Since the sexual content in NBC’s Friends prevents it from being shown on Chinese television, producers here have done the next best thing: they’ve decided to make a slightly more wholesome Chinese version.
The Shanghai Morning Post reports that the Chinese version of Friends, which has the production title of…Friends (朋友), will be made up of 65% to 85% laughs, and like the American version, will feature three intertwining storylines in every 24-minute episode.
Characters, too, take their inspiration from the American show, with a pair of siblings and another pair of lovers giving that familiar Friends dynamic. The actors have not yet been cast, but the writers, all returned foreign exchange students, have finished the first season of 40 episodes. The director might end up being being non-Chinese.
What is left unsaid in the press coverage is that Friends has already been done in China. The 40-part serial Happy Youth 《欢乐青春》 (pictured) came out in 2002. Like the latest project, it was sold as a “Chinese Friends minus the sex”. It lifted not only the characters and settings (quirky folk-rocker Xue Cun played the ditzy guitar player role, and a bar subbed for the coffee shop), but plots and dialogue as well, royally pissing-off fans of the original.