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# China's first full-length AI-generated TV series premieres in prime time
- URL: https://www.metatalks.ai/china-first-full-length-ai-generated-tv-drama-series-prime-time/
- Published: 2026-09-17T13:43:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T14:12:15.000Z
- Author: Al
- Tags: News, GenerativeAI, #newswire

**Hunan TV's The Later Journey to the West was generated with ByteDance's Seedance models, while a crew of about 100 handled design, editing and the scenes the AI got wrong**

The show, a fantasy adventure based on a centuries-old sequel to the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, began airing on August 31\. Its hero, a young monkey born from stone, battles monsters on a new pilgrimage. Thirty episodes of about 40 minutes each are planned. Five have aired so far, and the next batch is held for the winter break.

Every image comes from Seedance 2.0 and 2.5, with no live-action actors or filmed footage, and separate tools took care of lip-syncing and picture quality. The Chinese tech outlet [Huxiu](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/0xPW0LXVahvg8QFqQXNBGQ?ref=metatalks.ai), which calls it the country's first long-form AI-generated series, talked to the people behind it in an interview [translated by the ChinAI newsletter](https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-374-chinas-first-ai-generated).

People steered the process throughout. About 70 of the crew wrote prompts, set up shots and picked which generated clips to keep, and some 15 artists drew the concept art that fixed the show's look.

Each 30-second clip was held to one to three shots, leaving the cutting to human editors. The first two finished episodes, more than 80 minutes, were scrapped and remade when the emotions and story logic rang false. Mango TV's technology chief reckons generation is perhaps 40% of professional film and TV production, with editing, asset management and finishing work making up the rest.

Viewers were split, according to Huxiu. Some liked its Eastern look, while others found the AI actors stiff, the pacing slow and the result plainly artificial. The technology chief acknowledges that long sequences still lose consistency, complex movements are error-prone and subtle facial expressions come out flat.