Rags 2 Richmond star and co-creator Jonathan Wong makes history on South Korean TV show Show! Music Core with single Low Key.
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Released in December, the three-season series Rags 2 Richmond is made up of 30 short episodes (generally between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 minutes) and has been an online hit with close to 10 million views across various platforms.
The series is just one of many digital vertical short series/films that have taken off online as our attention spans shrink and our commutes increase. Platforms like ReelShort, home to a huge range of “micro-dramas,” is a huge success story. According to a Time story, the ReelShort series The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband has raked in more than 419 million views. It’s been reported that the site has 50 million active users and brought in US$40 million in revenue last September.
An ode to early 2000s hip-hop, R&B and Asian pop culture, Rags 2 Richmond tells a story of friendship, ambition and the no-holds-barred hunt for fame and what goes on behind-the-scenes of an entertainment industry looking to cash in on young talent.
At the centre are best friends Nathan (Wong) and Lando (Peter Sudarso) who have dreams of becoming stars and changing the music scene with their ChiDM (China Dope Music) sound. They create a hit single called Low Key, which in real life has garnered a lot of attention outside of the series, including Wong performing it a month ago on South Korean TV’s renowned Show! Music Core, making him the first Hong Kong artist to be on the show.
While the series includes upbeat musical performances, it also pulls back the curtain and shows the dirty deals and shady characters that are the dark reality of the star-making machine.
“I’m more interested in what happens in the green room, and less the crazy stuff that happens onstage,” said Wong, who is also an executive producer for the series. “Of course, the crazy stuff that happens onstage is super-entertaining, and that’s why our show has a certain fun to it.”
Setting the series in Richmond came about when Wong said he discovered that many of the success stories out of the Miss Hong Kong Pageant had Richmond roots.
“That became kind of the impetus to start creating the story and basing it here,” said Wong.
Wong added that the Hong Kong scene was too large and unruly to set their story in, and Richmond offered just the right microcosm for their storytelling plans.
“When you talk about it in … Hong Kong or China, it becomes too big, too vast,” said Wong, co-founder of Octagon Metatainment, which currently includes the Japanese crime-thriller biopic The Handler and Chinese crime novel adaptation Hate Coin on its slate alongside Rags 2 Richmond.
Originally developed during COVID-19 as a TV show, Wong said there were plenty of meetings in L.A. However, those ended with executives loving the concept but, because they had “no point of reference,” they weren’t willing to roll the dice on something this unique.
“Everybody thought it was cool. But they were like, ‘What is another show that’s close to that that has been successful? That we can point to and be like, OK, right?’ ” said Wong. “They’ll always say they want a new thing, but then they kind of want an old thing. So we couldn’t sell it.”
Not willing to ditch their plans, they pivoted.
“Let’s do an MVP. Let’s do a minimum viable product, right? If we can’t green-light the TV show yet, let’s do a digital series and shoot it in nine days and learn from it and collect the data, and see what the audiences like. And see if the audience even cares,” said Wong, who explained the demographic for the digital series is mostly females ages 18 to 41 and is equally spread across Asia and North America.
Once the series went live — and was a hit — with real, live metrics to point to, the phone started ringing.
“We were releasing these seasons, like one week after another and, after the first week, we already started getting these calls from not just the people we spoke to before, but from people we had never spoken to before. So, we’re talking about people in Japan and Malaysia and Korea and from airlines (for inflight entertainment),” said Wong.
Flash-forward to now, and Wong and company have used what they learned from their digital success and are currently putting the finishing touches on a script for a feature film they hope will go to camera this summer.
Wong wouldn’t disclose which studio they’re developing this project with, but did confirm that Richmond would once again play itself.