Zhao Benshan's New Comedy Draws Fire for a Dialect Problem

A new comedy series has landed on Tencent’s streaming platform, and the loudest complaint about it is not the plot. It is the accents.

“Zou Ma Shang Ren” — roughly, “Taking Office” — is a comedy of small-town officialdom with Zhao Benshan credited as chief producer. The director is his son, Zhao Yinan. Both men also appear on screen, cast as characters on opposite sides of the story’s quarrel, a pairing the show’s marketing has leaned into heavily.

The cast is a roll call of performers Chinese comedy audiences know from years of sketch shows and rural sitcoms: Wang Xiaoli, Jiang Yishan, Ge Shanshan, Cheng Ye and Song Xiaofeng among them. Zhao Benshan’s reach was on display at launch, when a long list of actors recorded promotional clips, including some whose connection to the project is hard to guess at.

The backlash, at least in the commentary that has circulated since the premiere, is not that the show is unfunny in the abstract. It is that the whole production sounds the same. Nearly every character speaks in the broad, flattened cadence of China’s Northeast, the register Zhao Benshan built a career on and that his studio has carried through two decades of television. Critics say the uniformity flattens the jokes into a single note and makes the show feel like a skit stretched past its length.

That complaint is a small window into a bigger argument in Chinese entertainment. Northeast dialect comedy — often called errenzhuan-adjacent, after the region’s song-and-dance duet tradition — was once the default language of Chinese television comedy. It still has a huge and loyal audience, but younger viewers, raised on a wider menu of regional comedy and online formats, are quicker to call it repetitive. What was once a guarantee of a laugh is now a style that has to defend itself.

The family framing makes the criticism sharper. A father-and-son production team is a natural story for the show’s promotion, but it also invites the question of whether the project exists because the material demanded it or because the name on the poster could get it made. Chinese audiences have grown comfortable asking that question out loud, and the volume of the response suggests they are asking it here.

None of this means the show is a flop. Tencent’s platform gives a comedy like this a large built-in audience, and the names involved guarantee sampling. The interesting test will be whether the criticism stays at the level of accent and repetition or turns into the slower verdict that matters more: whether viewers keep watching past the first week. In a market where short dramas have trained audiences to abandon anything within minutes, that verdict arrives fast.