A good TV drama demands heart-wrenching affairs, vicious conflicts, thorny social issues and relevance to real life.Shanghai's prime-time drama Humble Abode, or Woju, ticks all those boxes and more.
That's all the more surprising when you consider that the mainland's tight TV censorship usually results in drama so fluffy and onedimensional that Desperate Housewives seems gritty by comparison.
The series, which began airing last month, evokes the mainland's biggest corruption scandal in a decade. The story revolves around two out-of-town college-graduate sisters in the fictional city of Jiangzhou.
Soaring property prices makes them 'house slaves' - a popular term for those forced to borrow heavily to buy property. The character that attracted the most attention, and arguably helped Humble Abode secure a near-10 per cent audience share, is Song Siming, a powerful and well-spoken technocrat who falls from grace in a scandal surrounding the diversion of hundreds of millions of yuan from Jiangzhou's pension fund to finance property projects.
With landmarks like the Bund, Fudan University and an iconic downtown railway station, it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see that Jiangzhou is Shanghai. This is particularly bold: a crime drama drawing on the city's darker side could draw a backlash from officialdom, never keen to dwell on its mistakes.
One of the darkest moments in Shanghai's recent history was the downfall of its party boss Chen Liangyu in 2006, and Humble Abode pulls no punches in its references to this.
Chen and several dozen subordinates were purged for siphoning off money from the city's pension fund, along with other cases of graft. Chen was charged with accepting 2.39 million yuan in bribes and sentenced to 18 years in jail. In Humble Abode, the shadowy mayor takes more than 300 million yuan (HK$340 million) from Jiangzhou's pension pot to invest in property.
