Q Series: How a Laptop Maker Planted the Seeds of Taiwan's TV Drama Revival

30-second overview: In August 2016, eight Taiwanese TV dramas premiered at once, with a creative lineup that included hall-of-fame directors like Tsai Ming-liang and Chen Yu-hsun — yet the casts were, almost without exception, freshly trained newcomers. The backer was Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢), chairman of Pegatron Corporation, a tech figure who built his career on contract-manufacturing laptops. Q Series (植劇場) ran on counterintuitive logic: pair the most seasoned masters with the greenest apprentices, and pour resources into the "seed" rather than the "fruit." Two years later, names like Greg Hsu (許光漢), Chen Yu (陳妤), and Liu Kuan-ting (劉冠廷) had emerged from that cohort of 24 new actors, and the Taiwanese drama industry had one more piece of proof: genre diversity really could survive in Taiwan.

At the end of 2014, director Wang Shaudi called seven old friends and asked one direct question: "Are you willing to spend your time mentoring newcomers?"
On the other end of the line were Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Yu-hsun, Chu Yu-ning, Hsu Chieh-hui, Hsu Fu-chun, Wang Ming-tai, and An Che-yi — directors who had each spent decades building their names in Taiwanese cinema and television. In that era, hiring people of this caliber was usually about chasing high ratings or a big production. But what Wang Shaudi meant was exactly what she said: mentoring newcomers.

From more than 300 applicants, she picked 24 promising newcomers she nicknamed the "Good Planting Apprentices" (好植之徒) — a play on the "to plant" character (植) in Q Series' own Chinese name — and sent them first into the "Q Place" acting studio she had founded and led.
Training ran from the physical forms of Peking opera and the rhythm of clowning to the movement vocabulary of modern dance, all meant to recalibrate the modern body under the discipline of traditional theater.
After training, these 24 trainees' first real battlefield was the eight-drama lineup of Q Series (植劇場).
Wang Shaudi was clear about the intent behind the design: "Q Series is a plot of ground where we can breathe freely and grow together — it's not just a place for the little Q actors to hone their craft, but somewhere directors, screenwriters, and crew all support each other and improve together." (As quoted on Wikipedia, in Wang's own words)

A Laptop Maker's Cultural Gamble

The whole project needed funding, and that funding came from someone who, at first glance, seemed to have nothing to do with television: Tung Tzu-hsien, chairman of Pegatron Corporation. In Taiwan's tech industry, Tung made his name as a co-founder of ASUS and later as the leader of Pegatron's Apple contract-manufacturing business — a textbook hardware-industry patriarch. At the same time, he has spent years supporting Eslite Bookstore, sponsoring Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集), investing in the drama A Touch of Green (一把青), and funding the Yang Mu Literature Prize. Moving back and forth between the tech industry and the arts has long been part of his personal style.

In 2016, he funded Q Series into existence through Yishuo Culture Creative (藝碩文創), one of his ventures. Viewed through a business lens, the decision made no sense: pairing the most senior directors with the least famous actors, in an environment squeezed hard by Korean and Chinese dramas, guaranteed neither ratings nor a return on investment. When Tung was later asked about his motive, a company executive relayed his attitude as "a love for arts, creativity, and talent cultivation that has never let up." To him, the project looked less like a bid for short-term profit and more like a long-term investment in Taiwan's cultural ecosystem.

Wang Shaudi's own explanation of the investment logic was more direct. In an interview with BIOS monthly, she said plainly: "This game had already stopped being fun! So we wanted to make the game more interesting." Behind this stubborn insistence on "making the game fun" was a deep pushback against how formulaic and idol-driven Taiwanese TV dramas had become at the time. Through this platform, she hoped creators could stop being held hostage by ratings pressure and rediscover the joy and courage of telling stories.

📝 Curator's Note
Pairing the most senior masters with the greenest apprentices turns out to be an accelerant for cultivating talent, not a handicap.
Pulling apprentices into the highest-standard working environment in the shortest possible time isn't simple charity — it's high-efficiency, hands-on teaching.
What Taiwan's film and television industry has never lacked is talent. What it has lacked is a professional space like Q Series that can tolerate failure and make room for experimentation.

Eight Dramas, Four Genres

Q Series' full lineup comprised 8 dramas totaling 52 episodes, precisely split into four core thematic genres. Each genre contained two standalone dramas with sharply different styles, running in a year-long strip broadcast on TTV, GTV, and PTS starting in August 2016. The "genre drama" experiment was itself a declaration: Taiwan's television screens shouldn't be limited to idol dramas and long-running soaps.

The spread across these four genres forcibly widened Taiwanese audiences' sense of what a "TV drama" could even be. Homegrown drama production was in a slump at the time, with imported series crowding out room for local work. Through this planned, serialized output, Q Series proved that homegrown genre dramas were fully capable of competing with imported shows on both production quality and storytelling.

New Faces Inside the Love Sandstorm

In 2016, a young man who had just transitioned out of singing-trainee status, still adrift in the entertainment industry, got word he'd been cast in Q Series. In Love Sandstorm, he played a handsome, slightly comic senior; he then took on a young man with an intellectual disability and sexual compulsions in Teacher Jiang, Have You Ever Been in Love? — a role that demanded intense physicality and tightly restrained emotion. During filming, he admitted to the media that the process was "incredibly grueling."

That young man's name is now a household one: Greg Hsu. His striking performance in Teacher Jiang earned him his first nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, at the 52nd Golden Bell Awards. This isn't just a story of a newcomer's breakout — it's proof of how powerful Q Series' mentor-apprentice system really was: veteran directors like Wang Shaudi and Chen Yu-hsun personally coached these "little Qs," who had zero real-world experience, right there on set.

Chen Yu and Liu Kuan-ting also shone through Q Series. Chen Yu won the Golden Bell Award for Best New Performer for Love Sandstorm, while Liu Kuan-ting sharpened his craft across several series. This is where Q Series' logic found its firmest validation: you don't need to play it safe by casting people who are already famous. Given the right professional environment and enough rehearsal time, complete unknowns can bloom just as brilliantly under the industry's most demanding standards.

Hua-Jia Boy Turned Rural Taichung Into a Stage

Of the eight dramas, none reached further into everyday life, or drew higher ratings, than Hua-Jia Boy Grows Up. Adapted from novelist Yang Fu-min's book Hua-Jia Boy, it was directed by Chu Yu-ning, known for his skill at capturing local sentiment. He took the bold step of casting singer Crowd Lu, who had zero acting experience, as Zheng Hua-jia — a 28-year-old college dropout and small-town loser who grew up in his family's ancestral hall.

In 2017, with Korean hits like Descendants of the Sun dominating the airwaves, this show fought its way through on the raw energy of Taiwanese and Mandarin woven together. The premiere episode broke a 1.22% rating, and a long-take shouting-match scene afterward flooded social media, setting off a nationwide conversation about rural ties and family bonds. The frenzy eventually led to the 2018 film adaptation, Hua-Jia Adult Turns Boy, successfully turning a television experiment into a Lunar New Year theatrical hit.

The show's success carried a significance that went far beyond itself: it broke the prejudice that "local subject matter equals tacky." With polished cinematography and a solid script structure, a rural Taiwanese funeral and its tangle of family drama could become as gripping a contemporary myth as any Korean drama. It made the industry believe again that as long as the story is good enough and the characters feel real enough, Taiwanese audiences will absolutely pay for stories about their own land.

The Real Weight of the Golden Bell Scorecard

The numbers from two Golden Bell Awards ceremonies make up Q Series' most striking objective scorecard. At the 52nd Golden Bell Awards in 2017, the first five Q Series dramas together landed 24 nominations in one go, a new record for a single production outfit. By the 53rd Golden Bell Awards in 2018, Hua-Jia Boy Grows Up picked up the baton, sweeping multiple major awards and pushing this gentle revolution to its peak.

These awards were spread across different production teams, confirming that Q Series wasn't propped up by a single "masterpiece" but reflected an industry-wide rise in standards. Hua-Jia's sweep at the 53rd Golden Bell Awards in particular symbolized a rare alignment, on the Q Series platform, between popular taste and professional judging. Crowd Lu, a singer by trade, taking both Best Actor and Best New Performer became a record that has proven almost impossible to match since, in Golden Bell history.

After the Rules of the Game Changed: Aftershocks and Reflection

After Q Series' first season wrapped, it wasn't all flowers and applause — it also set off a serious debate about labor conditions in film and television production. Critics pointed out that this "charity-style" structure, of veterans pulling up juniors, was in commercial terms hard to sustain for long. In late 2017, reports surfaced of delayed screenwriter pay and disputes over layoffs at Q Series; Wang Shaudi responded with a joint statement affirming that the accounts were transparent and stressing how difficult talent cultivation actually is.

For Wang Shaudi, this was never a perfect social experiment — it was a pond that had to be stirred up just to "stay alive." In her public response, she admitted she wasn't deliberately trying to challenge some grand system; it was simply that the existing way of making dramas had already exhausted the talent pool. Even though Hao Feng Guang Creative Productions (好風光創意執行), the company behind the project, went through organizational restructuring after the first season, that didn't mean the experiment was over. The biggest asset it left behind was proof, for whoever came next, that Taiwanese audiences have taste — they are waiting for stories about humanity that don't all look alike.

Q Series 2 (茁劇場): The Seeds Take Root and Flourish

In 2021, the spirit of Q Series was formally revived under the name Q Series 2 (茁劇場). Wang Shaudi once again gathered a new generation of directors and screenwriters, trying to carry the talent revolution forward. This time, they focused not just on discovering actors, but also turned their attention to adapting Taiwanese literature, trying to give Taiwanese dramas more textual depth. The seeds planted in that first season have, by now, grown into trees tall enough to cast shade over Taiwan's film and television industry.

Names like Greg Hsu, Liu Kuan-ting, Sun Ko-fang (孫可芳), Chen Yu, and Chiang Yi-jung (江宜蓉) are now regulars on the Golden Horse and Golden Bell Awards nomination lists. They're no longer the nervous "little Qs" — they're professionals who can carry a project on their own, moving both ratings and artistic reputation. More importantly, Q Series changed how Taiwan's film and television industry sees "newcomers": give them systematic support, and newcomers become the industry's single strongest force for renewal. That logic — invest in people, not in traffic — has become an important foundation for why Taiwanese dramas have been able to shine on international platforms in recent years.

In 2024, when people look back at the history of Taiwan's TV drama revival, they often point to the arrival of Netflix and Disney+ money. But before the big international platforms formally set foot in Taiwan, there was a group of people who had already planted these restless seeds in the late-night slots of TTV and PTS. It was a hard-fought battle won with no big-data forecasting and no traffic-star endorsements — won purely on professional devotion to drama itself.

What it left behind wasn't just a handful of good shows, but an answer that's still sprouting to this day: it turns out Taiwanese TV drama could be more than this all along.

Further Reading:

• Golden Bell Awards — the award where When Night Falls, Close Your Eyes and Hua-Jia Boy Grows Up won Best Drama Series in back-to-back years, and where "Hao Feng Guang" first appeared in the winning-unit column

References

• 植劇場系列 - 維基百科 (primary source: full documentation of the project)
• 「年輕一代會說故事，但基本功才是關鍵」：王小棣專訪 - BIOS monthly (2016 interview, on the original intent behind talent cultivation)
• 王小棣從植劇場到茁劇場，培養新人溫柔改革台劇 - Elle Taiwan (2022 report, looking back at the reform's journey)
• 專訪王小棣：相隔四年《植劇場2》重啟，攪動台灣影視大海 - TNL 關鍵評論網 (2024 report)
• 許光漢進軍好萊塢演《尚氣2》的12個故事 - Elle Taiwan (2024 retrospective on the actor's career development)
• 植劇場「撤資收攤真相」！內部高層還原真相 - ETtoday 星光雲 (2017 report on the funding and organizational dispute)
• 植劇場—花甲男孩轉大人 - 維基百科 (viewership and social-impact record)
• 植劇場說出根植台灣的故事，王小棣分享內心燃燒的種源 - Tatler Asia (2021 interview)
• 許光漢、劉冠廷接班人？植劇場2公開徵選「8小Q」 - 噓！星聞 (2020 report on the second-generation program)