There are unfinished dramas every year, but like "Who Is He", it is rare for the screenwriters to choke. This Douban scored 8.2 points and ended but now there are only 6.0 points left, because the "rotten end" controversy is too great, the screenwriter directly Weibo said that he only claimed the first eight episodes, and did not blame the "rotten end" of the show. If it is really as the screenwriter said, either the play is hurriedly started before the script is completed, or the subsequent scripts are all replaced and re-operated, no matter what the situation, the work is not surprising that it is "rotten".
For TV series, the quality of the work depends first of all on the script. A good script may continue to lose points due to production costs, director aesthetics, actor acting skills, post-editing and other reasons in subsequent shooting, and the final product is average. But a bad script, or a rush to start shooting without the completion of creation, no matter what kind of director team, production team and cast are matched, it is impossible to present a high-quality appearance.
Especially in the field of suspense dramas that win by word of mouth, the work is highly dependent on the story itself, and once the plot is dropped, it is undoubtedly a disaster for the work. "Who Is He" is not the first work to be choked because of "rotten end", from "Icebreaker Action" to "Black Storm", from "In the Name of the Family" to "The Next Stop is Happiness", these works with a score of 8+ or more on Douban have continued to slide after the opening amazing.
The "rotten end" of these works is not the "pit" that domestic dramas have fallen through in self-exploration in recent years.
The end of the blockbuster drama is shocking, and "Who Is He" fell by 27%
The figure below shows the dramas in recent years that have scored 8 points + and dropped by more than 10% at the end. The biggest drop was "The Next Stop is Happiness", which fell directly below the passing line from 8.1 points, and now only 5.9 points. The same as "The Next Stop is Happiness" is "Who Is He", and the Douban score can stop at the passing line. The third place was the suspense drama "Daughter Back", which fell from 8.2 points to 6.2 points.
From the perspective of subject classification, these dramas with large declines are mainly suspense dramas, and 5 of the 7 works are reasoning and criminal investigation dramas focusing on male audiences. Among them, "Icebreaking Action", "Sweeping Black Storm" and "Who Is He" are all works adapted from real society cases and have a high degree of attention. "Detective Chinatown" and "Daughter Back" are dramas with a strong creative lineup and also have natural attention.
From the perspective of popularity performance, these works whose reputation has been declining all the way have an online broadcast index of 80+. Among them, "Sweeping Black Storm" and "Icebreaking Action" are even more popular out of the circle, popular on the whole network, and are phenomenal works of that year. And "In the Name of the Family" and "The Next Stop is Happiness" are also popular works in the field of urban romance dramas, with excellent ratings and online broadcast popularity.
In the heat fermentation trajectory of these works, the plot has accumulated a huge audience before advancing to the node of word-of-mouth collapse, and after the word-of-mouth collapse triggered the whole network to complain, some word-of-mouth fans abandoned the drama at the same time, but also attracted many passers-by who came to watch, so under the "black and red" effect, the popularity of these works is still maintained at the explosive level.
Judging from the cast, in these works, the male protagonists of the two urban romance dramas are Song Weilong, who performed a "brother and sister love" with Tan Songyun in "In the Name of the Family", and cooperated with Song Qian in "The Next Stop is Happiness" to stage a "sister-brother love".
And the other five suspense dramas are almost all powerful actors picking the beams. "Icebreaking Action" has Wu Gang, Wang Jinsong, and Ren Dahua racing; Sun Honglei, Liu Yijun, Wu Yue, etc. in "Sweeping Black Storm" are all superb acting bones; In "The Daughter Who Came Back", Zhang Zifeng, Wang Yanhui and Mei Ting are all powerful actors whose acting skills are well recognized; Qiu Ze and Zhang Junning in "Detective Chinatown" are also actors with acting skills online. There is also "Who Is He", which also stars Zhang Yi.
The wonderful performances of the above-mentioned powerful actors have made these works stand at a high starting point of word of mouth, but the efforts of the actors alone are obviously not enough. And after these excellent actors filled the audience's expectations at the beginning of the story, the weakness of the follow-up plot brought a huge psychological gap to the audience, causing many netizens to "emotionally" give bad reviews, making the already precarious reputation plummet.
These dramas with bad reputation but influence reaching the explosive level, respectively stepped on the audience's aesthetic minefield?
Family affection becomes love destroys the three views, and the gain for "abuse" and hurting others is not worth the loss
Objectively speaking, after the word-of-mouth decline of "In the Name of the Family" and "The Next Stop is Happiness", the Douban score is not low among similar works. In the field of urban romance dramas, there are very few high-reputation works, and the audience's word-of-mouth expectations for such works are not high, just pass. For example, the 2019 hit work "Dear, Love", with a Douban score of 6.6 points, has been highly respected during the broadcast.
And "In the Name of the Family" and "The Next Stop is Happiness" were broadcast in 2020, which is the node where urban romance dramas began to move towards word-of-mouth. From the content point of view, "In the Name of the Family" added a strong element of family affection and nostalgia of the times, and the beginning of the series successfully evoked the audience's nostalgia, pulling the audience's expectations to the highest point, and the audience even expected that this is a work that can benchmark against the classic Korean drama "Please Answer 1988".
And the "sister and brother love" featured in "The Next Stop is Happiness" is also unconventional at the beginning of the story, and the rapid progress of love and intensive sugar sprinkling also bring the audience a strong sense of amazement, and fans are full of expectations that this work can be comparable to "Beautiful Sister Who Often Invites to Dinner".
However, the performance of these two works in the later stages began to fall into the cliché of previous domestic urban romance dramas. "In the Name of the Family" allows the three brothers and sisters who are not related by blood but are better than relatives to enter the main line of love after the protagonists become adults, although the subsequent drama lays a reasonable emotional process, but the early stage of changing from family affection to love is unacceptable to most fans. On the one hand, it is the audience's dissatisfaction with the evolution of family affection into love, on the other hand, the nostalgic filter also fades after the end of the era scene, and under the double gap, the audience finds that this work has disappeared to everyone, and it is completely unable to support the façade of the high reputation of domestic urban romance dramas.
To some extent, "In the Name of the Family" is an urban romance drama that adds family affection and nostalgic elements, which has a positive significance for expanding the boundaries of the theme. Unfortunately, the integration between the added family elements and the main line of love is not pleasant, and this effect also brings a wake-up call to later works.
And "The Next Stop is Happiness" is another extreme attempt, "front" the most colorful part of urban romance dramas, quickly promote the love process of male and female protagonists, and then set up contradictions to cool down love. Such an attempt was originally understandable, but under the volume of 41 episodes, the pair of CPs obviously need to go through a "long" cooling sadomasochistic process, so the main creators set up the process of letting the female protagonist and the male second fall in love to support the length of the story, but obviously, the intensive sugar sprinkling in the early stage made the audience snort at the pair of CPs, only accepting the 1V1 love model, once the female or male protagonist has other emotional experiences, it will bring fans a strong sense of emotional betrayal, so the hostess is set in the middle and late stages of serious collapse.
If this work, like dramas such as "Beautiful Sister Who Often Invites to Dinner", has only 16 episodes in length, and the work only needs to complete the progress of love in a compact plot, and there is no need to impose various contradictions at all, then the story will still look good. But unfortunately, in the market environment of domestic dramas with base prices, it is obviously impossible for such a work with a huge investment to recover its costs and make a profit, and it is obviously impossible to shoot only 16 episodes. To some extent, the end of this work was also an inevitability in the market context at that time.
Fortunately, after these two works, urban romance dramas have made new breakthroughs in the exploration of word of mouth, such as this year's Douban scores of more than 8 points such as "Go to a Windy Place" and "Love Only", and the popularity has also reached the explosive level.
Talking about love damages the plot, and the characters destroy everything
Different from urban romance dramas, suspense dramas have always been high-reputation big households, driving popularity out of the circle with high word-of-mouth, and almost becoming a recognized path for the development of suspense dramas. Dramas such as "White Night Chasing" and "Hidden Corner" have become the creative samples of high-reputation hits. However, dramas such as "Icebreaking Action", "Black Storm" and "Who Is He" are obviously different from the previous typed suspense dramas that mainly focus on the circle audience, and the audience positioning of these three works is not a circle audience, which also means that these three works must not only be loved by suspense drama fans, but also have to break the viewing barriers of such works and cover more audiences.
"Icebreaking Action" is based on the 12.29 special operation of "Thunder Anti-Drugs" in Guangdong Province in 2013, and restores the beginning and end of the extraordinarily large drug trafficking case in the "First Drug Production Village". The producer of the play includes CCTV, and the co-producers include the Propaganda Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, the Narcotics Control Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department and other official units.
"Sweeping Black Storm" is adapted from real cases screened by the Political and Legal Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, with the background of the national special struggle against gang crime and evil, and all plot materials are taken from real cases, including Sun Xiaoguo's case, playground burial case, Hunan Wen Liehong's criminal case, Hainan Huang Hongfa case and other sensational cases.
"Who is He" and "Icebreaker Action", the first producer is CCTV, the play is also based on a number of real cases with major social influence, many netizens from the plot of the play and Gansu silver serial murder case, Hong Kong rainy night butcher case, Nanda corpse crushing case and many other similar details.
In a sense, these suspense dramas broadcast in Yangba are, although highly typed in content, their attributes are closer to the main theme dramas of edutainment, coupled with the platform attributes of CCTV, these works are destined to take into account more diverse audience tastes, so that it is possible to maximize the influence of the drama.
In order to break the barriers of the theme, "Icebreaker Action" and "Black Storm" have added a love line to the play, although there are not many scenes, but they are not close to the main line. The addition of love scenes diluted the coolness of the story and became a big slot in these two works, so that the works that could have been 8 points + failed to reach the excellent line in the end.
Of course, what makes the reputation of suspense dramas collapse is the character downgrading wisdom and logic bugs, such as "The Daughter Who Came Back" and "Who Is He", both of which are amazing at the beginning, with a score of 8.2, but can stop at the passing line at the end. The story of "The Daughter Who Returned" begins with all the characters complex and mysterious. But as the plot enters the middle and later stages, the characters have successively "reduced their wisdom", and the suspenseful atmosphere that is set to the extreme becomes mysterious. The biggest problem with the mouthless "Who Is He" is the logic bug, the high-energy plot that is dense in the early stage, and weak in the middle and late stages.
It can be seen that adding love scenes may dilute the high reputation of suspense dramas, but as long as the story itself is solid enough, it can still maintain a good reputation. But if there is a problem with the characters and plot, the reputation of the entire work will collapse.
At present, word-of-mouth may not directly affect the commercial performance of the series, but it will consume the audience popularity of the creators in front of and behind the scenes, and will also deplete the audience's confidence in domestic dramas. At the moment of the high-quality domestic dramas, we may be more likely to think about how to focus on the creation of ensuring the overall level of the series, rather than "deceiving the audience" with the first few episodes of amazement.