The first hit of the new year, domestic dramas welcome the "beginning"

At the beginning of 2022, a domestic drama "Beginning" with the theme of time loop set off a boom in watching dramas. According to the professional version of the lighthouse, since the beginning of the broadcast for a week, it has continued to dominate the daily episode list, not only the popularity remains high, but the broadcast market share also ranks in the top three. The infinite imagination brought by "Beginning" has once again allowed the industry to see the possibility of domestic dramas.

The first to eat crab

The first hit of the new year, it is the noonday sun. On January 18, under the urging of actors and audiences, "Beginning" was more successful.

Adapted from the novel of the same name, "Beginning" combines a variety of suspense elements such as car accidents, explosions, reasoning, time loops, and doomsday couples, telling the story of college student Li Shiqing (Zhao Jinmai) and game architect Xiao Heyun (Bai Jingting) on a bus, constantly experiencing explosions and constantly "coming back from the dead", and returning to the story before the explosion with memories, and only by stopping the explosion can they get out of this cycle.

Although it takes a niche route, it does not affect the praise and popularity of this drama. Since its launch on January 11, "Beginning" is almost "welded" on Weibo hot search, from the protagonist to the supporting role, from the plot to the tidbits, the popularity is high, "8 episodes in one breath", "The Beginning", I would like to call the best start of the TV series in 2022! ”

Since then, the popularity of "Beginning" has continued to rise, as of the time of the Beijing Business Daily reporter's release, not only the single-day network full-time positive film broadcast market share reached 9.92%, as of 15:30 on January 18, the drama has achieved a single-day network-wide positive film broadcast market share in the top three on the episode list for 6 consecutive days.

Not only the market share of the whole network's positive film broadcast, in terms of public opinion, "Beginning" also continues to dominate the list of lighthouse episodes, and surpasses other episodes broadcast at the moment for 6 consecutive days, sitting firmly on the throne at the top of the list of episodes. At the same time, according to data from Tencent's video platform, as of 15:30 on January 18, the number of plays of "Beginning" has also exceeded 400 million times.

It is precisely because of the popularity of "Beginning" that the suspense wind in the drama market has also blown up again, and even some viewers said that they "have to take a magnifying glass to find details." However, unlike the previous popular domestic suspense dramas, the plot of "Beginning" in addition to finding the truth, but also added the infinite flow setting of the time loop, which has also become one of the focuses of the drama.

The shell of the time loop

Unlike traversal, split personality, etc., infinite streams focus primarily on a specific period of time and some special space, with some characters being "archived" and the remaining being "formatted". That is to say, the "Chosen Son" will constantly repeat the content of a specific time and space, while retaining each memory, while the supporting characters start over in repetition.

In fact, for the time loop, many viewers are not unfamiliar with this, whether it is "Horror Cruise", "Source Code", "Twelve Monkeys" and other film works released more than a decade ago, or films such as "Happy Death Day" released in recent years, all use the setting of time loop to expand the plot. In the game market, the time-loop game "Twelve Minutes", which was released in 2021 in succession in the PC version and console version, also exploded, and achieved sales of more than one million copies across the platform.

Since the setting of the time loop is not a new thing, why can "Beginning" once again set off a wave of theater watching among the audience? In this regard, the audience Ms. Wu told the Beijing Business Daily reporter, "At the beginning, there will be a slow pace of the play, and the time loop is an old terrier who can still play the idea, but with the follow-up watching of the plot, it can be found that the play also pays more attention to the details and human nature, and it is the latter that makes me have the desire to continue watching."

In addition, in the view of mr. Xu, the audience, the time loop is called "old terrier" by many people, and it is difficult to play a new trick, although "The Beginning" uses a time loop, but more of an external setting laid to promote the development of the plot, the real key inside is to show the different characters in the play, explore human nature through different side plots, and also show the entangled emotions of the protagonist's heart, so that the audience can see each different individual and the thoughts that are wanted to be expressed behind it.

However, some people believe that the combination of this reality and infinite flow will sandwich the trivialities of life in the tense rescue, weakening some of the tension and suspense, and not enough to burn the brain. TV critic Sun Yu believes that "there are 1,000 Hamlets in the eyes of 1,000 viewers", and suspense dramas have received more attention in recent years, although a big step forward, they are still in the development stage. The high popularity of the broadcast of "Beginning" will also make the film and television industry pay more attention to suspense and science fiction themes, and once again prove that film and television works need to have a strong enough core as a support if they want to capture the hearts of the audience.

New possibilities for small productions

In recent years, the dark horses of online dramas have been one after another, often with small costs, non-traffic, and non-large IP, but they have brought different surprises to the audience. For example, the anti-routine cross-over drama "The Promotion of the Princess Princess", the "White Night Pursuit" that opened a new era of online drama, and the "Hidden Corner" that made the Mist Theater a hit.

By last year, there were more dark horses and more diverse types. The high-quality ancient detective drama "Imperial Gifts of Small Servants", BG's Light "Si Teng", the grounded tribute drama "Mountains and Seas", the "Awakening Age" that makes big people cute and loving, as well as the life flow of "Children of qiao family", and the female group portrait drama "Love is Delicious" that directly hits the reality.

At this stage, the reputation of "Beginning" has been released on multiple platforms. On the Douban movie, as of the time of the Beijing Business Daily reporter's release, the rating of the drama was 8.2 points, of which the five-star evaluation accounted for 36.5%, and the four-star evaluation accounted for more than 40%, making the proportion of four-star and above ratings reach more than 80%. On other platforms such as Maoyan, the score of "Beginning" is basically above 8 points.

In fact, before going out of the circle with "Langya List", noonday sunshine has actually done a lot of good dramas, but in Hou Hongliang's own words, "after a particularly long period of 'applause not to be applauded'", such as "Breaking into the Guandong", "Old Farmer", "No War in Peking", many of which are more than many years later, the audience feels the quality.

What "Beginning" did right is actually the direction in which domestic dramas should move forward. Good story, compact plot, enough details, matching actors, qualified scenes, and a sense of depth of discussion are all interlinked and indispensable.

This article originated from Beijing Business Daily