30-Second Overview: In 2015, Mu Yao 4 Super Play launched on Macabe Network TV; the first "One Day Series" episode appeared in 2016, and a dedicated YouTube channel was established in 2017. The show’s most intriguing aspect is not sending celebrities like Tai Zhi-yuan, KID, or Winnie to work for a day, but placing craftspeople, aides, and behind-the-scenes staff—who are rarely the protagonists—into a scene that can be watched by the entire island. Mu Yao appears to be turning celebrities into ordinary people; in reality, it is turning the invisible expertise of ordinary jobs into a mass-audience program.
When Tai Zhi-yuan first climbed a power tower, the real difficulty wasn’t whether to be funny in front of the camera. The iron wires at the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) Training Center required him to cut them more than ten times before succeeding. Climbing high-voltage towers required wearing safety gear and ascending step by step along the rungs. The Taipower Monthly later documented this shoot, noting that he changed two or three work uniforms due to sweat.
This is a fitting object for understanding Mu Yao 4 Super Play: a pair of iron shears that cannot be cut, rather than a pretty view count. The show places celebrities in work environments, but this does not make the work easier. On the contrary, the celebrities’ clumsiness suddenly gives shape to the expertise that was previously hidden by daily routine.
📝 Curator’s Note: The most valuable "special effects" of Mu Yao are often the hosts’ initial failures. Failure is not edited into a single inspirational slogan; instead, it retains the sense of time spent with swollen fingers, inability to climb, and the need to start over.
From Live Streaming to Trial-and-Error in the "One Day" Series
Mu Yao 4 Super Play did not initially know what it would become. National Taiwan Normal University research places it in a "post-television" context: the program combines television variety production experience, Macabe’s live streaming platform, and a YouTube format that allows audiences to actively rewatch and discuss. The research also notes that chat and sponsorship interactions during live streaming allow audiences to not only watch the program but also gradually form a "Mu Yao" community. 1
Macabe General Manager Liao Chi-chang recalled in an interview with The Manager that Macabe started with online live streaming in 2013, and Mu Yao 4 Super Play launched in 2015. The team initially tried live streaming but found that celebrities were not necessarily suited to handing every second over to the audience. Later, they inserted pre-recorded VCRs into the live stream, allowing Tai Zhi-yuan to return to a more familiar editing-driven variety rhythm. 2
This turning point was crucial. Mu Yao did not simply transplant television intact to YouTube, nor did it discard all television experience. It retained the sense of a regularly broadcast program, while leveraging the conditions of online video—longer lifespan, repeat viewing, and real-time response—to slowly find its own feel.
On October 20, 2016, the first "One Day Series" episode appeared. In February 2017, the team established a separate Mu Yao 4 Super Play YouTube channel. Early planning did not go viral immediately; instead, it gradually tested whether audiences would watch someone complete a workflow through topics like "One Day as a Player," "One Day as a Variety Show Staff Member," and "One Day as a 7-Eleven Clerk." 3
Source: National Taiwan Normal University thesis, Gongzhi, The Manager, Mu Yao 4 Super Play Official YouTube
Why "One Day Mayor’s Aide" Is More Than Political Propaganda
On July 5, 2018, Tai Zhi-yuan followed Ko Wen-je from 6:30 AM until evening, filming a nearly hour-long video titled One Day Mayor’s Aide. The video surpassed 3 million views in less than four days after going online. The Mu Yao 4 Super Play official video page still retains the original 58:15 length. 4 5
The numbers are striking, but what is more worth watching is how the power of filming is exchanged. The Taipei City Government team stated in an interview that they chose to let the Mayor accommodate the YouTuber’s existing culture and segments, rather than having the government lead the filming method. This statement is both a propaganda strategy and an acknowledgment of risk: once a political figure enters a web program, they cannot fully control who the audience considers the protagonist. 6
The video allows the audience to see the Mayor taking the bus, attending meetings, and running schedules, while also making aides Huang Ching-ying, Ko Yu-an, and Liu Yi-ting visible. However, one cannot equate a high view count directly with successful public communication. It remains content co-produced by the City Government and the program team; viewers may be attracted by the political figure, or they may simply want to see if Tai Zhi-yuan can make it to the end of the day. Mu Yao’s influence lies in this hybridity: it is not news reporting, yet it transforms political daily life into something many are willing to watch for 58 minutes.
📝 Curator’s Note: The most counter-intuitive aspect of "One Day Mayor’s Aide" is not that internet celebrities can approach politics, but that politics must first accept a viewing method not centered on official documents before it has the chance to be seen.
The Manager records that Ko Yu-an believed the filming should start from the perspective of citizens. The same report also preserves Liu Yi-ting’s description of online promotion as "walking a tightrope." Putting these voices together reveals that Mu Yao did not eliminate the boundary between political propaganda and entertainment content; it merely moved the boundary in front of the audience. 6
Making Taipower Employees the People in the Story
If "One Day Mayor’s Aide" brings public power into web variety, "One Day Taipower Employee" brings infrastructure into the audience’s living room. The Taipower Monthly records that this collaborative video reached 1 million views ten days after upload, and exceeded 1.41 million by January 2019. The timing and sources of these numbers are clear, so they should not be rewritten into an unchanging "myth of breaking one million."
Filming initially took place at the Datun Power Plant, but the production team found that automated equipment was professional yet difficult for audiences to see the physical burden of frontline work. Thus, filming shifted to the Kaohsiung Training Center, allowing Tai Zhi-yuan to start by cutting iron wires and further attempting to climb high-voltage towers. The Taipower official article specifically emphasizes full safety equipment and industrial safety requirements, reminding us: the danger in the program cannot be treated merely as a punchline; it must be supported by professional standards.
One Day Taipower Employee still carries the image the partner hopes to convey and should not be misread as a completely neutral labor record. But the program allows the audience to see at least one profession that usually only appears during power outages: Taipower employees are not abstract roles in electricity policy debates, but people who cut iron wires, climb towers, and enter emergency centers before typhoons.
This is what researchers call a "social perspective": the topics of the One Day Series may not be more unfamiliar than traditional television; the difference is that the host must actually enter the work process, placing the craftsman’s demonstration, the host’s failures, and post-production rhythm into the same narrative. 1
The Laughter of Variety and the Labor Behind the Scenes
At the end of 2018, the program appeared at YouTube FanFest, with TechOrange recording Tai Zhi-yuan’s naming of his new identity as "YArtist" in the article "YArtist." This term is funny yet precise: he did not transform from a TV celebrity into a completely different person, but rather moved existing celebrity skills to a platform requiring continuous cultivation of audience relationships. 7
The true protagonist of the program is therefore not only in front of the camera. Research indicates that the Mu Yao production team combines television and new media experience. The Manager records the team’s process from live streaming failures and difficulty finding ads to establishing a fixed audience through original planning. These data point to a less romantic but more reliable answer: the "naturalness" of web programs requires many production decisions behind the scenes. 1 2
They do not film every profession as an unboxing review. Liao Chi-chang said in an interview that planning must find the hardship or novelty behind the work, allowing the audience to empathize. For enterprises, a beautiful factory is not a sufficient reason; the question of whether the "One Day" format can hold is whether it can make strangers feel that this work is worth understanding. 2
In 2020, CommonWealth Magazine English discussed Taiwan’s YouTube monetization, mentioning that a Mu Yao collaboration with "This Group" received 2.88 million views, reminding us that web creators face highly unstable attention and income structures. This English report is not a Mu Yao exclusive interview, but it provides an important external benchmark: a video having millions of views does not mean the team has stable content production conditions from then on. 8
After Going Viral, Can the Program Stay?
The Trending News (Wangluo Wenduji) used KEYPO to observe website, social media, discussion forums, and blog texts from December 2018 to December 2021, compiling the "One Day Series" topics with higher audience discussion. The article itself explains that the ranking represents online buzz, not voting or positive/negative evaluation. 9 This limitation cannot be omitted, because "being discussed" and "being liked" are two different things.
Another problem the program later faced was how to continue a program that grew up relying on team chemistry after organizational changes. An updated article in The Manager in 2023 records that Chen Bai-hsiang stated the company underwent restructuring due to policy; some were laid off, some resigned because they could not accept the arrangements, and the production team had left the company. The article also records that subsequent filming of the One Day Series would be led by Liao Chi-chang. What can be confirmed here is the organizational change; it cannot fill in the reasons for leaving for any individual beyond what the sources state. 10
This ending makes the four words "Mu Yao Spirit" dangerous. If we attribute the program’s success to a host’s personality, we miss the planners, camera operators, editors, partners, and craftspeople. If we attribute success to a replicable formula, we pretend that team restructuring will not change the program’s "flavor." What Mu Yao leaves behind is not an answer sheet for "internet celebrity successology," but a question: when the audience loves the way a group works together, how does the program rebuild trust after that group changes?
The Program Craft of the One Day Series: Breaking "Work" into Watchable Steps
The "One Day Series" appears to be one person doing a day’s work, but actually contains at least four production layers. The first layer is career selection: the topic must have a sense of novelty, yet cannot be completely unrelated to the audience’s life. The second layer is on-site teaching: the host does not directly receive a job title, but must first accept training on tools, safety, and procedures. The third layer is failure and retry: the host’s unfamiliarity provides punchlines, but also makes the craftsman’s proficiency visible. The fourth layer is post-production, compressing long hours of work into a narrative the audience is still willing to follow. Both research and production team interviews indicate that Mu Yao’s format was gradually explored between live streaming, pre-recording, interaction, and commercial pressure, rather than having a complete formula from the start. 1 2
These four layers also explain why ordinary "unboxing" is insufficient. Unboxing usually only requires displaying an object. The One Day Series requires the program to place the object back into a set of work relationships: who teaches the host, who checks safety, who is responsible for cleaning up the failure, who continues to finish the work after the host leaves. When Liao Chi-chang discussed planning, he emphasized that products or fields provided by enterprises cannot be filmed just because they "feel beautiful"; they must also make external audiences feel the hardship, novelty, or universal value of the work. 2
| Program Layer | What the Audience Sees | The Work Easily Ignored |
|---|---|---|
| Career Selection | A strange or rarely filmed profession | How planners judge whether the topic has public interest |
| On-site Training | Host holding tools, wearing gear, listening to instructions | Craftsman teaching, industrial safety, and risk management |
| Failure & Retry | Clumsiness, errors, correction, and renewed challenge | Proficiency is the result of long-term training, not an innate reaction |
| Post-production Narrative | Punchlines, rhythm, and a complete episode story | How editing decides which labor is kept and which is omitted |
Therefore, Mu Yao’s "naturalness" is not without design, but rather design hidden where the audience need not pay attention. When the audience sees Tai Zhi-yuan failing to cut the iron wire, they usually do not simultaneously think of the camera position, the industrial safety officer’s judgment, the waiting time on site, and how editing composes repeated failures into a comprehensible segment. It is precisely this hidden production labor that makes the work in front of the camera appear to happen naturally.
View Counts Are Not the Same Thing
One Day Mayor’s Aide breaking 3 million views in less than four days after its 2018 launch is a speed record at the time of the event; the 58:15 on the official video page is the length of the work itself; The Trending News’s KEYPO compilation of discussion buzz over a period represents the degree of online discussion; CommonWealth Magazine English’s mention of 2.88 million views for a collaboration video is an external review in a 2020 article. These numbers are all potentially real, but they answer different questions and cannot be mixed into a dateless "Mu Yao has many views." 4 5 8 9
This distinction is important for understanding web culture. View counts are platform counts, buzz is a data analysis result, on-site reaction is media reporting, and public communication is an effect much harder to measure directly. When a political collaboration video quickly breaks millions of views, it can at most say it successfully gained attention; whether the audience thereby understands municipal affairs, supports policies, or changes voting judgment, existing sources do not provide sufficient causal evidence. Conversely, the report’s reminder of "walking a tightrope" precisely illustrates that both cooperating parties know entertainment effect and public persuasion are not the same. 6
Collaboration Does Not Equal Neutrality: A Reading Method for the One Day Series
Mu Yao’s craftsman videos often require government agencies, enterprises, or event organizers to provide venues and personnel. This allows the program to obtain work sites difficult for general production teams to access, and gives partners the opportunity to explain their own image. The Taipower Monthly describes One Day Taipower Employee from Taipower’s public service perspective; the Taipei City Government Department of Public Works’ Park and Streetlight Engineering Management Office records One Day Streetlight Maintenance Worker from the perspective of streetlight maintenance and citizen safety. These primary articles are important, but they cannot be treated as completely neutral third-party observations. 11
A more reliable reading method is not to exclude collaborative sources, but to simultaneously ask three questions: Who provided the filming conditions? What does the article want readers to see? What things are still not filmed? Taking streetlight maintenance as an example, the official article clearly writes about pre-shift training, tools, safety measures, the 1999 reporting system, daytime inspection, and nighttime emergency repair; this makes the profession’s workflow concrete, but it remains an article published by the collaborating agency and cannot alone represent the work experience of all streetlight maintenance personnel. 11
This reading method also applies to "One Day Mayor’s Aide." The program brings the Mayor’s work before the audience, while the Taipei City Government team publicly stated the hope to let the Mayor accommodate the YouTuber’s existing culture, rather than having the government lead the content. Both are part of the truth: the program indeed obtained a special viewing entry, and the government team indeed had to face the interpretation risks brought by entertainment. Portraying one side as manipulating and the other as purely passive would instead weaken the complexity of this episode that is truly worth preserving. 6
Why "One Day" Leaves Memories More Easily Than Simple Interviews
Interviews allow craftspeople to explain work; the One Day Series allows the audience to see how that explanation happens physically. Whether wearing gear is too hot, how far the ladder must be carried, how many times a line fault must be checked, when the day’s schedule ends—these are not pieces of information that can be replaced by a single sentence saying "work is hard." Cases from Taipower and streetlight maintenance show that the program breaks work into a series of observable actions, allowing the audience the chance to link abstract hardship back to a concrete site. 11
On the other hand, this form has clear boundaries. The host only does one day; the craftsman must bear the consequences long-term; the camera can stop before danger rises, but real workers cannot rely on editing to avoid risk every day. Therefore, the best function of the One Day Series is not to claim "I already understand this work," but to let the audience know they originally did not understand, and begin to pay attention to details like training, tools, safety, and time.
The Visibility of Ordinary Work Is Not Yet Complete
The Taipei City Government Department of Public Works’ Park and Streetlight Engineering Management Office recorded in a 2019 article that Tai Zhi-yuan and Hsieh Kun-ta followed streetlight seniors to receive pre-shift education, tool and safety training, and then moved from daytime inspection to nighttime emergency repair. This is not the program’s own promotional copy, but a work site record left by the collaborating agency; it places the public value of the "One Day Series" on a concrete question: Who is maintaining the roads citizens walk past every day? 11
Mu Yao’s achievement lies not in introducing every profession completely; one video cannot replace training, certificates, and industrial safety standards, nor can it allow the audience to understand the full complexity of Taipower, police, aides, or concert backstages after just one viewing. What it can do is open a normally closed door for a few hours, allowing the audience to see someone practicing repeatedly behind it.
The footage of Tai Zhi-yuan failing to cut the iron wire, the 58 minutes of aides guiding the way in the City Government, and the 1 hour 46 minute record of concert backstage work in the official video 12 all ultimately point to the same thing: Taiwan’s daily life is not maintained by "ordinariness," but by many invisible professions. Mu Yao lets celebrities temporarily become apprentices, and lets the audience temporarily drop the illusion that "this work should be simple."
It appears to be turning celebrities into ordinary people; on a deeper level, it is reminding us that ordinary people never have ordinary work.
Further Reading
Taiwan YouTuber Industry and Culture
References
- National Taiwan Normal University: Venturing in Post-Television, Online Live Streaming, and YouTube Platforms: Innovation in Taiwan Variety Content — 2022 Master’s thesis abstract, using convergence culture analysis to examine Mu Yao’s multi-media production, audience interaction, One Day Series, and advertising models.↩234
- The Manager: Mu Yao 4 Super Play Producer Chen Bai-hsiang and Behind-the-Scenes Team Exit Program! From Past Lows to Turning Around, Gaining Million Subscribers, What Is the Key to Success? — 2023 updated team interview, preserving interview content on live streaming trial-and-error, VCR turning point, original planning, and production team restructuring.↩2345
- Gongzhi: How Web Culture and Commerce Coexist: How Does the "One Day Series" Respond to New Forms of Variety Programs? — 2019 media culture article, tracing the development context of the first One Day Series episode, YouTube channel establishment, program format, and sponsorship transparency.↩
- SETN News / Yahoo News: Ko’s One-Day Aide Breaks 3 Million; Netizens: Hundred Days Breaks 100 Million — 2018 event report, recording the video surpassing 3 million views in less than four days after going online and the time scope of Tai Zhi-yuan’s one-day follow-up.↩2
- Mu Yao 4 Super Play Official YouTube: One Day Mayor’s Aide — Program’s official video page, directly confirming the title of the 69th episode and the 58:15 length, serving as the entry point for the program’s original material.↩2
- The Manager: How Did "One-Day Aide" Rush 3 Million Traffic in 4 Days? Ko Yu-an: Pushing the Strongest Ad "Uncle with Built-in Traffic" to the Frontline — 2018 interview, collecting statements from the Taipei City Government team on cooperation methods, web culture, political propaganda risks, and aide reactions.↩234
- TechOrange: Mu Yao 4 Super Play Appears Lively at YouTube FanFest, Grandpa Tai Zhi-yuan: We Are "YArtist"! — 2018 YouTube FanFest on-site report, recording the Mu Yao team led by Tai Zhi-yuan attending, and the self-naming "YArtist."↩
- CommonWealth Magazine English: The Race to Monetize YouTube Fame — 2020 English article, focusing on Taiwan YouTube monetization, mentioning view counts for Mu Yao and other creators’ collaboration videos, and explaining the instability of attention, advertising, and income.↩2
- The Trending News: One Day Series Most Popular Topics Released! Mu Yao 4 Super Play Iron Fans, Which Episode Do You Love Most? — 2021 buzz analysis article, explaining KEYPO’s observation period and data scope, and clearly distinguishing online discussion buzz from poll evaluations.↩2
- ETtoday News / LINE TODAY: Mu Yao 4 Super Play Production Team Resigns Collectively; He Reveals the Inside Story of Leaving — 2024 article organizing the 2023 team restructuring, Chen Bai-hsiang and A-Liang’s departure, and subsequent arrangements stated publicly; this text only adopts organizational change facts directly supported by the article.↩
- Taipei City Government Department of Public Works’ Park and Streetlight Engineering Management Office: Who Knows the Hardship of Streetlight Maintenance Workers? Mu Yao 4 One-Day Experience — 2019 collaborating agency article, recording streetlight maintenance training, tool safety, daytime inspection, nighttime emergency repair, and the public service context of the program filming.↩234
- Mu Yao 4 Super Play Official YouTube: One Day Concert Backstage Staff — Program’s official 101st episode video page, directly confirming the Mayday concert backstage staff topic and the 1:46:20 length, serving as the entry point for observing backstage work narratives.↩