Small Town Remedy's hero can't follow his hometown dialect

Small Town Remedy (小城良方) premieres in China on October 21, and before a single episode has aired, viewers are already arguing about how its characters talk.

Xiao Zhan (肖战) plays Liu Zhengliang (刘铮亮), a doctor who grew up in a small town in Northeast China, spent years in the south, and is forced back home. The show's official promo clips lean hard on the language gap. One, posted on October 13, says that faced with "authentic Northeastern," he turns into a "fully automatic I-know repeater" — nodding along to words he can't follow.

Is that how Northeasterners talk?

On Xiaohongshu (小红书, China's lifestyle app), a viewer from Liaoning posted a clip captioned with one line from it: nǐ xīwàng ge dēr (你希望个嘚, roughly "hope for what, exactly?"). The comments split at once. A Liaoning user said der is rarely used. Another replied that the Northeast isn't only Liaoning, and people in Heilongjiang say it a lot. Then a Heilongjiang user said it's rare there too.

Two more words carry the jokes. The first trailer's caption asks who is doing the gěnggeng (哽哽, "grumbling back under your breath"). An October 17 clip has his showy Cantonese meet a diànpào (电炮, "a smack in the face") from Ai Chen (艾辰), a local played by Jiang Yan (姜妍), who answers him in rapid-fire Northeastern. The producer, Linmon Pictures (柠萌影视), posted a behind-the-scenes clip of that scene, shown at the top of this page.

His Cantonese doesn't pass either

The top comment under that clip on the show's official Douyin (抖音, China's TikTok) account cheered "Dr. Liu's Cantonese class is now in session." But a Guangdong viewer on Xiaohongshu said his Cantonese isn't accurate, and another Guangdong viewer, on Xiaohongshu too, asked what gěnggeng means.

Home, but not quite

That double miss looks like the point. The official account calls him a Northeastern kid who has lived in the south for years, and says that on his return, "his accent got home before his body did." A Bilibili viewer heard a Northeastern lilt slip into one of his lines. He belongs to both places, and fully to neither.

The first four episodes stream on iQIYI tonight, with two a night on CCTV-8; availability outside China varies. Listen for the first word he gets wrong.

Source: Small Town Remedy official Weibo account (September 23 to October 17, 2026); Linmon Pictures official YouTube channel (October 20, 2026); Beijing Time (北京时间, Beijing Radio and Television's news account), October 17, 2026; viewer comments on Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Bilibili.