It seems there's little to connect the hutongs and high-rises of Beijing with the leafy suburban surrounds of Wisteria Lane. Desperate Housewives might have saved the day for the ABC network and topped the ratings from Singapore to South Africa, but the first series has fizzled and flopped in mainland China. The censors certainly did not help its cause. They apparently did not take too kindly to the racy behaviour of Susan, Bree, Lynette, Gabrielle and Edie - and chopped out the racier chunks of the drama. The neutered productions occasionally make gloriously illogical leaps that swallow up many twists and turns, making nonsense of some of the parallel narratives. Dubbed in Putonghua, the script is robbed of its double entendres and often suffers from a flat delivery. All this has spawned an online community of fans who discuss the latest instalments and are constantly asking the enlightened - those who have watched the original on bootleg DVDs or free downloads - to fill in the gaps and make sense of what they have just seen. Loyal watchers tend to number among the young and urban minority, not the masses. In the greater Beijing area, the rating was only 0.7 (700 out of every 100,000 viewers), while in the greater Shanghai area it was just 0.4, according to research by AGBNielsen. And in Guangdong province, as in several other areas around the country, the show did not even register on the ratings radar. The distributors cried foul as three episodes were shown back to back each night on CCTV 8, with the entire first series showing in one week. The rapid-fire broadcasts gave little time for this new audience to soak up the satirical comedy, they argued. Also, the time slot - from 10pm to 1am - was far from favourable in a land of early risers. Yet, other foreign imports have enjoyed considerable success in the same slot. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is not at all crazy about the idea of showing foreign fare that could potentially corrupt the minds of their audience, so they limit their impact with a host of rules. Anything politically charged or 'sensitive' is not allowed in, for a start, and those that do make it are kept far away from prime time. They also refuse to promote the foreign shows. But, even with such little support, some South Korean soaps have managed to pull in more than 10 times as many viewers in Beijing and Shanghai as Desperate Housewives. Their success lies in their similarity to their Chinese counterparts, so the audiences here find them easy to follow. They are often period dramas with lots of exaggerated acting, close-ups of brokenhearted, pretty girls with tears streaming down their chalk-white cheeks, and storylines heavy with moral overtones. The dark comedic antics on Wisteria Lane, however, are a planet apart, teeming with contemporary American cultural references alien to almost all Chinese. According to one Chinese viewer, 42-year-old sales manager Zhang Haihong, the scenarios are implausible: a harried mother constantly takes abuse from her four children; a rich, married woman has an affair with a teenage gardener; a single mother takes sex advice from her adolescent daughter. 'It's not like that in China. America is very different. Crazy,' he said. He wasn't sure whether to blame the censors, poor translation or cultural divide, but the upshot was that he and his wife often struggled to follow it. The United States is fretting about its trade deficit with China, and there are hopes that Hollywood and America's popular culture can go some way to redressing the imbalance. But if this effort to export sex and the sagas of dysfunctional families is anything to go by, they are not yet clicking with the average Chinese consumer. Peter Goff is a Beijing-based journalist
