The Old Story of Yu Hong: A Northeast Crime Drama Cut Down to Mid-Length

Why this one

The Old Story of Yu Hong (余红旧事, Yu Hong Jiu Shi) is a crime drama released as 34 episodes of roughly 15 to 21 minutes each, a shape the Chinese industry calls zhongju (中剧, "mid-length drama"). It comes from Mist Theater (迷雾剧场), iQIYI's crime-and-suspense label, which a recent column on The Paper describes as otherwise working in seasons of 12 to 18 episodes. The series is adapted from a story by Ban Yu (班宇), stars Ma Yili (马伊琍) well outside her usual city-woman roles, and fills its ensemble with comedians. It premiered on 29 September 2026 and finished within a week. The same column says the show earned good word of mouth but a smaller commercial result, and the format is a large part of that argument.

The setup

A string of deaths hits a town in Northeast China in the 1990s: a drunk frozen into an ice sculpture, a strongman whose limbs are severed, a local bully who vanishes. They happen around Yuhong Square (余红广场), and they trace back to a forestry-farm case from years earlier. The series opens on that case, with a young railway line inspector, Liu Yang (刘阳), left for dead in a forest fire.

The police side belongs to Liu Juan (刘娟), a local policewoman who works cases by chatting with neighbours and who is suddenly looking after her ex-husband's four-year-old daughter, a child who speaks only Cantonese. The third thread is Chen Hong (陈红), who has spent years under her husband's violence and begins to plan his death. The three lines run separately at first and meet at the square.

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Background: the era, the place, the story

The town is called Tiecheng (铁城, "Iron City"), a declining industrial town. The time is the end of the 1990s, when state-owned enterprises were being restructured and workers laid off, a process Chinese writers call xiagang (下岗, "stepping off the post"). iQIYI's own episode synopses speak of a layoff wave sweeping the town, and TMDB's English summary describes a declining industrial town in 1990s Northeast China.

The source is "Yu Hong" (于洪), which Ban Yu first published in the journal Mangzhong (芒种) in 2019 and collected in his 2022 book Huan Bu (缓步, "slow steps"). Yuhong is a district of Shenyang, the Liaoning capital, and the story's square carries the same name. The series keeps the sound and changes the characters in the title and the square (余红). The original is a short first-person story; a Beijing Daily review of the collection calls it the one story in the book that can only just be read as a "Northeast story". The series builds an ensemble around it.

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Cast and crew

Yu Miao (于淼) directs. The credited writers include Yu Miao and Li Xiao (李潇); iQIYI's page also lists Jiang Wuji (姜无及) and Wang Si (王思). The theme song, "Yu Hong" (余红), is sung by Mao Buyi (毛不易).

The leads are Ma Yili as Chen Hong, Wang Jiajia (王佳佳) as Liu Juan and Zhang Zhehua (张哲华) as Liu Yang. Around them, per iQIYI's cast list: Xiang Hanzhi (向涵之) as Hao Jie (郝洁), whom Liu Yang has loved since youth; Fu Hang (付航) as Hao Peng (郝鹏); Wang Tianchen (王天辰) as He Liang (何亮), an officer on the investigation; Ai Liya (艾丽娅) as the older Hao Fang (郝芳); Jiang Shimeng (蒋诗萌) as the fortune-teller Wan Xiuhua (万秀华); Dong Baoshi (董宝石) as Brother Dong (东哥), a local boss; and Liu Peiqi (刘佩琦) and Geng Le (耿乐) in supporting parts.

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The setting is the point

The murders are the way in; the town is what the series is about. The trade outlet GuDuo (骨朵), in an analysis republished on Huxiu, describes the structure as a run of character portraits: each person is introduced with a story of their own, and all of them are gathered at Yuhong Square. A hairdresser, a fortune-teller, a gang boss and a policewoman with a borrowed child each get room, and the crimes connect them as much as they pose a puzzle.

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That is also why the pace reads as slow for the genre. GuDuo notes that the case moves gently and that much of the running time goes to daily life, feelings and past events. Chen Hong's attempts on her husband, for example, are played alongside household routine and the tension of the marriage, not only as a plot to be solved. The era shows in the incidental details: a police station anxious about layoffs, an officer, He Liang, who picked up Cantonese from Hong Kong films and ends up interpreting for the child.

Ma Yili as Chen Hong

Ma Yili is best known for city women: Luo Zijun (罗子君) in The First Half of My Life (我的前半生, 2017) and Ling Zi (玲子) in Blossoms Shanghai (繁花, 2023). Chen Hong is a break from that image: a woman in a declining industrial town, in a marriage held together by fear, with a tight perm and a padded jacket in place of the Shanghai wardrobe.

Chen Hong goes home to a man who hits her, and her planning is the series' darkest comic thread: she is no good at murder, and the attempts keep failing. Her path crosses with Liu Yang, who becomes her driver, and the two are held together by money.

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Ban Yu and the Northeast literary revival

Ban Yu was born in 1986 in Tiexi, the old factory district of Shenyang, to a family tied to the Shenyang Transformer Factory; his father was laid off around 2001. His first story collection, Winter Swim (冬泳), appeared in 2018. English Wikipedia counts him as one of the "Three Masters of the Northeast Literary Revival" (东北文艺复兴); China News names the other two as Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛) and Zheng Zhi (郑执), and attributes the phrase itself to the rapper Dong Baoshi, who shouted it in his 2019 hit "Yelang Disco" (野狼disco). The same Dong Baoshi plays Brother Dong here. In China News's account, an East China Normal University professor, Huang Ping, describes these writers as telling their fathers' factory stories from the child's point of view.

The landmark adaptation is The Long Season (漫长的季节), a 12-episode series that premiered on Tencent Video on 22 April 2023, set in a fictional steel town modelled on Anshan. Ban Yu was its literary planner, and its title comes from one of his short stories, though China News quotes him saying the story and the series share a name but not a plot. This summer the same story won him the Lu Xun Literature Prize for short fiction. Yangtze Evening News and The Paper's column both compare The Old Story of Yu Hong to it. The column argues that The Long Season built everything on one big question, who did it, while the newer series gave that hook less weight, perhaps the main reason it did not become the same kind of event.

Comedians in a crime story, and the format argument

Several of the cast are known mainly for comedy. Yangtze Evening News points to Fu Hang, Jiang Shimeng and the performer Tudou (土豆), and notes that Zhang Zhehua, who has drawn attention in recent years for comic work, plays Liu Yang without his familiar comic manner. In the same report, Jiang Shimeng's mumbling fortune-teller adds absurdity to the tense plot; the newspaper describes the series as blending crime, Northeast humour and street life so that the weight of the characters' situations shows through the laughter.

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The format is the other debate. GuDuo says the series was originally planned as a 12-episode long-form drama of about 45 minutes an episode, then re-cut into 34 shorter episodes, with the title changed from "Yu Hong". Its phrase for the result is "half long, half short". The Paper's column adds that a producer posted online that it was shot as about 12 episodes and that advertisers numbered only three brands; those are one person's account relayed by a contributor, and we found no statement from iQIYI. The column also says the in-site heat index peaked above 8,400. In August 2026 iQIYI opened a separate label, Anliu Theater (暗流剧场, "Undercurrent Theater"), for crime series with 10- to 25-minute episodes, according to the same column.

Opinion on the cuts splits. Yangtze Evening News reports viewers who like the interlocking storylines and others who find parts of the story loose, and that the short episodes did not bring the expected tightness. GuDuo says the short format made character highlights easier to share as clips, while breaking up sequences written to run longer; one flashback to the parents' love story spans three episodes. The Paper's column calls the numbers disappointing next to the reception and asks where this kind of series goes next.

Spoilers: how it ends

The rest of this section reveals the ending and key twists.

Liu Juan is Liu Yang's sister. She sets the trap that leads to his arrest, a coat with a missing button that ties him to a crime, and her turning in her own brother earns her a second-class merit. Liu Yang, who has killed several people, is brought to justice; the body of Hao Peng is dug out of Yuhong Square's foundations. Chen Hong, after five failed attempts on her husband, ends up running a factory and raising a daughter of her own. Hao Jie divorces Liu Yang in return for 300,000 yuan from Chen Hong and uses it to get treatment in a big city.

Viewers raised complaints about the ending; The Paper's column mentions arguments over a conviction resting on a button and an ending some found hurried.

Where to watch

The series streams on iQIYI in mainland China. All 34 episodes are out: nine appeared on the first day, 29 September, and the finale on 5 October. International availability varies; at the time of writing we found no listing on iQ.com, iQIYI's international service.

Overseas impact

Reception outside China is thin so far. TMDB has an entry under the title The Old Story of Yu Hong with a cast list and one backdrop image but no reviews, and there is no English-language press coverage. Fan-forum reactions will be added to this section as they appear.