China’s latest viral reality show is about broken friendships — rather than failing romance — between celebrities.

“I Miss You” surpassed 100 million views within two days of its Oct. 22 debut, and topped the real-time TV popularity chart on Chinese review platform Douban since last Thursday. Topics related to the show have repeatedly trended on the microblogging platform Weibo since airing.

Produced by streaming platform Mango TV, the show brings together four pairs of celebrities who have reportedly fallen out for an 18-day trip through the southwestern Xizang Autonomous Region. 

The show is widely seen as a riff on China’s popular relationship reality shows and follows a similar format to “See You Again,” whose fifth season aired in late 2025, which takes celebrity couples in troubled marriages on an 18-day trip before they decide whether to divorce.

In “I Miss You,” guests discuss their former friendships as a group and one-on-one with their ex-friends, play games, and share their feelings with the production team. A panel of celebrities, a psychologist, and a journalist comment on their interactions. 

The most discussed pair on “I Miss You” so far has been Xu Fei and Li Na, two contestants from the 2006 season of “Super Girl,” a popular televised singing competition regarded as a cornerstone of China’s fan culture.

The two were close friends during the competition 20 years ago, but their friendship later collapsed after Li came to believe that Xu had reported her to their management company for taking outside jobs in violation of her contract. Li said the company subsequently stopped arranging work for her, which she sees as having dealt a major blow to her career. Xu denied the accusation, instead blaming a third person.

As the two revisited their past on the show, their memories of their friendship moved many viewers, with one highly upvoted comment describing their relationship as “an epic saga of love and hate.”

Xu said in tears that she had loved “wasting time together,” and noted that her current preferred snacks are the “ones Li loved back then.” Li also recalled how, even when the two appeared to be bitter enemies, they would sometimes end up crying in each other’s arms after getting drunk at gatherings.

Yet the two remained at odds over the past accusation. During an interview with the production team, Li said she had hated Xu “for a long time,” at one point shouting, “What about the money I lost?”

The other three pairs of celebrities include an actor who cut ties with a longtime producer friend after feeling pressured to accept a role, an actress and a writer who fell out when the latter grew closer to a third person, and former professional esports teammates who fought over training strategies, eventually leading one to leave the team.

“‘I Miss You’ feels so much more pure than ‘See You Again,’” read a post on lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, that received almost 3,700 likes. “In a marriage, you have to argue about more than feelings. There’s property, children, parents, and so much else. With friendship, we can sit down and focus on just one thing: how we feel about each other.”

Fu, a 21-year-old viewer from the southern Guangdong province, told Sixth Tone that she found the show’s focus on friendship “refreshing” given how rarely such relationships take center stage on screen.

“We’re so used to understanding intimate relationships through the lens of romance, but rarely give serious thought to the love, possessiveness, jealousy, dependence, disappointment, and reconciliation that exist in friendships,” she said.

Another 21-year-old viewer based in Shanghai, surnamed You, added that the show’s appeal lies in friendship’s lack of definition.

“Friendship can be as intense and possessive as romance, full of love and resentment, or it can be something much more casual,” You said. “People can have very different ideas of what friendship means, and that alone can create tension.”

Contributions: Yang Yang; editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: A poster for “I Miss You.” From Douban)