Kangxi Coming (2004)
Original title: 康熙來了
Kangxi Coming is a 2004 Chinese-language talk series created by Wang Wei-chung and 詹仁雄. It stars Kevin Tsai, Dee Hsu and 殷琦.
Two hosts, a panel of famous guests, and an hour of questions no publicist approved. Kangxi Coming ran on Taiwanese television from 5 January 2004 to 2016, with Kevin Tsai and Dee Hsu putting celebrities through topics the rest of the schedule stepped around, teasing the guests and then each other.
The format barely moved in twelve years. Guests sit, the hosts pick a subject, and the comedy comes out of the banter instead of sketches or stunts. Chen Han-dian joined the duo as a sidekick in 2007. It went out as a nightly hour on cable, Monday to Friday at 22:00 on CTi Variety, a pace that made it a habit rather than an occasion. Chungta Production made it until the company shut down in 2009, after which Golden Star Entertainment took over.
The habit travelled. Hong Kong carried the show on ATV Home as Variety Show of Mr Con and Ms Csi, and Chinese-speaking viewers elsewhere caught up on uploaded re-runs and bootleg DVDs, which turned a Taiwanese studio show into common ground for audiences who shared no other television.
Figures from politics and entertainment sat for interviews too, on a programme whose default register was mockery. For an outsider, that mix is the appeal: the guest list of a major chat show, the manners of two friends talking late.
Cast
Similar series
A few thoughts on Kangxi Coming
The print shelf holds the same world. Cell Phone follows a television host and the mobile phone that complicates his life, a Chinese novel sitting inside the industry Kangxi Coming filmed from the studio floor, and it runs funny in the same uncomfortable register. Xiong di = goes wider, a satire of how fame, money and spectacle remade Chinese life within a single generation, which is the culture that produced the guest list the hosts worked through five nights a week. Read either for the context the show never stops to explain. Neither replaces the banter, since two hosts who know each other's timing do not transfer to a page, so come to these after the episodes rather than instead of them.
Talk shows where the interview is the whole show
Kevin Tsai and Dee Hsu ran Kangxi Coming as an interview first, asking guests the questions their publicists had ruled out and letting the answer run. These hosts work the same chair: one guest, one conversation, no sketch to hide behind. Carson and Cavett set the template decades before Taiwanese cable picked it up.
Studio shows that run on banter instead of sketches
The format of Kangxi Coming barely changed in twelve years: guests sit down, the hosts pick a topic, and the hour fills with riffing rather than sketches or stunts. Chen Han-dian joined in 2007 to give the two of them a third target. These panel and studio shows run on the same fuel, where the tangent beats the topic.
Taiwanese TV and film from the Kangxi Coming years
Kangxi Coming booked the Taiwanese pop and film industry five nights a week from 2004, so its guest list doubles as a map of what Taipei was making. Start with the idol dramas whose casts kept turning up on the couch, the Golden Horse ceremony where those films competed, and Tsai Ming-liang working the other end of the same scene.