So is TVB doing a good job or not? (Part 1 in a series of articles)

Throughout the years, there has been frequent criticism toward TVB – besides the concerns about how the station handles its news programs, the biggest complaint by far is TVB’s lack of creativity and lack of consistent progress (improvement).

So is TVB doing a bad job? In comparisons to other local (Hong Kong) TV stations, they are actually doing quite well – or perhaps the blame should be placed on the other local stations for doing so poorly.

For the past few decades, TVB has owned over 80% of the Hong Kong television audience pool. Every year, the station has at least one (if not more) highly rated and highly acclaimed series, plus a bunch of game shows and variety shows with a huge audience following – for a local TV station, it has already achieved a certain level of ‘success’ in satisfying basic audience needs.

If that’s the case, then which area does TVB need to improve?

By setting our sights further – not just looking at Hong Kong, but at the TV stations in the neighboring Asian regions – we will be able to see how others have ‘improved.’

By doing such a comparison [between TVB and other stations outside HK], it is easy to discover that in the past 10 to 20 years, TVB has not progressed (‘improved’) much. Of course, if we factor ATV into the comparison, the situation is even worse.

It is true that looking at a station’s ratings alone may not necessarily be an indicator that it is regressing or moving forward very slowly; however by paying just slight attention to the various channels and productions of the stations in other regions, it is already obvious that the others have progressed a lot – not only have these regions ‘caught up’ with Hong Kong, but on certain levels, they have already ‘surpassed’ them.

Currently, Hong Kong drama series are represented almost exclusively by TVB – however the station’s ‘creative’ production methods have not changed much since the 80s and 90s. In addition, production budgets have continued to shrink and the content of the series produced are geared more and more toward local (HK) audiences.

At one point, Japanese and Korean dramas created a huge trend-setting phenomenon in the industry, which proves that the productions from these 2 countries have progressed greatly. Same goes for Taiwan and mainland China drama series, which have greatly increased production costs due to huge demand in the market. This is especially true in mainland China: for example, the highly rated and highly acclaimed mainland China series "Three Kingdoms" boasts a production cost of 1.8 million Yuan (CNY/RMB) per episode; another genre of series – one that reflects how every day people live in modern society – is starting to become more and more popular in China.

In recent years, there have been very few Hong Kong drama series that are creative or explore different genres and themes. Also, with the overwhelming number of sequels produced each year, the ‘creativity’ has pretty much resided in the “successes” of the past.

With many of the behind-the-scenes crew (producers and writers) who have been responsible for most of the station’s highest rated and most highly acclaimed series leaving TVB this year, the concern over whether TVB will try to improve its ‘creativity flaws” becomes even greater.

Of course, there are other problems as well, which will be further discussed in future articles.

Source: Ming Pao
Translation: llwy12 @ AsianFanatics