S is for... Shanghai. Sweet. Smart. And Miss Su, the star of a Chinese adaptation of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which is on its way to China in a scripted deal that breaks new ground for Aussie drama.

Independent, glamorous and unflappable detective, Miss S, debuts in China in spring 2020, breaking new ground for Australian scripted drama adaptations and upping indie distributor all3media international’s involvement in Asia’s booming scripted formats environment.

The 30-episode Mandarin version of high-end Australian drama, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, set in 1930s Shanghai, stars Ma Yi Li as the eponymous lady detective, Miss S. Distributed by all3media international’s Singapore-based regional office, the series is produced by the Shanghai 99 Visual Company in collaboration with Tencent Penguin Film and artist management company Easy Entertainment.

The original show was created by Australian production house Every Cloud Productions; Miss Fisher creators Fiona Eagger (chief executive/co-founder) and Deb Cox (creative director/co-founder) are creative consultants on the Chinese adaptation. Miss S producer and head writer is Jin Weiyi, who has recreated the lead character in the spirit of China, retaining the charm of her Aussie counterpart and adjusting some of her ways without losing any of her cheekiness.

Some of lead character Miss Phryne Fisher’s activities have been toned down as she morphs into Miss S. Miss S will not, for instance, have quite as many suitors. “We can’t let Miss S change boyfriends every night,” Jin says. What she can do is be more independent and much warmer. “We strengthened those aspects,” he told delegates at the ContentAsia Summit in Singapore at the end of August.

“Miss S represents Miss Shanghai and any lady from Shanghai, basically, is sweeter... more feminine,” he adds. This, for instance, translates to fight scenes that are, as fight scenes go, more feminine. Smart is another “S” he adds to the list of reasons for the China-version’s name. Plus, of course, the character’s name is Miss Su.

But perhaps Jin’s biggest challenge was adding elements to the story line that allowed one case to span two episodes and then to make sure there was relevance in every detail. For instance, Miss S wears traditional Chinese dress when she closes a case. Miss S, Jin says, is “not simply an adaptation”.

The conversation to develop Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries for China spanned about five years. “When the possibility first came up in 2014, we were culturally curious,” Cox says. “We didn’t really have any idea what working with China would be like,” she adds. With Phryne Fisher spirit, they dived in. “We thought, this is an adventure, let’s do it,” she says.

Cox and Eagger say they had few fixed expectations about the China version before shooting started. What they didn’t necessarily expect was the scale of the production, including, among other elements, the locations and the resources. “The Chinese version is much bigger and more lavish than the Australian version... We were very envious when we visited,” Eagger says describing their experiences in China as “very educational for us to work out that there’s a universal language in how we all create drama and then work out what are the differences are,” Eagger says.

Production wise, Eagger and Cox experienced “a level of ambition in China” they did not, perhaps, expect. “It feels that they can do anything really,” Cox adds.

In Australia, the original series was filmed mostly on location. “We had to find all the period locations and we were very restricted in our filming because obviously, with period, you have a modern building right next door and you do a lot with CGI, but we are more restricted,” Eagger says. In all, the Australian crew was “probably a third” of the size of the Chinese crew.

The Australian TV stories were also crafted based on what was physically possible to film, Cox says. “We have a handful of mansions in Australia, some of which we shot the back of, the side of, every angle of,” she adds. A small studio was built for Miss Fisher’s house and the police station. but the rest was location-based. We could only think up stories when we knew we could actually pull them off,” Cox says.

Miss S was filmed at Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang. “The scale was something we couldn’t imagine... We don’t have anything like that in Australia. Now we just want to come to China and make something in that studio,” Eagger adds.

But that all came later. “In the early phases, when we sent the scripts over for formatting, we weren’t sure how much we should worry about cultural misfit,” Cox says.

The original series are based on books that Australian author Kerry Greenwood started writing in 1985. “They were very culturally specific to Melbourne. It was curious to see how something that felt so specific to Australia would travel,” Eagger says.

In the end, they left it to Jin. “If we had tried to pre-empt the cultural differences we would never have made the same decisions... He made decisions from a much more informed position; he had some fantastic swaps,” says Cox.

Eagger adds that Jin captured the tone perfectly. “There is a real respect that has been shown to the tone and to the core relationships that has travelled well culturally. “Our leading lady is a little more liberated than the Chinese version but in essence they still have a lot of the same characteristics. The central romantic relationship is intact, which is to do with gentle flirting more than anything, and then the surrounding ensemble of characters has very similar qualities. These have all been maintained,” she says.

The end result caps a search for a TV series that Shanghai 99 Visual Company launched in 2014. Vice general manager, Wu Xiao, says Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, set in Melbourne in the 1930s, was similar to Shanghai at the time – an open city with a lot of foreigners. “We thought it would be easy to adapt into a Shanghai story. Also, audiences are attracted by an independent woman. She’s very smart, brilliant, beautiful and brave and these are the characteristics that women should learn still in China. That’s why I decided to choose this TV show,” she says.

Both Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Miss S are distributed in Asia by all3media International out of Singapore. Three seasons of the Australian original is also available on Netflix. EVP for Asia Pacific, Sabrina Duguet, says the appeal of the show as a format involves the structure (one investigation per episode with some story lines across the series) as well as the number of episodes/scrips available to choose from.

Given China’s content sensitivities, a wide variety of story lines seems like a good idea. “Overall, this is a detective story. The genre itself is basically safe,” Wu says, adding: “That era – before the People’s Republic of China – is pretty okay for a storyline like this”.