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This time, Feng Xiaogang stirred up "Echo" of "her suspense"

Author| Bow bow

Q1 of 2023 is quietly over, looking at the Q1 drama market surprises, the overall positive signal, iQiyi after "Crazy", the online drama market has killed a dark horse.

Since the start of the suspense drama "Echo" on March 16, it has won the iQiyi popularity crown for 13 consecutive days, and there has been no gap since its launch, and the market share of the drama's feature film broadcast on the whole network reached a peak of 8.69% on the closing day of members, becoming the champion of the whole network drama.

In the popular list of online dramas of Maoyan Professional Edition, Lighthouse, and Yunhe Data, "Echo" occupies the TOP3 position on the list, with a high gold content, and the top two are popular fairy tale dramas, which are different from the realistic theme type of "Echo". The entire list is also basically based on works such as costume fairy tales and urban love, which also demonstrates that the audience of the online drama market is low in age, and the love is concentrated between love and idol works, and "Echo" as a realistic suspense drama can stand out under such circumstances, which proves the market's affirmation of it.

The drama "Echo" has only 13 episodes, the entire broadcast period is only six days, usually the drama requires a certain fermentation cycle, but the show has been closed for nearly 10 days, the popularity is still high, still ranked at the forefront of the online drama popularity list, it can be seen that its reputation is still continuing to ferment, which is enough to prove that its long-tail effect is very obvious.

In the suspense arena, high popularity leads the "Fog" label

As a blockbuster work of iQIYI Misty Theater, the most prominent attribute of "Echo" is to meet the preferences of the audience on the station. On iQiyi's website, "Echo" has won 54 popular searches on the station, the number of barrages on the station is as high as 4.45 million, and the popularity of on-site dramas for 13 consecutive days, which is enough to prove that "Echo" accurately fits the platform user attributes of iQiyi.

During the broadcast of "Echo", the highest popularity value in iQiyi Station reached 8845, ranking 2nd among the 12 dramas broadcast by the Misty Theater, and the popularity of the show was only lower than that of "The Daughter Who Came Back", "Echo" is a very shining existence in the horizontal arena of the Misty Theater.

Based on the establishment of the "Mist Theater" label, users on the site put forward higher and higher viewing needs for suspense works, and the content of the drama must be upgraded again and again to break the routine suspense content creation, and the same is true of "Echo".

"Echo" adopts a double-line winding narrative of suspense and emotion this time, which is different from the usual suspense drama narrative technique of single-line chasing murderers, and at the same time deepens the emotional expression part of the narrative, mainly to allow the audience to feel a deeper emotional relationship in the suspense story, and have a more delicate and extreme experience and feelings, so this may make some audiences who have traditional suspenseful expectations for "Echo" not understand, which is also the reason why "Echo" is now polarized in word of mouth.

Innovation in content makes "Echo" break through the audience's inherent viewing habits, so if "Echo" is regarded as a traditional suspense drama, then the audience may be misplaced, which also makes the play suffer a loss in word of mouth.

But in fact, because "Echo" makes the emotional part more sincere and delicate, so many viewers openly express their liking for the emotional content of this drama on social platforms, "she suspense" must not only be "suspenseful", but also highlight the female audience's expectations for content, and the emotional part has also become a highlight that the show cannot ignore.

In the words of director Feng Xiaogang in an interview, it is explained that "on the one hand, the audience must follow it to chase the murderer, on the other hand, it also has the detection of people's inner thoughts in daily life, not only to solve the case, but also to detect people's hearts." This innovative expression of "she suspense" has made "Echo" capture a large number of loyal audiences in the station, relatively speaking, the audience of the Misty Theater is a very sticky suspense drama audience group, they have a deep understanding of the "suspense" content, and are willing to see more innovative suspense expressions, so the data of "Echo" is very eye-catching.

In addition, on social platforms such as Weibo, the data performance of "Echo" is also very impressive. The Weibo topic of the same name #Online drama echo#The number of views reached 170 million on the closing day, and now it has reached 230 million, and it is still growing, winning 174+ Weibo hot topics during the opening period, and the related Weibo topics have been read more than 4 billion times, and it has also won 56 Douyin hot topic lists, and has repeatedly topped the topic list TOP1.

Refine the expression of marital emotions, "close relatives and estranged" pillow people

The discussion of "marriage" has become the focus of the word-of-mouth discussion of "Echo", and many netizens have felt the "way to get along" in the marriage relationship through the content of the series, which also shows that "Echo" has found an audience that really likes it.

On Douyin, the video related to the topic of the same name of "Echo" has exceeded 600 million views, and most of the video content has been extended around the topic of "marriage". For example, whether there is love in the fifteen years of marriage, suspicion is the first step in the breakdown of the couple's relationship, and so on.

On the Xiaohongshu platform accumulated by female users, there are 230,000+ notes related to "Echo", most of which revolve around the topic of "marriage and love", and users use the drama "Echo" as a link to share relevant content about "marriage", "emotion", "gender" and so on.

For example, it can be seen in the comments that "Echo" is very well completed under the theme of dissecting the truth of marriage and human nature, which makes the audience who really like it empathize, especially Song Jia's description of the three stages of marriage "chewing gum period, cocktail period, and airplane mode period" is very broken, real, sharp, to the point, and closer to life.

Some netizens commented, "It can only be said that young people want to see some extreme, and people with some emotional experience or marriage experience can watch these marriages more chicken feathers." ”

Netizens also said that they understood love and marriage from "Echo", and many netizens praised "Echo" for explaining the simplest truth in marriage, and many netizens directly exchanged their experience and feelings of operating a marriage in the comment area and discussed relationship issues with each other.

"Echo" distills several states of married life and the contradictions between getting along, showing the complex marriage state of the current society, and also through real marriage emotional issues, the series has truly entered the widest and most sinking audience.

"Echo" is not only topical, but also contains more philosophical thinking. For example, Ran Dongdong, a female criminal police officer played by Song Jia, while looking for a clue to a murder case, found that her husband had a hotel opening record outside, so she fell into the fog of her marriage while tracking down the real murderer, and finally pushed the story to a climax under the intertwining of two seemingly parallel narrative lines.

In the advancement of the plot, "Echoes" deeply analyzes people's personality, psychology, three views, etc., reflecting the complexity and multi-faceted of people, making the story more intriguing, and the related issues also have some philosophical charm.

The original author and screenwriter of the play once said in an exclusive interview that in his opinion, the original work itself is a double-line structure, and the case line and the emotional line echo each other, so "Echo" is accurately a "emotional reasoning drama", the protagonist can solve the case but may not be able to detect the human heart, "The human heart is the biggest suspense." ”

The drama highly restores the novel, shooting the rare character tension and psychological tension of the Chinese drama, and the content is also quite deep. It is precisely in this way that this drama presents more poetic expressions, and the Tang Dynasty Eighth Zhi poem mentions "near to far, deep to shallow, highest to bright, close to close", "Echo" will grasp the boundary between husband and wife "closest relatives to estrangement" just right, indicating that "the pillow person may also be the most familiar stranger", echoing the theme again.

So even if "Echo" runs through the whole drama with a homicide case, it does not bring a very hardcore reversal through the main characters in each case, but more about the characters' life stories and emotional experiences, involving the original family and other content, the series is written with "suspense", and the landing point is on "emotion", so as to touch the hearts of more audiences.

Multi-dimensional upgrade of the texture of the work, the market needs more "Echo"

Nowadays, the drama market as a whole presents three major characteristics: first, the collective volume of dramas is gradually streamlined, and the market of "improving quality and efficiency" requires more condensed drama creation and higher standards for content; Second, the theme content is innovative, and the audience is no longer satisfied with the traditional routine plot, but is more inclined to novel stories and themes; Third, the audience has a more direct entertainment demand for dramas, such as fast-paced, strong contrast and counterattack cool dramas, etc., and the genre of dramas is more prominent.

In this regard, "Echo" is breakthrough and innovative in the narrative method, and at the same time, the director has given the series an excellent film texture, which is a broadening and upgrade of the aesthetic style of genre dramas.

Director Feng Xiaogang is very good at creating scene wonders, such as the enchanting character costumes and gorgeous palace buildings in "Night Banquet", the terrible scene of landslides and ground cracks in "Tangshan Earthquake", the panoramic display of refugees in "1942", etc., these grand scenes enhance the visual aesthetic tension of the work, "Echo" sets dim lighting, greenish color palette and life texture scenes, etc., the literary and artistic temperament of the series is further highlighted.

In addition, in Feng Xiaogang's works such as "A Sigh", "Do Not Disturb If You Are Insincere", "Only Yun Knows", we can also see his deep insight into marriage and emotions, and "Echo" also reveals some morality, values and other phenomena that are common in modern love marriage, such as Ran Dongdong After discovering the signs of her husband Yu Dafu's cheating, the two began a long psychological war. In marriage, the two have reached a certain "Nash equilibrium" state because of various interests and emotional connections, and once someone points out the other party's cheating and other big problems, it means that the balance will be broken, and the original intention of the "fig leaf" can be torn to solve the problem or give up on each other, hitting the audience's heart.

"Echo" integrates the dual concepts of "female + suspense", the length is concise, and the core of the story directly hits the marriage emotional relationship in the current society, which is real and profound, catering to the needs of the current drama market, and has certain creative advantages.

Throughout the current drama market, urban emotions, costume idols and other theme works still occupy half of the drama market, "involution" is very serious, and other pendant content, such as science fiction and other themes are not supported by a large number of explosive works, it is difficult to cultivate the audience's viewing habits in a short period of time, so in the stage of "improving quality and efficiency", the producer is more like "looking for new increments in creation in mature genre dramas", which seems to be a more mature and stable creative idea at present.

Relatively speaking, suspense is a mature type of drama, because various video platforms regard "suspense" pendant dramas as a must compete place, suspense dramas have a relatively stable audience, and now the scale of "she economy" continues to expand, which derives more content demand for women's themes, and the combination of the two to create "she suspense" works naturally has certain market advantages.

Under the framework of the type of suspense content, "Echo" meets the content needs derived from the background of "she economy", which is both commercial and artistic, that is, it conforms to the general direction of the development of the drama market, and has a strong story core and cinematic texture-like pictures, so that the audience can obtain more advanced and profound feelings in both visual experience and emotional experience. Whether from the perspective of the content power or marketability of the work, the current drama market does need more "Echo".

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