A scene from iPartment performed by Wang Chuanjun (left) and Deng Jiajia. Photo: CFP

When a bunch of young, good looking friends live in the same apartment, what kind of funny situations can occur? Audiences are familiar with this kind of set up from popular American TV shows such as Friends, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. Recently however Chinese audiences' attention has been drawn to a domestic sitcom featuring a similar story, iPartment. 

The show revolves around four girls and three boys from different backgrounds who moved to iParment (which is called love apartment in Chinese) in Shanghai and quickly became friends. The funny plots quickly made this comedy sitcom one of the most popular TV series in 2009 when the first season of iPartment was aired.

Although many shows in China do not get a second season, iPartment's fourth season was aired this month. The cast, many of whom were students at Shanghai Theatre Academy before the show began, have become rising stars with many fans.

When information about the fourth season was released last year, it triggered many online discussions, and although it has only been on air for a few days, the audience ratings and hits on video streaming websites are extremely high.

What are the secrets behind this comedy sitcom?

Into the fourth season

Having focused on comedies for years, Ma Dong, the chief content officer of the video streaming platform IQIYI, explained why he supported iPartment and bought the copyrights to exclusively broadcast it on the Internet.

"Comedies are difficult. In China you have to make comedies suitable for both northern and southern people. More difficult than that is to make comedies suitable both for the young and the old. Even more difficult than that is to make sequels," Ma said in a press conference for iPartment on January 15.

Sitcoms are not new on Chinese TV. Over the past two decades there have been several successful sitcoms series. I Love My Family (1994), and Stories from the Editorial Board (1991)  were the pioneering shows when Chinese sitcoms were still in their infancy from 1993 to 1999. The golden age came in 2000 to 2009, when a large number of sitcoms were produced, including by My Own Swordsman (2006) and Home with Kids (2004).

But the numbers of sitcoms have decreased since 2010. However, among the most recent batch, iPartment has become the most successful one.

The first season of iPartment was only aired on some second-tier satellite television channels. The second season was shown by first-tier satellite TV stations, but it was not aired during prime time.

When it came to the third season, four satellite televisions aired it at prime time and the show received a high audience rating. This year several television channels and networks are airing it at the same time. Online hits for the show are also staggering. The playback rate of the first three seasons on IQIYI has passed 1.5 billion, according to statistics from IQIYI.

"[The producers of] iPartment know the preferences of Internet users. They  target Internet users, and by choosing the online platform as its main audience rating platform, the program has changed the market pattern," said Gao Shouzhi, the president of EntGroup Inc, a research company for the entertainment industry.

Besides the Western style sitcom format, the love stories and the young and gorgeous cast all attract a large fan base.

Plagiarism scandal



Despite the show's rising popularity, there is a large group of people who do not like the series, since most of the plots of iPartment are similar to, or even exactly the same as episodes of Friends, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory.

For example, the main story line that connects season three and season four is about Youyou (a character ) who everyone thought was pregnant when her friends found a pregnancy test kit in her garbage bin, while in fact, it was Youyou's friend Meijia's. The whole plot was exactly the same as one featuring Rachel and Monica in Friends. This lack of originality has  happened again and again over the four seasons.

The plagiarism even caught the attention of Time magazine in the US and The Daily Mail in Britain. Both of them criticized iPartment was ripping off Friends' plots.

While people criticizing the show's lack of creativity, screenwriter Wang Yuan, who wrote the scripts of iPartment, reckons that Chinese TV is just not developed enough. "Friends had 16 screenwriters and each screenwriter could just write one character's lines. I admire those American TV series when I watch them," he said. "They have more talent and a better system in Hollywood." 

Wang was not a screenwriter at all before iPartment, having studied marketing in college. "I watched so many bad TV series I decided to have a go at writing one myself," Wang said.

Wang regards US sitcoms as the model for new Chinese TV series and is devoted to learning from them.

Acknowledging the criticisms levelled against it, iPartment finally paid official tribute to the three American sitcoms it has copied.

In the first few episodes of the fourth season, there were references to all three sitcoms, and in one scene, as the character Zhanbo was trying to jump from one building's roof to another, clips of How I Met Your Mother appeared.

Despite only being on air for a few days, the fourth season has already generated staggering viewing figures, with over 200 million people watching it online in two days. With more episodes on the way, iPartment seems to set to make new records.