Bright Future
县委大院
A 24-episode contemporary drama, shown on CCTV-1 and Tencent Video, following a new county head and his colleagues as they take on the everyday problems of one fictional county.
Save- Premiere
- Dec 7, 2022
- Episodes
- 24
- Where to watch
- CCTV, Tencent Video
About the drama
A drama about a county government sounds like a hard sell, and Bright Future (县委大院, Xian Wei Da Yuan, "county Party committee compound") mostly succeeds by being specific. It follows the daily work of officials in one fictional county: meetings, home visits, reports filed upward, a stalled relocation project, a river fouled by pig farms. The camera stays close to the people doing the job. In one early scene an overworked town official gets home after a long day, starts boiling dumplings, and is called back out before he can eat them.
It comes from Daylight Entertainment (正午阳光), the studio behind Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜), with Kong Sheng (孔笙), who directed that series, as lead director. Hu Ge (胡歌), who became a household name through Nirvana in Fire, plays the lead in his first television series in five years, since The Hunt (猎场).
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Mei Xiaoge (梅晓歌, played by Hu Ge) arrives as the new county head of Guangming County (光明县, "bright county"). The synopsis released before broadcast describes a place worn down by years of rough resource extraction, with strained relations between officials and residents, heavy local debt and too little income.
Around him are the people of the county compound. Lü Qingshan (吕青山, Huang Lei 黄磊) is the Party secretary, a man who looks permanently burdened. Ai Xianzhi (艾鲜枝, Wu Yue 吴越) is a brisk, direct colleague. Lin Zhiwei (林志为, Zhang Xincheng 张新成) is a young newcomer to the government office who has to learn the job as it happens. The opening stretch centers on relocation work: persuading households to move and negotiating over family graves.
Guangming is a fictional county. Writer Wang Xiaoqiang (王小枪) spent nearly five months on a secondment in Dayu County, Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, attending meetings and doing the daily work of local officials, and said the script has more named characters than any he had written, over a hundred. The crew also visited 50 county governments in Hunan, Hubei, Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangxi before settling the look of the sets.
Hu Ge said he felt unsure about playing a grassroots official and built the part from the director's and writer's field notes and his own habit of smiling easily.
The series premiered in the CCTV-1 evening slot on December 7, 2022, with simultaneous streaming on Tencent Video. Beijing News reported that its first-night TV rating briefly passed 2. On December 15, 2022, Tencent Video announced that the series had passed a heat index of 26,000 on its platform.
Producer Hou Hongliang (侯鸿亮) said the production felt like the story itself, with a crew pulling in one direction.
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