A new strand of AI short drama is taking off on Douyin: series that look like Korean, American or Japanese shows but are made in China for Chinese viewers. A feature by the entertainment account Mirror Entertainment, republished by 36Kr, tracks the trend. Its casts are usually Chinese exchange students from Sichuan and Chongqing, Shandong or the northeast who land at a foreign school, a ferocious Sichuan girl, a carefree northeasterner, a sporty transfer student, even a ghost-catcher from a Miao family, and proceed to set the place straight.
The standout is Pretty Malice, a chaebol-campus story whose fourth episode passed a million likes; its four episodes have drawn more than 120 million views, with a fifth due over the National Day holiday. Viewers crowd the comments demanding proper hour-long episodes "if it's a Korean drama". Others cited include the body-swap drama Misplaced Life, the American-style The Accident, and a Japanese-set series whose title promises a northeastern girl reforming a Japanese high school.
The piece stresses that these shows are not made for audiences abroad. They borrow the look of foreign idol dramas, which shaped China's own idol genre in the first place, and pair it with the payoff structure of domestic short dramas. Korean-style uniforms, chaebol heirs, campus bullying and slow-motion romance signal the genre at once, while the Chinese student's point of view and the odd dialect grumble make them easy to slip into.
Better video tools have made this cheap. The Pretty Malice team says that after Seedance 2.5 arrived, prompting for a "Korean revenge movie style" gave usable results straight away. The two costliest parts of an idol drama, attractive leads and dreamy sets, cost far less with AI, and in a Korean-language setting even the exaggerated mouth movements of AI actors look less out of place.
Uniformly good-looking casts have become standard. The heroine of The Accident closely resembles Anne Hathaway, while its male lead pairs rugged American features with a softer "puppy" appeal, and the Japanese-set series gives each of its heart-throbs a distinct hook. In dramas aimed at women, the article says, the male lead's look is where the most money goes. With AI characters now rendering consistently, it argues, idol drama may be the genre that suits AI best, because the fantasy depends on flawless leads and an idealised romance.
Underneath the foreign styling, the formula is the one domestic short dramas have proven many times over: when you are wronged, you hit back. The settings are imagined rather than researched. The creator of The Accident says their sense of American high school comes entirely from US TV everyone has seen, so the shows recreate the foreign country Chinese audiences picture, not the real one, and that is part of the appeal.
Most therefore follow the same campus clean-up storyline. Pretty Malice's heroine is so oblivious that the malice around her barely registers, yet a string of coincidences topples the chaebol pecking order, and the Japanese-set series puts "rectification" in its title. The article adds that dressing these payoffs in foreign clothes can make them hit harder: a famous Chinese clip of Xue Zhenzhu confronting a mistress was remade with a Korean chaebol family and landed several times harder, though stacking the same payoffs wears thin quickly.
There is also little to stop copying. Once one series hits, near-identical versions follow within weeks, with students from Chaoshan and elsewhere heading to the US, Japan and Korea. Viewers have noticed how much is borrowed: one popular comment under Pretty Malice lists seven Korean dramas it echoes, others say many shows rework Cheongdam International High School, and one fall scene in The Seventh Seat is described as nearly copied from Penthouse. The article warns that treating foreign series as a material library, on the blurry line between homage and plagiarism, carries a real infringement risk.
Multi-channel networks (MCNs) that used to make scripted short videos are driving the boom, having adopted AI short drama as their next format. Pretty Malice comes from OST Media, which has built more than 80 AI accounts; one of them, @Day and Eggplant, gained over 1.3 million followers from a single school drama with a Korean feel before Pretty Malice took the idea further. The earlier hit The Fired Girls came from a team at My Film & TV, whose two Douyin accounts have about 8 million fans between them, and Voice of Wish, Huimeng Media, Gumai Jiahe and Malt Media have all ramped up output in the past month or two.
The article places the trend in a longer line of AI remakes on short-video platforms, from AI versions of Empresses in the Palace and The Story of Ming Lan to fan pairings of Lin Daiyu and Sun Wukong. The business model follows short video: episodes run five to ten minutes and come out one at a time, slowly enough to leave room for more players, the lead characters get their own accounts as AI idols, and apparent product placements for Dewu, Sony and Uni-President drinks have appeared. Misplaced Life went pay-to-unlock from its seventh episode.
Some teams are now trying shorter episodes released all at once, and a title that adds rebirth and "system" tropes to an aristocratic-academy idol story has entered the top ten of Hongguo's new animated-drama chart. The article closes by saying that audiences will eventually want more than recycled payoffs in a foreign costume, and that creators will need to offer more sincerity to keep them.
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