Wonderland (五十公里桃花坞)

Format and premise

Each season gathers roughly 15 residents of different ages and professional backgrounds, most of whom do not know one another beforehand, and places them in a fixed location for 21 days of communal living⁸. The show sets no fixed game rules; residents are largely left to find things to do and build relationships themselves, forming a temporary small community⁸. The stated goal of the first season was to have the group break loneliness, witness friendship take root, and build an ideal community combining art, humanities, and technology².

The premise grew out of a deliberate design choice. Chi Yuan, then director of the Tiangji Studio at Tencent Video and the show's first general director, said he wanted "community" rather than "survival" to be the main narrative, showing a group of people building social ties from nothing⁹. He had earlier worked on Tencent's 2015 program We Are 15 (我们15个), which used a similar 15-person communal-living base but with a different production logic⁹.

The program frames itself as a social observation experiment rather than a conventional slow-life show. A male voice-over narrator cites sociological concepts, including Goffman-style ideas of front-stage performance and back-stage authenticity and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, to interpret the residents' behavior for viewers^{10 • 11}. General director Chi Yuan has said that awkwardness and conflict are part of the program: "my real thought is that I want to present this misunderstanding, and how it is resolved"⁸.

Seasons

The first season, subtitled Beijing (北京), placed 15 guests including Song Dandan, Shu Qi, Guo Qilin, Zhang Han, Zhou Jie, Wang Sulong, Li Xueqin, and Meng Ziyi in a new community called Taohuawu about 50 kilometers from central Beijing, in Pinggu district^{2 • 9}. Early episodes were criticized as confusing: viewers did not immediately understand why unfamiliar celebrities were made to live and eat together, and the show's frequent awkward and embarrassing moments drew mixed reactions⁶.

The second season (Seaside, 海边, 2022) is widely regarded as the show's breakthrough. The casting shifted toward people with varied attitudes toward socializing, including the openly unsociable Wang Chuanjun and talk-show performers such as Li Xueqin and Xu Zhisheng. Song Dandan's "awkward nine minutes", in which she pressed younger guests about their achievements, went viral, and viewers began reading the show as an observation laboratory for social dynamics they recognized from their own workplaces and family gatherings⁶. The pairing of Wang Chuanjun and Dylan Wang (Wang Hedi) produced many of the show's most-shared scenes⁶.

The third season (Mountains and Wilderness, 山野, 2023) continued the social-experiment concept with a mix of returning and new residents, including talk performer Niao Niao. Its hashtag on Weibo accumulated over 9.5 billion reads and more than 26 million discussions, and the season drew 214 entries on Weibo's main hot-search list¹². The fourth season (Wilderness, 旷野, 2024) took its theme from the popular phrase "life is a wilderness"³.

Song Dandan, who had functioned as the show's unofficial "family elder" through the first four seasons, announced her departure after season 5, leaving that role vacant¹³.

Season 6: return to strangers

The sixth season, which premiered on May 14, 2026, made the most significant format change in the show's history. It kept only four returning residents, Xu Zhisheng, Li Xueqin, Li Jiaqi (Lamu Yangzi), and Wang Ziqi, the lowest proportion of veterans since the show began, and added 11 new residents, more than half of whom had never appeared on a reality show⁷. New residents included the veteran host Zhou Tao, singer Jam Hsiao (Xiao Jingteng), Yuan Yongyi, Peng Guanying, Fang Yuan, A Runa, Xu Ruohan, Chen Xinhai, He Junlin, and Ku Ku De Teng¹⁴.

The season also moved the experiment back into a city. Titled "Rough-cast Life" (毛坯人生), it was filmed in corners of Chongqing rather than in the pastoral settings of earlier seasons, which the production framed as a shift "from poetry and distance to city fireworks"^{14 • 15}. The opening episodes built two social experiments, an online "anonymous chat room" game and an offline performance art piece called "Sharing the Same Robe" (与子同袍), in which residents wore connected giant costumes and navigated obstacle paths together^{7 • 15}.

General director Xie Dikui, who took over the role after Chi Yuan, described his two core tasks as finding people who feel fresh to a mass audience and creating mechanism-based pressure that produces genuine social reactions¹⁶. In his own season-end assessment, he credited the location and visual language, the "rough-cast life" theme's closeness to young people's living conditions, and the residents' performances, while saying some of the season's games could have been more theatrical¹⁷.

The season ended on July 17, 2026. As of late August 2026, Tencent Video had made no official announcement about a seventh season; Xie Dikui had said in May that whether the show continues "depends on this sixth season"¹⁸.