Call me snobbish¹ but I have never hidden my disappointment with Chinese television. In general, that is. I am not ruling out the occasional decent show.

When I flip² through the 60-something channels, I rarely stumble upon anything to my taste. Not educational programming like Discovery or PBS. For that, I have to trek³ to a certain stall in southern China whose owner has a warehouse⁴ of great discs.

Recently, I got a box set of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation⁵, a BBC series that functioned as the "open sesame" to a world of Western civilization for me, while I was a graduate student in Guangzhou, in the early 1980s. My German-born English professor borrowed canisters of films from the British Embassy and for the first time I realized that great art does not necessarily spring from class struggle.

Sure, CCTV10, as well as an array of imitators, is attempting to fill this void. Its runaway⁶ hit The Lecture Room does a service to various aspects of Chinese culture. But a lecture filled with graphics⁷ and footage from period dramas does not equal a good documentary with high production values. And focusing on only a few Chinese classics does not make what Francis Bacon called "a full man". Why not broaden the vista⁸ to embrace other fields, such as modern Chinese literature, or French Impressionist paintings, or Shakespeare?

Speaking of production values, Chinese soap operas have come a long way from the not-too-distant past of shabby costumes and haphazard⁹ lighting¹⁰. But I can hardly bear to put myself through a whole show because I can tell from the first episode what will happen by the grand finale. Worse, whenever a character says his or her line, it is easy for me to predict the follow-up line.

Last month, the publicist of a television company sent me a copy of a high-prestige new show to critique. When he called me up, I said: "Congratulations on a potential hit!"

"So, you liked it," he said.

"No way. I watched only the first hour and it's so formulaic I could quickly tell who would end up with whom by the end. My mother-in-law loved it, though. She is a better barometer¹¹. If I loved your show, it would probably bomb as no middle-aged¹² housewives would swoon with joy or anguish¹³ at the melodrama¹⁴."

As I see it, Chinese television entertainment is a paragon¹⁵ of kitsch, especially as far as variety shows are concerned. When last summer CCTV let ethnic¹⁶ singers use their "original style", audiences were stunned¹⁷: singing without the pretense¹⁸ of overheated emoting, or so-called professional training, could touch our hearts like a force of nature.

You can imagine why it made me laugh when I saw the proclamation this week that China is now officially "the biggest producing and broadcasting country of television drama". Last year we churned out 40 episodes a day, some of which were aired on 90 percent of the country's 1,974 channels.

Now, I don't expect every show to be smart and witty¹⁹ and thought provoking, but just like Hollywood blockbusters, our television programming seems to aim for the lowest common denominator.

For those of you who rely on your tube as a language tool, I have this advice: We Chinese don't actually talk like that in real life. What you see is a parallel universe populated by eerily²⁰ hollow characters, such as 20-somethings who spend a fortune on a meal or otherwise act with no discernable motive²¹.