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Notes -
Mid. So much of the HK dramas dubbed into mandarin for local chinese audiences here in southeast asia are basically the same few stories with different skins. The underlying skeleton of family dramas are the same across all cultures, so whether it is Billions or Succession or Dynasty the centrality of sibling and patriarch dynamics will always be present. I do blame the honkies for shitloads of weird complexes about younger-brother-and-elder-brothers-wife, and the Japs for son-and-stepmother complexes based on certain Noticing of their dramatic outputs. I heard that Indian dramas especially focus on mother-vs-daughter-in-law conflicts but my tolerance for bad filming cannot handle Indian or Latin American editing.
I think the reason for HKdrama exploding outwards and receiving a virtuous cycle of profits and reinvestment was the Chinese diaspora being starving for recognizable content, and the Hongkies were the first to produce media at scale, since the Taiwanese were struggling with their language issues over Hokkien vs Mandarin and the Hongkies went went full Cantonese. The Honkies were happy to license their stuff cheaply to Southeast Asian broadcasters and have their shit dubbed, leading to the first mover advantage of Honkie stuff. Inevitably local productions would spring up, creating inferior copies of legacy HK media and highlighting the appeal of just licensing their stuff and etc etc etc.
The plots and writing for HK shows have been really mid, and it was the brutal competition of talent that let certain auteurs like Wong Kar Wai and John Woo exploit available talent like Chow Yun Fatt and Jackie Chan but only after a long time. Advances in filming and special effect techniques allowed Wuxia and martial arts to ascend, and those filled a niche otherwise missing in most television productions. Maybe China would have had the opportunity to develop their film industry as well for local tastes, but they were too busy making Romance Of The Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West for the 2000th time. Never Water Margin though.
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