TV industry observers have made much of the hug that Chris Lee, China's first grassroots singer to make the cover of Time Magazine Asia, gave Hua Chenyu, the freshly crowned champion of Super Boy, as the show came to a bittersweet close on Friday night.
As Hua's win comes in an era when dozens of similar TV talent contests are vying for attention amid tighter regulation and increasingly picky audiences, analysts say the 24-year-old will find it harder to sing his way to professional success than Lee did a decade ago.
When the latter rose to fame overnight by winning Super Girl, produced by a satellite station in central China's Hunan province in 2004, Chinese people were dazzled to find that the girl next door could achieve stardom.
Following the success of Super Girl, a clone of American Idol, Chinese TV producers have competed with one another to stage more than 20 similar programs, including The X-Factor, Chinese Idol, I'm A Singer, Let's Sing, Super Star China, Copycat Singers, Chinese Dream and China's Got Talent.
Public excitement has abated as a result.
"There are so many reality shows today, but they are all similar and unattractive," said Dai Guangxiu, 49, who feverishly followed the second season of Super Girl in 2005.
"A show that is much-hyped but with mediocre contestants only makes me want to turn off the TV," Dai said.
The growing audience fatigue has worried both TV producers and China's media authorities.
Wang Tongyuan, president of Zhejiang Radio and TV Group, said that reality shows in China have gone from one extreme to another in recent years.
"Some programs spend a meager 10 million yuan (about 1.63 million U.S. dollars) on production but another 30 million on promotion," he said.
Professor Wang Handong with the School of Journalism and Communication of Wuhan University attributed the homogeneity of these programs to increasingly scarce talent and the over-exploitation of foreign originals.
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