This article analyzes main melody TV drama—an official genre that has emerged in the context of China’s most recent social and cultural transformations when the old socialist TV drama was losing viewership. Focusing on the TV drama Provincial Party Secretary as a case study, the author argues that main melody TV drama reconstructs socialist TV drama with a Hollywoodized creative strategy through which the didactic tradition of socialist TV drama has been transformed from direct propaganda to ideological persuasion. The development of main melody TV dramas since the 1990s indicates that a soft and repackaged propagandistic model has been developed in contemporary Chinese television with the aim of revitalizing the Party’s ideological control over society.
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