Taiwan Variety Shows

Taiwan Variety Shows: From _Star Show_ to _Kangsi Coming_ — A Social Stage

30-Second Overview: In 1962, Shen Zhi (慎芝) and Guan Hua-Shi (關華石) took the performances that had belonged to radio and the nightclub stage and moved them into the just-inaugurated TTV studio; Star Show (群星會) thus became Taiwan's first televised song-and-variety program. More than thirty years later, following the liberalization of cable channels, Taiwan variety television entered an explosive period — from Firing Line (連環炮) and Super Sunday (超級星期天) to Kangsi Coming (康熙來了). It did not merely create stars; it shaped an entire generation's way of chatting, needling, and making sense of public events. In the streaming and short-video era, variety has not disappeared — it has simply transformed from a big-tent studio kingdom that required a bit of everything into a craft that is more fragmented, more brutal, and in need of constantly redefining itself.¹²³

In 1962, after TTV launched, Star Show went on the air; Shen Zhi and Guan Hua-Shi moved performances that had been unfolding on radio and at live venues into every household's television set for the first time. When TTV later looked back on this period, it described Star Show directly as "Taiwan's first televised song-and-variety program." It was not merely a program — it was something closer to the live birth of a new grammar: singing, hosting, performance, and star-making began to be packaged into a single media experience.¹

That is also why Taiwan variety television is difficult to understand as simply "comedy programming." What it resembled most closely, at its origin, was a television apparatus that bundled stage, radio, local performance venues, the star industry, and everyday family life into a single form. You could say it was selling entertainment — but it was simultaneously teaching viewers to recognize who counts as a star, who knows how to talk, what counts as decent, what counts as witty, and even what "something Taiwanese people have all watched" means.¹⁴

If one sentence could capture the counterintuitive core of this piece, it would be: The most important function of Taiwan variety television has never been simply making people laugh — it has been inventing, for each era of Taiwan, a shared way of living together in speech.

A Chart First: Taiwan Variety Has Not Been Declining — It Has Been Transforming

The key to early variety was not abundant resources — it was that almost every mode of performance was crammed into a single time slot. TTV materials record that after Star Show, the station went on to develop Happy Weekend (歡樂周末), Jade Flute Silver Strings (翠笛銀箏), Galaxy Spectacle (銀河璇宮), and other forms: some took broadcast trucks outside, some built interviews into song programs, some created elaborate sets and dance troupes as a kind of television spectacle. In other words, Taiwan variety did not evolve along a single line from the very beginning — it was simultaneously branching toward song, short drama, location, and conversation.¹

Supplementary research on early Taiwan variety also notes that between the 1960s and 1980s, variety programs gradually moved from pure singing toward a more theatrical, multi-segment format; the host was no longer just an announcer but someone who had to be able to sing, take cues, throw jokes, and carry emotional energy at the same time. That seems obvious in retrospect — but in those years when television was still a new medium, it was actually redefining what a "television personality" could be.⁶

📝 Curator's Note: The most fascinating thing about Taiwan variety is that it never tried to bring one kind of talent to its absolute peak — it jammed many kinds of performance together until viewers felt "this is tonight's most exciting place to be."

From _Star Show_ Onward: Variety Learned Not to Make People Laugh — It Learned to Make Stars

TTV's description of Star Show is telling. It says that in the era before the Golden Melody Awards, appearing on Star Show was like "being gilded"; the program ran for fifteen years and was broadcast live throughout, with no karaoke tracks and no lip-syncing. That reveals two things: first, variety programming was a star-certification mechanism from the very beginning; second, variety in the live-broadcast era actually depended on performers' genuine live-performance ability.¹

Because of this, Taiwan variety was never simply a content industry from early on — it was simultaneously a machine for launching people. Who got seen, who could recover from a mistake, who could hold the live moment — these things directly determined whether someone could cross from being a singer, an actor, or a nightclub performer into a genuine television star. This star-making capacity later extended into talent competitions, hosting, talk shows, and reality programming; it became something close to the underlying logic of the entire Taiwanese entertainment industry.¹⁶

Interestingly, early variety was not entirely free-wheeling. When TTV looked back at the 1960s, it specifically noted that during the White Terror era, you could not sing just any song or say just anything; television stations were even required to intersperse designated songs by regulation. In other words, Taiwan variety was born into a deeply contradictory environment: it was an outlet for popular entertainment while simultaneously being under heavy discipline. Later, when viewers found variety most delightful, it was often not because it had total freedom — it was because it could always smuggle in a little vitality within the constraints.¹

The Golden Era After 1993: Taiwan Variety Moved All of Society into the Studio

If the free-to-air television era taught variety to make stars, then after cable channels were substantially liberalized in 1993, what Taiwan variety learned was expansion. The News Lens review called this period the unfolding of a golden era and listed a series of programs that still carry memories today: Firing Line from 1986, Super Sunday from 1994, I Guess I Guess I Guess Guess Guess (我猜我猜我猜猜猜) from 1996, Kangsi Coming and Omnibus MV (全民大悶鍋) from 2004. These programs are very different from each other, yet collectively they proved one thing: Taiwan variety was no longer just moving song and dance onto television — it could absorb every emotion from inside society and encode it into a program format.⁴

Super Sunday squeezed reunion searches, short drama, games, and live interaction into a massive emotional machine that only television could produce; I Guess I Guess turned youth, trends, and speculation into a weekly ritual; Kangsi Coming turned the in-studio talk show format into a linguistic competitive arena — stars were no longer just there to promote works; they were there to test whether they could balance on the fine line between humiliation and humor. Taiwan variety's truly impressive moments were almost always those moments: it looked raucous, yet it captured the scent of its era better than many serious programs.⁴

This also explains why many people feel nostalgic for Taiwanese variety — the nostalgia is not for a particular host, but for a social rhythm of "everyone watching the same thing on the weekend." Variety programming in that era functioned as a shared-vocabulary machine in the family living room. The next day at the office, at school, around the dinner table, there was always some segment that could serve as a point of connection. Today's short videos are also very good at generating fragments, but they rarely produce that simultaneous-viewing experience that crosses generations, regions, and social circles.⁴

📝 Curator's Note: A genuine golden era was never about every program having a big budget — it was about everyone knowing that they had all watched the same thing the night before.

Why Taiwan Variety Makes People Feel "It Used to Be More Variety"

A valuable reminder appears in articles recently reviewing the history of Taiwan variety. One quote from Lu Jie (呂捷) is cited: "Taiwanese variety programs today cannot really be called variety, because variety should mean 'comprehensive performing arts' or 'comprehensive skills' — not what we have now, where everything follows a single theme."⁶ This is not mere nostalgia — it identifies a genuine structural shift in Taiwan variety.

When people say "it used to be more variety," they mean that in a single time slot there used to be music, dance, interviews, imitation, short drama, and location shoots, with the host responsible for threading these disparate elements into a continuous flow. The two characters for "variety" (綜藝) originally implied hybridization, patchwork, and orchestration; when programs gradually began to be segmented into talk, quiz, reality, and travel formats, many individual programs became more precise — but they also lost that sense of luxurious, beautiful chaos from having a bit of everything.⁴⁶

Seen from this angle, the criticism that later Taiwan variety became cheap, conservative, and flat-toned was not merely a budget problem — the program formats themselves had narrowed. The News Lens analysis points out that after entering its mature phase, low-cost talk shows were massively duplicated, programs imitated each other, the market was highly competitive yet increasingly short on new ideas. This is not saying any particular program was worse — it is saying the industry as a whole began favoring formats that were lower-risk, faster to turn over, and replicable over the long term.⁴

The Problem Was Never Just Not Having Enough Money — It Was Not Daring to Invent New Formats

After 2010, "the decline of Taiwanese variety" became something close to a consensus — but many diagnoses of the problem are too lazy, reflexively pointing to Korean variety, Chinese mega-productions, and insufficient budgets as the reasons Taiwan was bound to lose. These are all partial truths, not the whole picture. What is genuinely difficult is that when television stations were forced to pursue high cost-performance ratios, what got cut first was almost always R&D capacity: new segments, new modes of performance, new hosting rhythms, new post-production languages — all of these require time and the freedom to fail, and they are precisely the costs most easily eliminated.⁴

When The News Lens discussed this predicament, a Lin Xin-Ru (林心如) quote is worth preserving: "Not every production needs to be a multi-hundred-million extravaganza. If you make something intimate, focus on telling the story well, get the production values right, find the right actors, and put your heart into it — audiences will feel it."⁴ Although she was speaking about drama, it applies equally to variety. What Taiwan variety truly lost, in many instances, was not money — it was the determination to turn limited resources into a distinctive format.

In other words, the problem was never "we don't have as much money as they do" — it was "do we still believe that small-scale and refined can grow its own style?" The reason Firing Line survives in memory is not that it looked lavish but that it used a very spartan form to invent very sharp content. That capacity is now rarer than big productions.⁴

📝 Curator's Note: The genuinely expensive thing about variety programming is usually not the set — it is finding someone willing to risk not being funny in order to try a segment no one has done before.

But Taiwan Variety Has Not Died — It Has Simply Moved

If you only look at traditional free-to-air or cable television, it is easy to reach an overly pessimistic conclusion: Taiwanese variety is finished. But what public media has done in recent years reminds us that variety does not necessarily disappear — it may simply have changed platforms, subject matter, and rhythm. In 2021, when TTV promoted I Already Know But Taiwan History Is Useless? Says Lu Jie (懂了也沒用的台灣史？呂捷表示_), it directly categorized it as an "internet variety program" and arranged it to premiere on the PTS+ platform — meaning historical knowledge can be packaged into six-minute-per-episode internet variety rather than being confined to textbooks or documentaries.³

Lu Jie was very direct about it in the TTV press release: "Taiwan's partisan conflict exists because people don't understand Taiwan's history; not understanding the past means you can't comprehend, can't comprehend means you can't forgive, can't forgive — where does reconciliation come from?"³ These words sound like a new mission for post-transformation Taiwan variety: it doesn't have to serve stars forever — it can serve understanding. It doesn't have to occupy Saturday night's two-hour primetime slot — it can be compressed into a few minutes of content on a phone.

This cross-platform shift is not accidental. The NCC's (National Communications Commission) Communications Industry Survey Platform now lists "television watching behavior and satisfaction," "online streaming video watching behavior," and "residential reception source and viewing device usage" as parallel frameworks within the same observation system. The official categorization itself reveals the reality: audiences have long since stopped living on a single television set; variety programs cannot go on defining themselves through a single broadcast channel.⁵

The Golden Bell Awards Show That Variety Has Always Been Part of the Institution

Variety is often dismissed as insufficiently highbrow, but it has never been a sideshow in Taiwan. Materials from the Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development show that the Golden Bell Awards were founded in 1965, originally focused on radio, with television works incorporated after 1970. In other words, Taiwan very early on placed the audio and visual content that most affects everyday people's lives inside a formal cultural evaluation system.²

This is worth mentioning because it reminds us that variety is not entertainment debris outside of culture — it is an important official history of Taiwan's television culture. It has made stars, offered comfort, offered satire, helped viewers practice speaking in awkward situations, and preserved the island's most unguarded colloquial expressions. Looking at variety as merely a ratings competition underestimates its place in Taiwan's collective memory.²⁴

So — Does Taiwan Still Need Variety?

The answer is probably not "we need the old kind of Taiwanese variety to come back unchanged" — but rather: we need someone to answer again the question of what variety can do, in an era when people no longer watch the same channel simultaneously. Can it still generate a sense of community? Can it take a topic that has gone cold and make it feel human again? Can it, with a limited budget, fragmented audiences, and the heavy hand of platform algorithms, still preserve the ambition of "comprehensive performing arts" — the wild aspiration to bring together different senses, different people, and different emotions?

If what Star Show did in 1962 was move the cabaret into the living room, then what Taiwan variety today perhaps needs to do is take Taiwan — scattered across all its platforms — and move it back to the same table. It does not have to look like Kangsi Coming, and it does not have to return to Super Sunday's scale; but as long as it still has the power to make people say "hey, did you see that last night?" — Taiwan variety is not over.¹³⁵

Further Reading

• Lin You-Jia (Lin Yo-wei) — 2007 winner of Super Idol Season 1; one of the most representative cases of Taiwan's television talent-show star-making mechanism

References