Text | Media circles
"I didn't expect that 10 years have passed!"
Recently, the second generation of stars such as Huang Yici (Duoduo), Tian Yucheng (Sendi) has been frequently searched, and people suddenly found that the original show "Where Did Daddy Go" has been 10 years ago.
Those cute and cute children back then have now become generous, but online public opinion has gradually become harsh on them - they used to like it, and now every bit of their life cannot escape controversy.
Of course, it is not only public opinion that is fickle, but also the preferences of the audience. In 2013, "Where Did Daddy Go" opened the golden age of Chinese variety shows, and no one could have expected that the total advertising revenue of a show could reach more than one billion yuan, but in 2023, variety shows fell to the point that as long as they are not broadcast naked, they are successful, and even like "Half-Acquainted Lovers", it obviously has a lot of popularity, but it has never won the favor of advertisers.
What has happened in the past 10 years that has led to such a difference? Is it time for domestic variety shows to need a comprehensive innovation?
Why don't audiences love watching variety shows?
An entertainment product is not very popular with the audience, how to think, it should also be that the taste of the audience in front of the screen has changed.
According to Yunhe data, the cumulative number of positive films on variety shows on the whole network in 2022 will be 27.6 billion, down 14% year-on-year; In 2022, there will be 274 variety shows (excluding derivatives and galas) broadcast in the new season, an increase of 7 over the same period last year; In 2022, the new season broadcast variety shows effectively broadcast 16.9 billion, down 18% year-on-year.
The number of programs has increased, but the number of broadcasts has declined, which shows that the market for variety shows has shrunk.
The webcast data is not ideal, and the TV ratings are not optimistic. According to CSM63 4+ data, in the 2022 Satellite TV Variety Show TOP100 list, the number of head variety shows has decreased overall, breaking 2% variety shows with a 45% drop and 1%-2% variety shows down 7%.
Since the audience's leisure time is relatively fixed, are the audiences who don't watch variety shows switch to watching the series?
Also citing Yunhe data, it can be seen that the drama traffic market tends to stabilize in 2022, and the effective playback of dramas on the whole network will be 305.9 billion, down 2% year-on-year.
In this sense, the lost audience is attracted by other media.
The biggest media change in the past 10 years, or the past 5 years, is undoubtedly the emergence of a free information medium that gradually approaches the national population coverage of TV channels - short video.
According to CSM national measuring instrument data, CCTV-1 viewers will reach 1.056 billion in 2022, making it the only channel in the country with a TV audience size of more than 1 billion. According to the "China Network Audiovisual Development Research Report (2023)", the number of short video users in China reached 1.012 billion in December 2022, surpassing instant messaging to become the largest Internet application in China, and the average user used it for more than 2.5 hours a day.
If the extremely high user penetration rate and amazing single-day usage time are the helplessness of technological progress, then the most unpreventable point of short videos is to fundamentally change the viewing habits of users.
Recently, a short video blogger asked an 8-year-old boy in the elevator, "Who is your current idol?" ”
The boy replied: "I don't have an idol, but I have a favorite vlogger - Dean Xiaoshio".
This answer aroused the unanimous curiosity in the comment area, "Who is Dean Xiaochao?" Am I already old? ”
In fact, Dean Xiaochao is a well-known video producer, he has tens of millions of fans on the whole network, and has become one of the top 100 UP owners of Bilibili for 4 consecutive years.
The content he produces, such as "Don't "Do" Challenge", "Eye "Color" Game", "Seeking Power and Usurpation", "Sheep Village", etc., the average broadcast volume of a single episode of the whole network is more than 10 million, and can maintain the high stability of a weekly update, and also invites other well-known UP hosts to participate in the show, more importantly, these video submissions form a branded program list and fixed game form, similar to many national studio games and outdoor reality shows, almost equivalent to a simple version of the variety show production company.
Yes, when the post-80s, 90s, and even post-00s are still watching TV or online variety shows, the new generation of post-10s audiences have abandoned these domestic variety shows based on stars and scripts and plunged into the ocean of people's creation.
It is not unusual for the new generation of children who grow up with smartphones to like "variety shows" produced and participated in by amateurs, after all, in the last decade when "Where Did Daddy Go" became popular, it was the era of "Super Girl" that featured people in the draft and sang if they wanted!
Variety shows may have been the world of amateurs.
How did celebrities record variety shows, from flocking to avoiding them?
Different from ordinary people who will be popular on the show, for a star artist with career development and artistic pursuits, variety shows seem to be a shackle.
Since the seventies and eighties, the entertainment industry has had a hidden chain of contempt: movie coffee> drama coffee> variety show. This set of imported products, which were imported when the mainland entertainment industry was not yet developed, is still an important criterion for fans to judge whether their favorite star artists have a sense of career.
If an artist participates in a film of a well-known director, it is naturally a good choice for fans, and if he can go to a mainland film festival or an international film festival, then his acting career is thriving.
But if an artist originally has a large number of well-known film and television works, but is now willing to mix in variety shows, it is a matter of "great disobedience and self-depravity" for fans and even passers-by audiences.
Even if the artist has "woken up" and no longer records variety shows, the audience's impression score is once destroyed and will not return.
This trouble exists in Li Chen and Sun Honglei, but it should be Deng Chao who has the deepest understanding of this dilemma.
Before appearing on variety shows, Deng Chao was a young and famous "Young Tianzi", and a good actor who won the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Supporting Actor with "Rally" for the first time he was electrocuted. Even if he first appeared on variety shows, Deng Chao was also the Golden Rooster Award actor who interpreted the textbook fear of death row prisoners at the last moment of their lives in "Scorching Sun" (filmed in 2013).
But as "Run Brother" became a national hit, people's impression of Deng Chao became "logging tired", "moving bully tua", "comedy comedian"...
The destruction of variety shows to Deng Chao's career was vividly demonstrated at the box office fiasco of "Chinese Table Tennis Jedi Strikes Back" screened this Spring Festival. Although this is a sincere work by Deng Chao, the audience said: "I can't accept any setting in "Chinese Table Tennis" at all, I can't believe the character created by Deng Chao, and I feel that he is recording a variety show no matter how I look at it." ”
Such an evaluation is undoubtedly sad for an actor.
Coincidentally, just a few days ago, Yang Mi was also sent to the hot search by career fans because of his variety show.
The reason was that Yang Mi's career fans proposed that the studio refuse to accept the permanent recording of variety shows on the grounds that he had suffered eye injuries and unfair editing, so as to focus on the filming of the spy war drama "Harbin 1944".
Because "Harbin 1944" has a strong production team such as director Zhang Li and actor Qin Hao, and it is a spy war drama that Yang Mi rarely touches, Mi fans are very optimistic about the career benefits that the play will bring to Yang Mi, not to mention that many of them think that recording variety shows is completely invalid exposure for "85 Flower Top Stream" Yang Mi.
When variety shows become the "original sin" of star artists, it seems not surprising that the ratings of domestic variety shows have declined.
epilogue
The "hot potato" that has become a star artist in variety shows has changed the viewing habits of variety shows in the new generation of young audiences, but perhaps it is amateur creators like "Dean Xiaochao" who ultimately determine the future form of domestic variety shows.
These versatile Internet celebrities may have become bright contestants, guests, and spoilers of variety shows, but through short video platforms, they can skip the "middlemen" and directly export their talents to more than a billion potential viewers in their favorite way and monetize them.
At this moment, it seems to have returned to the era when "Zhengda Variety Show" and "Lucky 52" focus on ordinary people, and the right to speak in domestic variety shows seems to have once again been handed over to the grassroots masses.