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This talk explains the significance of an unlikely encounter between Wang Shuo, a writer who became infamous in the 1980s for his transgressive portraits of the Beijing underclass, and a nascent Chinese television industry searching for a popular and economic model for the media. This challenge led the television workers of the Beijing Television Arts Center to look abroad for models - Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas, Japanese asadoras - and domestically to the colloquial language, archetypes, and sentimentality of Wang Shuo鈥檚 fiction. The BTAC synthesized these influences into the shineiju (studio drama), a model that reflected both the demands of the industry and an emerging postsocialist ideology of domesticity. Despite being instrumental in its creation, Wang quickly turned on a televisual culture that he found empty, dishonest and oppressive. Wang鈥檚 contribution to and eventual disaffection with television points to problems of television that span capitalist and socialist, Eastern and Western media environments.