General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Don't Want To Be Friends With You (我才不要和你做朋友呢)

I Don't Want To Be Friends With You (我才不要和你做朋友呢) is a 2020 Chinese web series in which a rebellious high school girl travels back twenty years to 1999 and becomes friends with her own mother as a teenager. Directed by Tian Yu and written by Cheng Xiaomao and Cheng Mengyan, it ran for 24 episodes on the streaming platform Mango TV beginning 19 May 2020, and became one of the year's best-reviewed youth dramas.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	我才不要和你做朋友呢 (Wo cai bu yao he ni zuo peng you ne)²
Broadcast	Mango TV, 24 episodes, first aired 19 May 2020; episodes about 43 minutes¹
Genre	Campus, youth, fantasy, comedy, romance; time-travel premise¹^•²
Main cast	Chen Haoyu as Li Qingtong, Zhuang Dafei as Li Jinbu, Zhou Yanchen as Duan Xiao, Ma Sichao as Chen Junhe, Gu Zicheng¹^•²
Reception	Douban 8.2/10 from 37,000 users; topped Douban's Chinese-language drama reputation chart³
Streaming total	630 million views on Mango TV as listed on the platform's series page⁴
Adaptations	Stage play (2021, Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre) and 2024 film Be My Friend, which earned RMB 204 million⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Premise and story

Li Jinbu (李进步), a 17-year-old raised by her single mother in Shenzhen, has never met her father and quarrels constantly with her unreliable parent. After one especially fierce argument over her father's whereabouts, she runs away from home and is transported back twenty years to a small city in northeast China, where she meets her mother Li Qingtong (李青桐) as an 18-year-old high school senior. Posing as her mother's childhood friend, she moves into the Li household, and the two become close companions through a youth spent amid both sweetness and hardship.¹^•⁴^•⁷

The time-travel device drives the plot in two directions. Li Jinbu, who blames her mother for an impoverished upbringing, tries to steer young Li Qingtong away from Chen Junhe, the man she believes to be her father, while Li Qingtong grows close to the studious Wu Zhixun. Li Jinbu also befriends Duan Xiao, with whom she has an on-and-off first romance. A running mystery, the "guess the father" question, threads through the series.⁸^•⁹

The story ends with Li Jinbu returning to the present and the two reconciling, each supporting the other in finding the meaning of her own life.¹

Production

The series was the first web drama for both producer Wang Zhenni and director Tian Yu, who had previously worked together on the 2017 web film That Girl Is So Handsome. The project began from a simple concept for a two-female-lead drama; four groups of writers worked on the script, gradually adding the mother-daughter relationship, the time travel, and the northeast China setting, elements for which the team found few comparable works on the market.³^•¹⁰

The northeast setting became the show's most distinctive feature. Because Mango TV's staff initially associated northeast China with rural comedies such as Liu Laogen rather than youth drama, the team pitched the tone by analogy with Korean dramas at a similar latitude. Filming ran from 18 October 2019 to 2 January 2020, on location in Chenzhou, Hunan and Harbin, Heilongjiang. The art department converted an abandoned kindergarten into Li Qingtong's home and a derelict building into the fictional Tieyuan school, repainting three floors and refurnishing every classroom; costumes were largely bought in Korea to reproduce the Korean-influenced fashion of around 2000, and crowd scenes on the frozen Songhua River and at a sports meet used 300 and 200 extras respectively.¹^•³^•¹⁰

The production company credits list Mango TV, Tianhao Shengshi, and Kaihuo Culture.¹

Reception and the ending controversy

The series was a small-budget production that performed well beyond its scale. On Douban, 37,000 users gave it an average of 8.2 out of 10, and it reached first place on Douban's Chinese-language drama reputation chart.³ On IMDb it holds 8.0/10, and on Rakuten Viki 9.3/10 from more than 2,000 users.¹¹^•¹² By March 2024 its Mango TV play count had reached 610 million.¹

The finale divided viewers. Many critics judged the ending a botched resolution: the time-travel timeline stretched from high school into university with contradictions against the present-day frame, a mysterious figure who pushed the plot along was never explained, and the paternity question that had driven audience discussion received no convincing answer, with the actors clarifying key points outside the show. The screenwriter Cheng Xiaomao attributed the compression to limits of budget and length, saying that rich plot material had to be cut to fit 24 episodes.⁸^•¹³^•¹⁴

Commentary also credited the series with widening what a youth drama could do. A review in Wenhui Daily placed it among 2020 dramas that stepped back from romance-centered plotting, mixing family and friendship themes, and argued that its "mother and daughter become best friends" premise showed how understanding can bridge generational conflict.¹⁵^•¹⁶ A China Literature and Art Critics Association review highlighted its double-female-lead character design, contrasting the impulsive Li Qingtong with the shrewd Li Jinbu, and its detailed reconstruction of 1990s northeast life, from bathhouses and video halls to frozen pears and skewer barbecue.⁷

The series received official recognition: it was selected as an outstanding program in the National Radio and Television Administration's 2021 "promoting core socialist values, building the Chinese dream" original online audiovisual program campaign, entered the 29th Huading Awards satisfaction survey top-100 list for 2019–2020, and was named among the year's ten premium dramas at the fifth Golden Budo Online Film and Television Ceremony.¹

Adaptations and related works

A stage adaptation, produced by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre with Huanle Media and directed by the theater director He Nian, premiered in 2021 and returned to the Shanghai Majestic Theatre in November 2022 as part of the eighth Shanghai International Comedy Festival, with a revised cast including Qian Fang and Chen He. Like the series, it centers on the mother-daughter relationship rather than romance.⁵

He Nian also directed the 2024 film version, released under the English title Be My Friend while keeping the same Chinese title. Zhuang Dafei and Chen Haoyu reprised their roles. The film keeps the frame of the daughter's time travel but weakens the romance lines, adds a time-crossing telephone, and focuses on family feeling; it earned RMB 204 million at the summer box office and topped the Dragon Boat Festival holiday in its opening window.⁶^•⁸^•¹⁷

A companion web series with the same production team, I Don't Want To Be Brothers With You (我要和你做兄弟), followed on Mango TV in 2022, again directed by Tian Yu.²^•¹⁰

Comparisons

The premise of a child meeting a young parent through time travel places the series alongside the films Windsurfing (乘风破浪) and Hi, Mom (你好，李焕英). Commentators distinguish them by motive: in Hi, Mom mother and daughter are close in the present and the journey is a farewell, while in I Don't Want To Be Friends With You the pair are in sharp conflict, and the daughter travels to understand her mother's past and reconcile. The 2024 film's core has also been compared to Everything Everywhere All at Once, moving from incomprehension of a mother's life choices to empathy.¹⁸^•⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026