the interactions – it's a fun mix of banter and serious craft talk. It’s also cool to get a sense of how songs are developed.
I’d love to hear about your favorite chill reality shows, Chinese or otherwise!
no subject
Date: 2025-07-30 11:46 am (UTC)My music variety show of choice is Time Concert, though I've only seen the 2024 season haha and random performances here and there. Musicians get together, talk, and perform (sometimes covering each other's songs) on a small stage, so it's cozier than the average music show and really nice to put on the background.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-30 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:11 pm (UTC)And the episodes really are so long -- I could not watch them in one go!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 09:34 pm (UTC)