Chen Zheyuan: Best TV Shows and Dramas, Ranked

In the summer of 2023, Chen Zheyuan’s middle name was probably “Everyone’s favorite C-drama TV boyfriend.”

So where exactly did Chen Zheyuan come from? And is he the “It Boy” now?

Because we were curious, we also looked at his numbers. To us, the answer at least as of right now is: not quite yet, but it’s still possible in the future.

Actually, his path to arrive at this point has been quite rocky. He filmed several high-profile dramas years ago that looked primed to make him the next big thing—only for them to never be broadcast for one reason or another, because the road to a career in the Chinese entertainment industry is paved with shelved shows (The Golden Hairpin and Winner Is King jump to mind, the latter being a BL series co-starring another rising star Tan Jianci that has likely been buried as a direct result of the government’s crackdown on LGBT+ dramas and TV shows). 

Then 2023 came along, and Hidden Love became the hit that we all now know.

So in combing through his filmography, we also put it through our internal drama meter to get a sense of how his dramas compare to one another. For those unfamiliar with why we started doing this, it’s because we wanted to develop a somewhat more objective way to rank dramas specific to the actor or actress, because we think that Douban and MyDramaList ratings can often be skewed by recency, fan wars, and reach.

In this case, we tried to determine an objective view of Chen Zheyuan’s best TV shows by using the underlying drama characteristics specific to him, including: (1) the show’s general audience viewership, (2) how important his role is in the drama, (3) what type of role he played, and (4) the show’s Douban rating.

Here are the results!

The top 5 Chen Zheyuan TV shows and dramas: a breakdown

To prep for the making of this list, we first looked at all of the dramas where Chen Zheyuan is credited as a main lead for this exercise.

Out of those Chinese dramas, these are the top five dramas we gauge that audiences will likely enjoy if you’re a fan of Chen Zheyuan:

Based on our internal ranking meter, we then put them in a recommended order for viewing below.

1. Hidden Love (2023)

Hidden Love is Chen Zheyuan’s #1 drama by far, mostly due to the strength of its above-average Douban rating of 6.7 and the widespread audience the show reached (all over our Instagram feeds, as well) during its airing.

That Hidden Love even made it to the silver screen is a minor miracle, as reportedly there was a bit of controversy during filming. But all’s well that ends well: a female-led team (the director, assistant director, and screenwriter for Hidden Love are all women) saw this modern romance drama through to the end, along with Zhao Lusi (who plays the female lead, Sang Zhi).

And of course Chen Zheyuan. In Hidden Love, he plays Duan Jiaxu: the tall, handsome boy who’s the object of Sang Zhi’s almost-a-decade-long love. Unfortunately, he also happens to be her older brother’s best friend. 

Apart from annoyingly being completely unattainable because of it, however, Duan Jiaxu is a walking green flag. On our completely scientific “Find a guy who looks at you the way he looks at her” scale, he ranks very well. He also aces the even harder “Find a guy who learns how to bake for you” test and the “Find a guy who smiles at you while you lecture him/supports your career/buys you honey/looks great in a white shirt” test. 

Just a quick note for the wary: he doesn’t fall for Sang Zhi until she’s out of university, but if you’re cautious about the 5-year gap between them when they’re younger, we suggest that you skip the first seven episodes, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and head straight to Episode 8. That’s when a college-aged Sang Zhi meets Duan Jiaxu again. The result from then on is one of the summer hits of 2023, which cemented Zhao Lusi’s star status in the industry and launched Chen Zheyuan’s ascent in one breath.  

• 👀 # of episodes: 25
• 👖 Original network: Youku
• 📺 Watch Hidden Love on: Netflix, Youku

2. Detective Chinatown (2020)

Second on this list of Chen Zheyuan TV shows to watch is Detective Chinatown, which to many might be “Detective What?” on account of its relative obscurity. That’s not an indictment of its quality (it has a Douban rating of 7.0 as we speak), but rather its genre, because Detective Chinatown isn’t the modern-day romance or grandiose costume drama that tends to be popular in the drama world.

Yes, it’s instead a full-blown mystery/comedy/buddy cop TV show.

Detective Chinatown is in reality a huge IP in China. Its first rendition, a Detective Chinatown movie that premiered in 2018, was a fantastic success that spawned two direct sequels (which are today among the top 15 highest-grossing films in all of China). And in 2020, a TV spin-off was also introduced to the Detective Chinatown universe: a web drama series, which is when Chen Zheyuan enters this story.

The web series is composed of 12 episodes, with every 4 episodes covering a different case. So if you’d just like to watch Chen Zheyuan in it, then we recommend that you skip ahead to episodes 9 to 12. This third case is rather detached from the rest of the plot, so you don’t need to have watched the previous 8 episodes to understand what’s going on. Your reward will be nothing less than an opportunity to see Chen Zheyuan as Noda Koji, the eccentric leader of a five-man team who enters a video game tournament turned death game. 

• 👀 # of episodes: 12
• 🥝 Original network: iQIYI
• 📺 Watch Detective Chinatown on: iQIYI

3. Our Secret (2021)

For those suffering a hangover after watching Hidden Love, we think this one might be the one to turn to. Though it was much less viral-popular (which we accounted for in our calculations), Our Secret is the closest you’ll get to Hidden Love. They’re both modern romance dramas, and they both secured similar Douban ratings after airing (Our Secret has a rating of 6.8, which is extremely respectable when you compare it to Hidden Love’s 6.7 Douban rating).

Like Hidden Love, Our Secret also asks a perennial question: what happens if you fall in love with your tall, handsome desk mate at school who you can’t stand? 

The tall, handsome desk mate is, of course, played by Chen Zheyuan. In Our Secret, he is Zhou Siyue, the school god who will steal your stuffed animal, and then turn around and be waiting for you while perched on his motorcycle with the wind strategically blowing through his hair. This is the guy who will never let you forget it when he scores higher than you once on an exam, and then immediately hasten to protect you from traffic on the streets.

Just know before going into it that the biggest difference between Hidden Love and Our Secret is probably that the latter is probably meant for a younger teen audience: while Hidden Love mostly takes place while the female lead is in university, Our Secret spends much more time with its characters in high school. But the sweet chemistry between Chen Zheyuan and his co-star, Xu Mengjie, is what makes the standard package of tropes and misunderstandings work. It might even turn Our Secret into an underrated fan favorite. 

• 👀 # of episodes: 24
• 🥭 Original network: Mango TV
• 📺 Watch Our Secret on: YouTube, Viki, iQIYI, Mango TV

4. Mr. Bad (2022)

Fourth is Mr. Bad, or so our drama meter said. We actually disagree with it here, though more on that later! Numerically, Mr. Bad ranks fourth just slightly behind Our Secret mostly because of its viewership: though it holds a higher Douban rating (7.4), it also has a much smaller audience. 

Here’s our argument: we’d make the case that both dramas are virtually tied, and that you should make the decision on which to watch between the two based on the genre you like. While Our Secret is a traditional high school romance, Mr. Bad is a non-traditional romance comedy—with an emphasis on “comedy” in the first half of this series about a writer who accidentally brings the biggest baddest villain in her story to her life.

Chen Zheyuan plays Xiao Wudi: the self-professed “ancient guy, not an idiot” who proceeds to blow bubbles in the bath upon finding himself transmigrated into the modern world. Yes, he’s a villain. But he’s also a princess who kicks his legs, twirls his hair, and giggles to himself while looking at his phone in bed. Yes, he’s Mr. Bad. But he likes to mope around in his pretty robes as well. 

With such a breezy and campy premise, it might just be possible to see where the mixed reviews about an uneven plot come from. If you don’t overthink the plot, though, you’ll get a funny drama—and what’s most important is that you’ll also get Chen Zheyuan complaining that he doesn’t have a haircut like Zhang Xincheng’s yet. 

• 👀 # of episodes: 24
• 🥝 Original network: iQIYI
• 📺 Watch Mr. Bad on: Viki, iQIYI

5. Sword and Fairy 4 (2024)

In full disclosure, we think that this is the “Enter With Caution” territory, because the best part of Chen Zheyuan’s filmography probably ended at the previous entry, Mr. Bad. Like we mentioned earlier, Chen Zheyuan struggled to see a lot of his dramas broadcasted, so his portfolio of works is slimmer than it should be—leaving only the dramas of more debatable quality beyond this point. 

So please do consider this a friendly warning before you head any further into his filmography! ✋

For the sake of rounding this list out with our usual five, however, we’ll stick our necks out and put Sword and Fairy 4 here. It was indeed a closely-fought contest for fifth place between his “best of the rest” dramas: 

• The Princess and the Werewolf (2023)
• Sword and Fairy 4 (2024)
• Handsome Siblings (2020)

All three were very mid for various reasons (plot, production quality, cast, premise, off-air controversies, etcetera etcetera), but out of them, Sword and Fairy 4 was at least the most talked about. This drama, which counts as a standalone entry in the series, is the TV adaptation of the bestselling video game, Legend of Sword and Fairy 4. Its original network, iQIYI, handpicked Ju Jingyi and Chen Zheyuan to be its stars—but we suspect that the consequent fight between the two camps in the lead-up to its broadcast might have been more compelling than the drama itself, judging from the hot topics that trended on Weibo during that time!

• 👀 # of episodes: 36
• 🥝 Original network: iQIYI
• 📺 Watch Sword and Fairy 4 on: iQIYI

The verdict

As a last step, we plotted Chen Zheyuan’s best TV shows and dramas out onto a scatterplot to see where they fall against each other on purely a Douban rating vs. # of Douban users basis:

A few quick observations:

• Judging from his graph, his “bread and butter” genre is definitely in the modern-day sphere. They also score conspicuously higher than his other dramas, with five out of six attaining over a 6.0 rating on Douban.
• While Detective Chinatown is the numbers king overall in his filmography, we still feel confident saying that Hidden Love is his first real breakout show, given the amount of screentime and his leading man role in it. 
• He’s somewhat less prolific than other actors and actresses that we’ve profiled, as it looks like he puts out an average of 1.6 dramas a year. Of course, this might have to do with airing issues. 

With his promising track record with modern-day dramas in mind, it’s pretty exciting that he’s got a few more lined up in the future. Next up for him is the romance drama between a reporter and an engineer, The White Olive Tree (with Liang Jie) which is rumored to air very soon in September 2024, and Dark Night and Dawn (with Xing Fei), which will also mark his first Republican-era drama.