Live Up to Your Youth

The setting is Beijing in the 1990s, in a small guesthouse named "Winter Goes, Spring Comes" (冬去春来). Young people from all over the country pass through it. Xu Shengli (徐胜利, Bai Yu, 白宇), from a Shandong seaside town, wants to write films and keeps submitting scripts. Zhuang Zhuang (庄庄, Zhang Ruonan, 章若楠), from Wenzhou, has come to sing and hopes to enter a professional troupe. Shen Ranran (沈冉冉, Lin Yun, 林允) is an actress with some screen credits who wants leading roles. Guo Zongbao (郭宗宝, Tian Yu, 田雨) is a background actor, and the painter Cao Ye (曹野, Cao Zheng, 曹征) and the musician Tao Liangliang (陶亮亮, Wang Yanlin, 王彦霖) round out the house.

Xinhua describes it as following the group for nearly thirty years. The drama does not promise that everyone will succeed in art; the director says many of them do not.

The story is an original, not a novel adaptation. According to Xinhua, citing Beijing Evening News, it grew out of the personal experience of the screenwriter Gao Mantang (高满堂) as a young artist in Beijing. Gao co-wrote with Li Zhou (李洲), and Zheng directed with Li Ang (李昂). Zheng and Gao previously worked together on Nan Lai Bei Wang (南来北往), and the reports say this series continues that realist approach.

The look is a main selling point. The crew rebuilt the guesthouse and a stretch of lane one-to-one in a 5,000-square-meter studio in Huairou, a district of Beijing, because modern hutongs (胡同, hutong, "lanes") are full of air conditioners and cables. Beijing Evening News says the set copies Luogu Lane (锣鼓胡同). Visual effects added views of the White Pagoda in Beihai Park.

According to the production company's finale release, published by Beijing News, the first day broke CCTV-8's premiere record at 2.280 on CVB, and the national average was 1.92. In 35 cities CSM measured a 4.24 average and a 5.27 peak for one episode.