Text | Hedgehog Commune, author | Xu Shang Ouyang Shixin, Editor | Director
Have you ever seen a hot search fight over the air?
On January 26, 2022, the "dispute over whether "The Beginning" is a bad ending" was launched on the hot search list. The entanglement of the arguments between the two debaters, the fullness of the arguments, and the excitement of the emotions cannot help but make people feel that the plot is above.
And the focus of the controversy TV series "The Beginning", it is not an exaggeration to call it the first explosive drama of the beginning of 2022.
This drama about the male and female protagonists stopping the bus explosion in the time loop swept the whole network in just half a month, creating a new myth of high-quality short episodes.
So the question is, how did "Beginning" become popular on the whole network? What kind of episode is this? From "The Beginning", what kind of experience and lessons can the film and television drama industry learn?
Every barrage is a terrier
At 8:00 p.m. on January 11, 2022, "Beginning" was officially launched on Tencent Video, and before that, this series was almost "invisible" in the public eye. As a series adapted from the NOVEL IP, compared with IP dramas such as "Knife Line in the Snow" in the same period, the original work of the same name of "Beginning" is not well-known and cannot bring "natural heat" to the series. On the other hand, compared with many dramas in the same period, the amount of publicity in the early stage of "Beginning" is not high.
Although the drama is produced by the noonday sun, the male and female protagonists choose Bai Jingting and Zhao Jinmai, who have a high degree of national popularity, but less pre-publicity, the light volume of 15 episodes, and the low popularity of the original book make this drama show the appearance of an ordinary drama.
However, "The Beginning" is still like the pressure cooker in the play, bursting.
On January 11, the first eight episodes of the VIP of "Beginning" quickly attracted attention, and novel plots such as "Infinite Loop", "Two Episodes Exploded Ten Times", "Bus Werewolf Killing" spread on social media, and the audience attracted by the plot began to go crazy Amway, and "Beginning" was frequently mentioned in private domains such as circle of friends and Weibo.
Three days after its launch, "Beginning" exceeded 100 million plays, which is not much of an eye-catching achievement, but this is only the beginning of the "beginning miracle". With the passage of time, the "staying power" of "Beginning" began to appear. According to the Baidu index, after the start of the broadcast on January 11, the search index of "Beginning" rose rapidly, from 47140 to 508980 in three days, more than ten times, and is still rising rapidly.
"Beginning" Baidu search index, image source Baidu index platform
"The Beginning" has a total of fifteen episodes, after releasing more than half of the eight episodes in the first week, the most popular evaluation is still "not too addictive", guessing the murderer, unwinding the cycle, the audience is deeply immersed in the high-energy and tense plot of "The Beginning", and the changes in the fate of the characters in the play have pinched the sweat.
Along with the rise in attention, word of mouth is also rising. On January 15, "Beginning" Douban officially opened its score, and more than 100,000 people scored a high score of 8.2, which is already at the upper middle level in domestic dramas. Followed by the recommendation and interpretation of the whole network big V, film and television bloggers, as a high-concept science fiction series, its peculiar cycle setting leaves enough room for the audience to imagine.
Watermelon micronumerics show that as of January 20, 2022, the broadcast market share of "Beginning" rose to the first place with 14.45%, accompanied by satellite events such as "Bai Jingting's next scene to add more", "the whole people urged" to become one of the labels of "Beginning", and in the episode barrage, there was even a sound of "seeking to advance on demand return".
The heyday of "The Beginning" is January 25, the day when the lunar Chinese New Year's Eve and the episode updates the ending. How Li Shiqing and Xiao Heyun achieved "injury-free customs clearance", saved the bus, and escaped from the cycle became the biggest suspense. On the evening of the 25th, more than a dozen topics related to "Beginning" landed on the Weibo hot search list, and #Beginning Ending##Beginning Bad End# successively topped the list, and the controversy of the ending brought higher discussion heat to the series.
Whether there is a "smooth landing" or not, "Beginning" will be one of the biggest dark horses in 2022, which is beyond doubt. The data is the best example, as of now, the total number of plays of "Beginning" has reached 1.4 billion plays, the average number of episodes has reached 0.93 billion; the number of Weibo #Beginning # topics has reached 2 billion, which is only the reading volume of a related topic; after the final controversy, the Douban score has been maintained at 8.0 points, and the number of the official group of the beginning has reached 135,000, ranking fourth in the whole platform after "Chen Qing Ling", "Shan He Ling" and "Zhen Huan Biography".
The fire of "Beginning", in the three weeks of broadcasting, fans have almost established a "beginning universe" on the entire network content platform, which is composed of three major elements: "hot search, playing terrier, and bump cp".
Mention "Beginning" always talk about hot search. In the first week of the war report released by the official Weibo of "Beginning", a surprising statistic: 303 episode topics were on the hot search list before the pre-broadcast and until the end of the first week of broadcasting, of which 4 were also at the top of the list. That is to say, in the few days when "Beginning" is broadcast, the hot search list and entertainment list of your Weibo will be occupied by this drama.
This continued for three weeks during the broadcast of "Beginnings", especially on Update Day, when new topics continued to emerge. Some people joke that passers-by are so "bombing and indiscriminately bombing", it is difficult to open Tencent Video. High heat is often accompanied by controversy, and excessive exposure also attracts disgust for "Beginning", and the discussion about the drama party's "buy hot search" and "excessive marketing" is also very loud.
Soon, some netizens on Weibo claimed to be the publicity personnel of "Beginning", claiming that in addition to a few hot searches for pre-broadcast files and important plot points, most of the other hot searches were tap water behavior, justifying the name of "Beginning". The two sides come and go, and the heat is still harvested by the series.
On the other hand, the popularity of "Beginning" is also inseparable from the audience's positive stemming. With the broadcast of the series, the various characters and lines in the play began to be turned into various popular memes by enthusiastic netizens:
"Cannon", which will sound every time the explosion must sound, has replaced "Little White Boat" as a new "hypnotic comedy", and countless people have bluntly said that they have suffered from the "opening sequelae" of "fear of pressure cooker" and "fear of Cannon";
The source of the picture is the official Weibo of "Beginning"
In the series, the car bomber is Tao Yinghong of the end pressure cooker and the bus driver Wang Xingde, after eight episodes of netizens finally learned the truth, the "beginning" was dismantled into "driving and end pot";
In many cycles, the male and female protagonists are always listed as suspects for interrogation, and whenever they tell the truth, the police chief will always receive a sentence of "prepare for a drug test", which is later used by fans to respond to various "confused" statements.
In addition, terriers such as "Pot Auntie", "This xx can be placed, there is something he really xx", "Xiao Heyun's unjust brother" and other stems spread rapidly in the barrage and discussion, and followed the huge group of drama fans to spread to the whole network.
The CP sense of Bai Jingting and Zhao Jinmai has also made great contributions to the establishment of the "Beginning" universe. Open the B station to search for the beginning, in addition to the episode commentary, you can see a variety of CP clips.
In these videos, the love direction of the male and female protagonists Xiao Heyun and Li Shiqing is either sweet or poignant, in addition to such a series that tells the cycle, fans have created countless parallel universes for Xiao and Li, and at the same time, various episode tidbits and Lalang clips are "adding bricks and tiles" to the CP cause of netizens, and countless people have called "crazy".
Why does "The Beginning" catch fire?
Although after the last two episodes were broadcast, "Beginning" did cause a lot of doubts about the "bad tail", but it cannot be denied that this short 15-episode series is definitely the first blockbuster TV series at the beginning of 2022, and the series of hot memes mentioned above are the best proof.
It is also worth noting that even on the night of the finale, the total broadcast of "Beginning" was only about 1.3 billion, but the amount of discussion on the whole network and the social thinking it triggered have already reflected the good influence of this TV series.
This also confirms to a certain extent that "Beginning" achieves a kind of circle explosion with a clear target audience, and for the young generation who have mastered the right to speak on social media, this TV series really makes them shine, and the related memes are created on various platforms.
In the early stage of communication, Amway in social occasions such as the circle of friends was an important reliance on it to attract audiences and form a good reputation environment. So why did "The Beginning" attract so many young people? And let them actively recommend this series to their friends with excitement?
Perhaps the first factor is that there are enough novel themes in the mainland drama market.
In the first stage, whether it was official publicity or netizen recommendations, the concept of "infinite streaming" was first posted on "Beginning". Although in the later publicity, Guan Bo himself clarified the specific concept of "infinite flow" and regarded "Beginning" as a work of "infinite flow in the broad sense". However, as a rare "high-concept drama" in domestic dramas, "Beginning" first attracted the audience with a unique attitude.
Based on the existence of the "loop", the male and female protagonists try again and again under the sword of Damocles, and all the tension and excitement are restarted in one explosion after another, like playing a game that has been archived, and will once again solve the mystery for the lives of the whole car after waking up at the rebirth point.
In such a plot, "sense of gameplay" and "immersion" may also be the reason why many people can substitute.
In the space of the bus without a sense of distance, you need to solve a puzzle about the "murderer" in a limited time, like a script killing game? When "Cannon", which is not unfamiliar to everyone, rings in the ears, when "Aunt Pot" pulls open the pressure cooker that is not good-looking, is there a kind of strange reality?
This is an extremely real, highly close to people's lives of the "suspense".
After experiencing several big hit dramas in iQIYI Mist Theater in 2020, people undoubtedly have higher expectations for domestic suspense dramas: there are enough high-quality IP and production teams in China to shoot high-quality works, applaud and applaud. After 2021 has passed, people suddenly find that the suspense dramas that were highly anticipated at the beginning of the official announcement did not get good results, and even many of them were not above the pass line, or they were mysterious, or the stories could not be told, but they consumed people's trust.
Perhaps many people did not expect that it would be the noonday sun, such a production company with a positive drama and a big drama that is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people launched "The Beginning", a suspense drama with the color of the times. Throughout, the series deals with the core issue in a very focused way, which is to stop the bus from exploding. The first eight episodes are tightly and directly looped, building an increasingly powerful framework to achieve the final tension effect.
It is precisely because it is a "noonday sun work", there are also many warm elements of realism in "The Beginning", and many times it is some details and warm stories that achieve self-propagation among the audience. Including Uncle Ma, who carried watermelons for his sons in the city to eat, Lou Cat's Apostle, Asthma Conqueror, And The Chosen Man of Light, Flute, etc., everyone in the car seemed to be alive in reality, and in the end, they also gave the best explanation to each character.
"Beginnings" is not strictly an infinite stream, but it is innovative and quite meaningful in the sequence of works by noonday sun. Such a small-scale drama can catch fire at the beginning of 2022, which may also be the arrangement of God.
Behind "The Beginning", the noonday sun
The popularity of "Beginning" continues to rise, and people's attention is also attracted by the producer behind it - the noonday sun.
In recent years, with the "Langya List", "Pretender", "All Is Good", "Great Rivers", "Mountains and Seas" and other dramas to win the double harvest of ratings and word of mouth, the dramas produced by the noonday sun are like quality assurance.
A Douban "Beginning" audience commented: "As a fan of the original work, some time ago after seeing the fixed file, I was still a little worried, after all, the time cycle is rare in China and not many people have filmed it, but when I saw the noonday sun production, it is not an exaggeration to say that the hanging heart was at least half down. ”
For IP adaptations such as "Beginning", Noonday Sunshine seems to have established a more mature adaptation. Whether it is from a high-quality long drama or a high-quality web drama, noonday sunshine can basically respect the original author of the IP when adapting the IP, and choose to enable the original author to join the screenwriting team of the series, which may be an important reason why noonday sun can maintain the level of adaptation.
For example, many novels of the famous IP writer Anai are put on the screen and let him participate in some of the screenwriting work; the same "Langya List" also invites the original author Haiyan to serve as a screenwriter, and Haiyan also participates in the screenwriting work of some non-original works, directly becoming one of the representatives of the new generation of screenwriters in the noonday sun.
The original author of "The Beginning", Pray Jun, mentioned in an interview with every film and television: "The noonday sun should be the kind of film and television company that every screenwriter yearns for. As a novice original author who had never been a screenwriter, when I went to the noonday sun to participate in the "Beginning" project, the project team taught me the language, format and structure of the script, which made me enter the door. Producer Hou Hongliang also said that he would read the script and would also ask the director to be familiar with the script before starting.
On the other hand, the noonday sun focuses on the cultivation of directors and creative teams. The creative generation composed of directors Kong Sheng and Li Xue is the cornerstone of the noonday sun. The second generation of creation, represented by Zhang Kaizhou, Jian Chuanxuan, and Sun Molong, quickly picked up the beams in the polishing of one work after another.
Sun Molong, one of the directors of "The Beginning", was the first to direct a number of works with Kong Sheng, such as "Wenzhou Two Families" and "The Spirit of the Ghost Blowing Lights in the Ancient City". It was not until "I Am Yu Huanshui" that Sun Molong began to direct independently. Under the experience of many mature works, the second generation of directors has grown into a core member, sending a steady stream of fresh blood to the creative road of the noonday sun.
Directed by Sun Molong
With the launch of two blockbuster word-of-mouth dramas "The Pretender" and "Langya List", capital began to focus on the noonday sun, and in 2016, well-known capital parties such as Chinese culture have successively invested in the noonday sun. This year, five dramas were launched, the number of which far exceeded the previous level, and the noonday sun, which has always carefully polished the script, encountered a lot of complaints in the first half of 2017 because of "Surgical Storm" and "Ode to Joy 2".
On September 15, 2017, Noonday Sunshine made a major decision to cancel the artist agency business, explaining in the announcement: "In the face of the increasingly stringent requirements of the market and the increasing expectations of the audience, we realized that we needed to devote more, if not all, of our energy to content creation. ”
This also ushered in a new life for noon.
In recent years, with the popularity of online dramas, the domestic drama market has continued to develop in the process of change, and some excellent online dramas have begun to emerge, and the audience's expectation threshold and "film business" have increased. In the face of fierce competition in the market, Noonday Sun is also seeking transformation, trying to find emotional resonance with more young audiences. 2016's "Ghost Blowing Lantern Essence of the Ancient City" and 2019's "I Am Yu Huanshui" are both an innovation and exploration in the form of content production.
On the night of the finale, the topic of #Opening And Ending was twice on the hot search list. The Douban score also fell from 8.6 points to 8.0 points.
In fact, this is not the first time this has happened.
"All is Good" and "I Am Yu Huanshui" in the finale, there were different degrees of controversy, netizens questioned the ending "bad tail", while lowering the score on Douban. "I Am Yu Huanshui" has also been hit by many viewers for the plot of the next few episodes.
There is also the launch of "Qing Ping Le" in the same year, because of the protracted plot, slow pace, and collapse of human settings, the audience is gradually worn out of patience, resulting in a double decline in ratings and word of mouth. Zhang Kaizhou, a second-generation director known for his slow pace, was not only jokingly called "melatonin in the world" by netizens, but even someone specially opened a post on Douban that "Zhang Kaizu I will teach you how to shoot the first episode".
The works of the second generation of directors of The Noonday Sunshine have been questioned one after another, and in the barrage of the two works, there is no shortage of voices calling for Kong Sheng and Li Xue. The second-generation creators independently directed the series, perhaps more than one step away from Kong Sheng and Li Xue's 9 points.
Of course, even if there are some problems with the second generation of creators in the noonday sun, it does not mean that the works and abilities of the new generation of creators are not worthy of affirmation.
The exploration of "Beginning" can at least show that the noonday sun has never been absent in the exploration of different genres and themes. Just like the evaluation of a Douban netizen, "You don't have to be a god, but in a group of poor students, "Beginning" is even the superior student."
Hou Hongliang, chairman of Dongyang Noonday Sunshine Film and Television Co., Ltd., has publicly stated that HBO's model is the direction that Noonday Sun is trying to work towards. In HBO's episode test waters, it is precisely because of the failed exploration of "Roma" in the front that there is a national carnival of "Game of Thrones" after that.
And the popularity of "Beginning", without the endorsement of the noonday sun, may not necessarily have such a high level of attention.
In fact, whether there are high-quality dramas in the noonday sun determines whether domestic dramas are popular in a certain sense. Whether the new generation of creators of the noonday sun can succeed Kong Sheng and Li Xue in the future to continue to support the "façade of domestic dramas" remains to be tested.