The Knockout Drama Series

[Cortney Voegele]

TheKnockout (Chinese: 狂飙) is a 2023 Chinese criminal drama directed by Xu Jizhou [zh], starring Zhang Yi, Zhang Songwen, Li Yitong, Zhang Zhijian [zh], and Wu Gang.[1][2] It tells the story of a police officer's fight against organized crime over a period of 20 years, showing the rise and fall of underworld figures and corrupt officials.[3][4][5] It premiered in China via CCTV-8 and iQIYI starting January 14, 2023.[6] The show takes place in the city of Jinghai, and chronicles the 21-year feud between incorruptible policeman An Xin and fishmonger-turned-mobster Gao Qiqiang.[7][8]

The name of The Knockout derives from a ci written by Mao Zedong in July 1930.[9] Shooting began in October 2021 and ended in September 2022.[10][11] Most of the TV series was shot on location in Jiangmen, Guangdong.[3]

Television viewers were surprised recently when Su Xiaoding, Lin Jiachuan and four other actors who play villains in the TV series "The Knockout" begged the pardon of fans and said they really weren't bad guys in real life.

That they seemed so real on screen is testament to some of the grittier fare on television, where series are focusing more on real life, both historical and contemporary, and attracting enthusiastic audiences.

"The Knockout" is rooted in China's national campaign to crack down on gang crime. Some viewers have even suggested, tongue in cheek, that police "investigate" actor Zhang Songwen, who plays criminal lord Gao Qiqiang in the series so realistically that it seems he's not acting at all.

"My classmates and I have really enjoyed the new drama, which is a big departure from the normal, mainstream stuff," said college student Chris Yu. "The storytelling is creative, with its overlapping timelines and flashbacks, and all the characters are multifaceted and interesting."

The 39-episode "The Knockout" began airing on China Central Television and iQiyi last month. It was simultaneously released overseas in subtitles of eight languages for viewers in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Inspired by true events, the drama centers on two decades of interaction between a gang boss and a police officer that began when the gangster was a humble fishmonger and a friend of the cop. However, they finally become foes, and the drama follows their years of cat-and-mouse struggle.

The series is apparently popular overseas as well. Rickshaw drivers in Thailand have been known to play excerpts of "The Knockout" and its theme song, trying to attract the business of Chinese tourists. On some websites in Japan, the drama is also a trending search topic.

The iQiyi Research Center said the show has broken a two-year popularity record previously held by the comedy costume drama "My Heroic Husband." "The Knockout" is also the most-watched drama on CCTV Channel 8.

The series is shot on location in the city of Jiangmen in Guangdong Province, which is also attracting visitors eager to sample local delicacies such as rice rolls and pig's-feet noodles that are featured in the drama.

The production team spent three years on the series. Director and scriptwriter Xu Jizhou said in a media interview that "The Knockout" is not simply a story about fighting crime, but also a reflection of social evolution this century.

"We needed to do a lot of interviews and research to recreate the realism of the era," director Xu said. "Audience can obviously see the changes of sets, makeup, costumes and props that reflect changing styles over the years."

When the Shanghai-produced epic series "New Dawn" was shown to global audiences through YouTube, it evoked emotional feedback with its touching stories behind the liberation of Shanghai in May 1949 and the city's subsequent reconstruction.

The series was particularly popular among viewers in North America and Australia, with foreign fans lauding the artistry of production and the heroic sacrifices of the characters. Some posted messages that they were watching the drama while learning about Chinese history.

Depicting history through drama productions is also an eye-opener for Chinese youngsters too young to remember an era when Party members had to fight bandits and enemy agents, and when People's Liberation Army soldiers won public respect with their discipline and patriotism.

"We are redefining storytelling methods to relate what happened in the past to the emotions of contemporary audiences," Long said. "We think details are important, and so scenes need to be based on facts and convincing acting."

TV experts attribute the success of the realism genre to its sincere, simple focus on the lives and emotions of ordinary people and its ability to show how they connect with vicissitudes of the era in which they lived.

Professor Gu Xiaoming, a film and TV scholar at Fudan University, told Shanghai Daily that dramas inspired by real-life events in China will continue to capture and engage audiences, both at home and abroad.

"The key is the degree to which they delve deeper into life, discovering the underlying logic of life and combining that with specific regions, topics and people to create a colorful story," Gu said. "Many countries hope to draw lessons from the examples of China, and dramas can serve a cultural envoy in that regard."

2.In accordance with the Regulations on Internet News and Information Services and other related laws and regulations of the People's Republic of China, comments should not contain anything that is obscene, offensive, defamatory or racist.

I'm not sure what's going on here, but I definitely approve. In the first week of 2011, the Showtime cable network gave us the premiere of Episodes, the Matt LeBlanc comedy that may end up being the best new comedy series of the year. And now, in the second week of 2011, FX gives us Lights Out -- which may well end up, 50 weeks from now, as the best new drama series of the year. This much fresh quality television, so early in the year -- I've never seen anything like it. But I love what I'm seeing.

Lights Out, on the surface, has the same basic template as The Fighter, the recent movie starring Mark Wahlberg. That film is about a boxer, his chance at a title shot, and the tough-as-nails, hot-tempered, loose-cannon family that's in his corner -- for good and for bad. It's the same premise in Lights Out, except this time there are other issues involved -- like money and mobsters.

Lights Out is created by Warren Leight, who ran season two of In Treatment for HBO. His more significant credit -- and one that applies more directly -- is that he wrote the fabulous Tony Award-winning play Side Man, about a jazz musician and his son. That play really dived into family dynamics in a big way, while also exploring -- and explaining -- an intense type of artistic dedication. And what Side Man did for jazz, Lights Out does for boxing.

The star of the TV series is Holt McCallany, playing heavyweight champ Patrick Leary. In the opening scene, his wife Theresa (Catherine McCormack) begs him to retire after a brutal loss in the ring. He does, and the series cuts to five years later. Patrick's ex-boxer brother, played by Pablo Schreiber, is now his business manager, and their father runs a local boxing gym that Patrick bought with his prize money. But that money -- as Patrick admits to his dad, played by a perfectly crusty Stacy Keach -- has all dried up.

McCallany is totally believable as the former heavyweight; the actor has real experience as a boxer, which is obvious, but he's also got the weary credibility of someone who's been through a lot. For the same reason, I love that Keach was cast as the father. He played a washed-up boxer in Fat City, a movie made way back in 1972, and every line in his face seems to be acting the part.

The rest of the supporting cast -- the unsavory characters who help, hurt or tempt along the way -- is just as good. Some of the actors are from The Wire or Oz. Others -- like Bill Irwin, who's usually clowning around, but plays it menacingly straight here as a white-collar mobster -- are impeccably, inventively cast.

FX sent out all 13 episodes of this first season for review, and it's obvious why. They keep getting better and better, and the path to the hoped-for comeback bout is anything but straightforward. Each episode ends, at the closing credits, with a boxing-ring bell going off, like it's signaling the end of another round. And often, based on what you've just watched, it feels that way. You'll want to head back to your neutral corner and take a rest. Not only after the scenes that take place inside the ropes, but all of them. Lights Out is that intense -- and that good.

With an all-veteran cast and twisting plotline, the series has set rating records to top a total of 11 viewership rankings on the streaming site iQiyi and has reached a television audience of nearly 320 million with its broadcast on China Central Television's channel 8.

Simultaneously streamed overseas, the drama has been translated to more than eight subtitled languages, including English, Spanish and Korean, to reach viewers in North America, Southeast Asia and Europe.

The show's overwhelming popularity has also sparked a frenzy in various related fields, ranging from boosting tourism in Guangdong province's Jiangmen, its filming location, to a surge in sales of sixth-century strategist Sun Tzu's treatise The Art of War, the favorite book of the drama's top villain Gao Qiqiang.

Graduating with an arts management major from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, Zhu shifted his interest to script writing after earning an opportunity to pen the novel adaptation of director Xu Jizhou's acclaimed military-themed TV series Designation Forever in the early 2010s.

For the first several years, Zhu recalls that he resided in a small bungalow nestled in a hutong in downtown Beijing's Dongsishitiao area, where it was easy to observe people from different walks of life.

Consisting of 39 episodes, the drama stars actors Zhang Songwen and Zhang Yi, who respectively play a fishmonger-turned-gang boss and a devoted police officer, recounting how they turn from friends to foes over a period of two decades.

3a8082e126