It’s 1998. Wang Xiang is a big man among the factory workers in Hualin, a one-company steel town somewhere in Northeast China. Gong Biao is a young recruit to the firm, a university-educated, handsome, up-and-coming manager. But the future of the steel company is shaky, and even a model worker like Wang has to try to ensure his job is safe. Wang and a reluctant Gong team up with hard-as-nails detective Ma Desheng to investigate a gruesome murder, hoping to get a favorable mention from the police in the final report but not realizing that the case traces back to Wang’s own family.
It’s 1998. Wang Xiang is a big man among the factory workers in Hualin, a one-company steel town somewhere in Northeast China. Gong Biao is a young recruit to the firm, a university-educated, handsome, up-and-coming manager. But the future of the steel company is shaky, and even a model worker like Wang has to try to ensure his job is safe. Wang and a reluctant Gong team up with hard-as-nails detective Ma Desheng to investigate a gruesome murder, hoping to get a favorable mention from the police in the final report but not realizing that the case traces back to Wang’s own family.
Jump forward to 2016. The factory went bust years ago, and the town is dying. Gong is a failure, unhappily married and bloated, and Wang is an old and saddened man. Together, they scrape together a living sharing shifts in a taxi—until Gong tries to buy his own car and gets cheated. Their quest to catch the con artist ends up dredging up the murders of the 1990s—and the tragedies and mysteries that went unsolved.
And the police detective in 2016? Well, spoiling that would ruin one of the series’s best jokes.
This is The Long Season, not only one of the greatest Chinese dramas ever but one of the best TV shows of the last year made anywhere—and now, months after its original release on Tencent Video, it is available on Prime Video for U.S. viewers. It’s a twisty, bleak noir about murder, revenge, and loss that jumps between different periods (including a tertiary plotline in 1997); it’s also frequently hilarious, humane, and masterfully written and has the best de-aging effects and acting I’ve ever seen, with most actors playing both their 1998 and their 2016 selves. It has fantastic music, handpicked by director Xin Shuang, once a well-known punk rock guitarist, and beautiful cinematography in the slow, red Northeastern fall. This is a must-watch show, and it’s amazing that it got made in today’s China.
Forming the background to the show are the industrial layoffs at state-run firms that devastated Northeast China economically and socially in the late 1990s—something akin to the Rust Belt in the United States or the coal mining districts of the United Kingdom.
In 1998, Wang, brilliantly played by famous comic actor Fan Wei—like most of the cast, a Northeasterner himself—is bombastic, naive, and often blind to the failings of those around and above him. The older Wang is an undoubtedly superior person to his younger self—humbler, wiser, and more cunning. But, as we rapidly see, he only got that way through tragedy. Even more than the closure of the factory, his wife and son are conspicuously missing in 2016, although he’s now responsible for another young man who calls him “father.”
The Wang of 2016 is a familiar figure in Chinese towns: the guy who can fix anything with two bits of wire. In many ways, he lives up to the ideals of the archetypal Dongbeiren, the people of the Northeast. A Northeastern man, at least in their own eyes, is tough, decent, stoic, hard-working, and hard-drinking. And as Wang demonstrates at home, he can cook—and cook well.
The older Gong, in contrast, is no stoic and not much of a cook. Chinese has a term, sa jiao, for women strategically pouting like children. There’s no equivalent for petulant male whining, although it’s equally common. Gong complains constantly. His wife doesn’t treat him right. His back hurts. Everyone is cheating him. Why is life like this? Why isn’t it what he was promised? He’s a Chinese schlemiel. It’s a tribute to actor Qin Hao that the older Gong is still sympathetic, not just annoying. (Qin himself was a heartthrob actor; in one scene in 1998, Gong’s date is watching a movie and remarks on his resemblance to Qin Hao.)
One of the show’s tragedies is how limited the language of love is for most characters. Gong, like most of them, can express affection only through complaint, even about his wife and his best friend. The exceptions are hard-earned and deeply moving.
These are broken men living in a broken town. Most Chinese dramas that move from the past to the present emphasize the modernity, progress, and glitz of today. Take the forgettable 2010 weepie Aftershock (“The Great Tangshan Earthquake” is the literal translation), a Sophie’s Choice that starts during the 1976 quake, when a mother must choose which of her children to grab and save. The gray, poor world of the 1970s then gives way to a brighter and richer 2000s, and the heartbreaking decision of 1976 is healed by the government-led heroism of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake rescues.
None of that is true in The Long Season. There has been no redemption for Hualin; the town is grim and backward, ravaged, like most of the Northeast, by the industrial layoffs of the 1990s and stuck in the economic gloom that beset the region in the 2010s. The set design is fantastic, from the popular books and Western classic rock posters of a teenager’s bedroom in 1998 to the shabby pharmacies, massage centers, and corrugated iron shack walls of 2016. The landscape is shaped by petty crime: entertainment centers that double as brothels, gambling dens full of slot machines, guys flogging fake license plate numbers outside the local vehicle registration office. Nobody has money, and the only way to get better is to get out.
If the show has a flaw, it’s in the status of its female characters. This is a story about emasculated men, and even as it’s deeply skeptical about masculinity, the women play second fiddle. The suffering and vengeance of women are key, and there are very well-done, disturbing scenes about coercion and abuse, but the roles themselves lack the fullness of the main characters. (If you want a fuller picture of the lives of some women in the Northeast, I recommend Tiantian Zheng’s Red Lights, a bleak study of sex work in Dalian.)
This is also a story about being old. Everyone’s bodies are failing; protagonists and antagonists alike are diabetic, arthritic, or plagued by other ills. A stakeout has to be interrupted by frequent bathroom breaks and naps because, as one of the characters says, “We’re old, and it’s hard for us to stay up. … Coffee goes right through me.” Often, it’s a deliberately slow show, taking its time with the characters’ everyday complaints, quips, and small actions of clambering out of cramped cars or cooking at home—but it’s never boring.
And there’s no help coming. Health care costs are extortionate, promised compensation never shows up, and the authorities are bumbling at best. The show steers clear of actually portraying the police, unlike the factory authorities, as corrupt—but while well-meaning, they’re mostly half-competent. For our protagonists, they’re more of an obstacle than an aid. (Compare this to the portrayal of the police as efficient and patriotic on another hit Tencent show, the time-loop drama Reset.)
There’s one problem with the show as currently available: The English subtitles are mediocre. They’re mostly not terrible, but they’re clunky, clearly not done by a native English speaker, and include a few outright mistakes and deeply confusing phrases. Wang, for instance, takes pride in being an “elected vigilante” when he’s talking about being on the local neighborhood committee. A professional retranslation could seriously help the show reach an international audience.
Yet the overall brilliance of The Long Season raises the question: How does something this good get made in Xi Jinping’s China, where artistic ambition is usually crushed? This is a country where a single inoffensive joke about a military slogan destroyed multiple comics’ careers and produced a $2 million fine, the mistaken appearance of a tank pulled the country’s top livestreamer offline for three months, and TV plotlines are tightly controlled. Censorial dumbness, albeit often spottily and inconsistently enforced, hangs over everything.
Most of the time, writers and directors opt for mediocrity for the sake of safety when they’re not making outright, if sometimes entertaining, propaganda. When something good makes it through the system, you can usually see the joins—dangling plotlines after scenes were cut, clumsily inserted lines, or contrived explanations that what was obviously magic (superstitious, bad) was actually acupuncture and fungi (“traditional Chinese medicine,” good.) Even Xin’s previous series, 2020’s acclaimed The Bad Kids, had overdubbed lines.
But The Long Season seems somehow to have dodged all this. It is an artistically complete work, with its own untouched vision of its characters and their world. The censors must have touched it somewhere, but they didn’t leave a mark. Perhaps somebody high up has a fondness for the “Dongbei renaissance,” the spate of high-quality films and TV shows about China’s rust belt since 2020.
One theory about how this happened, elegantly laid out by law professor Henry Gao on X (formerly Twitter), is that the show matches one of the current leadership’s ideological goals: portraying the 1990s and that era’s market reforms as corrupt and failed. Yet I think this does The Long Season an injustice; the present is not portrayed in substantially better terms than the past. There’s no narrative of redemption led by Xi here, only the weight of real suffering.
And while state media have praised the show, this strikes me as clumsy bandwagon-jumping on the back of its popularity, not a concerted campaign. Take the Global Times piece that claimed the show “presents the warm, sunny, bright and vibrant autumn in Northeast China, or Dongbei in Chinese, as well as the enthusiasm, positivity, optimism and humor of local people” and that it “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages.” That’s like praising Chinatown for being a film about how important family is in sunny Los Angeles.
One of the final lines of the show is “Look forward, not back.” But the line is as steeped in irony and tragedy as the rest of The Long Season. The show is about fall—and while spring will arrive, winter comes first.
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