Beijing:
In the end, it was not the overabundance of sequins or the cringe-worthy ballads that doomed "Super Girl," one of China's most popular televised talent extravaganzas.
When government censors pulled the plug on the show after its season finale on Friday night, they claimed that the producers had simply let the program warble on too long.
In confirming the yearlong suspension, a spokesman for the company that created the "American Idol" knockoff expressed contrition for having let the show repeatedly exceed a state-imposed 90-minute limit on talent competitions, which government mandarins have variously described as "vulgar," "manipulative" and "poison for our youth."
Next year, said the spokesman, Li Hao, the broadcaster, Hunan Satellite Television, will fill its prime-time slots with programs that promote healthy morals, public safety and "practical information about housework."
For the devotees who have followed the season - previous finales have drawn more than 400 million viewers - the suspension has produced shock and heartache. Under pseudonyms, one fan wailed, "I will never be happy again!" on Weibo, China's most popular micro blog service, and another wrote, "Maybe we need another revolution."
But for those prone to more sober thoughts, the ban issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is a bracing reminder of the heavy hand guiding popular culture in China.
On the day they suspended "Super Girl," the authorities imposed a one-month suspension on a channel in northern Hebei Province after one of its talk shows featured a son's berating of his father. The program "magnified distorted ethics and moral values" and "caused extremely negative social effects," regulators said.
This year the agency raised hackles in the domestic entertainment industry by issuing a blanket prohibition on narratives that rely on time travel.
Although government officials did not elaborate on the reasons behind the cancellation of "Super Girl," television executives and cultural critics suggested that the ruling Communist Party was unnerved by the runaway success of the show, whose producers have created a string of American-style reality shows that are more popular than the turgid fare of the state-run broadcaster, CCTV.
Others suggested that the show's reliance on voting by audience members was dangerously democratic. Such conjecture is not far-fetched: regulators banned text-message voting from viewers in 2007, forcing the show to largely limit audience participation to those inside the cavernous television studio.
Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the ban reflected the growing chasm between Chinese youths and the conservative bureaucrats who keep a tight leash on the production and dissemination of popular culture. "The old guard still has a very different notion of morality from the younger generation," Professor Zhan said. "Maybe government regulators just got too many complaints from retired cadres."
Despite its immense popularity, "Super Girl" went on a three-year hiatus in 2006 after a previous controversy fanned by Liu Zhongde, a former culture minister who led a campaign against the show. In a string of interviews in the state media, Mr. Liu lambasted the program as a threat to traditional Chinese culture and a blight on the nation. "What the market chooses is not necessarily a good thing," he said at the time. " 'Super Girl' is certainly the choice of the market, but we can't have working people revelling all day in low culture."
On the face of it, there is nothing terribly radical about "Super Girl," with its sharp-tongued celebrity judges, giddy young female contestants from the provinces and merciless eliminations.
But at a time when the Communist Party has been avidly reviving revolutionary mass culture from the Maoist era, some critics say the sassy and startlingly individualistic performers who scored well on "Super Girl" represented something of a threat.
Like many previous winners, this year's victor, Duan Linxi, 20, was a strikingly androgynous self-taught musician who beat out a pack of long-haired beauties, the standard archetype of state-engineered variety shows.
In an online essay published Saturday, one of the show's judges, Song Shinan, suggested that China's cultural authorities were unhappy about being cut out of the selection process and threatened by the kind of women who rose to the top. "One thing that has progressed is that 'idols' are no longer the product of political needs but of commercial needs," Mr. Song wrote. "The promotion of 'role models' from above is dying. These girls truly represent the voices of our times and are the idols of the people."
He acknowledged that the show could be cruel and frivolous, but said that it ultimately celebrated the triumph of the individual over the state. "In the frenzy of the 'Super Girl' fan there is the blind, naive and even the violent and dark side," he said. "But there also is a path leading to freedom rather than slavery."