The highest score of the 2023 domestic suspense drama was released in advance in the first half of the year.
The new suspense drama "Long Season", created by the original team of "Hidden Corner", was recently launched on Tencent Video, with a score of 9.0 yesterday, and the highest score for domestic dramas in the year (as of now).
Only the first three episodes were broadcast, and the show received unanimous praise from the audience. After the latest three episodes were updated, the show's rating also continued to grow overnight to 9.1 points. It is probably not a problem to visually see that the play won the highest score of the annual suspense drama at the end of the play.
"The Long Season" uses the "taxi deck" incident as an incision to bring up a shredded corpse case 18 years ago. The play creatively injects the perspective of old age, and draws on the changes in the northeast town in the past 18 years through the different story lines of the three protagonists in the old case.
Like the previous "Hidden Corner", director Xin Shuang and his team did not stop, they continued to challenge the genre innovation of domestic suspense dramas. This time, innovations in form and content are even more daring. In the play, the three story lines of 1997, 1998 and 2016 intersect, time and space are staggered, flashbacks and interpolations are used interchangeably, filling the sense of suspense and mystery and telling the past of old cases.
The perspective of old age memories selected in the story makes people fully feel the subversion of personal fate by an unsolved case, and the heavy sense of the changes of the times is also generated.
In the play, Wang Xiang (played by Fan Wei) was proud to be a train driver at the Birch Steel Mill when he was young, and after suffering a wave of layoffs and accidentally losing his only son 18 years later, he has been tempered by life into a tired old man and became a taxi driver for his livelihood. At that time, Gong Biao (played by Qin Hao) changed from a spirited college graduate to a middle-aged frustrated man with an out-of-shape figure, and the criminal police captain Ma Desheng (played by Chen Minghao) also changed from the most potential police officer in Hua Lin to an elderly dance troupe member who was addicted to Latin dance.
Three elderly people who had been silent met again because of a deck car case and the murder suspect of the year, rekindled their youthful passion and began to find the truth.
This angle has its own bloody plot, which is also different from the current expression habit of suspense dramas that generally focus on young and middle-aged people. The three timelines go hand in hand, neither follow a fixed narrative habit, seamlessly flow between different eras, but are not chaotic. Each transition plot is the degree to which the audience can applaud, and the subtlety and skill of the director's technique add a lot of audiovisual aesthetic enjoyment to the play.
The series adopts the narrative method of chapter hui, each episode is more than 1 hour long, and is called "movie-style TV series" by the audience because of its huge story volume and super long duration. While most domestic dramas are being spit and watered, "The Long Season" is called by the audience full of details, and an hour is not enough to watch.
At the beginning of the series, the spirited Wang Xiang in 1997 drove a train in Huagang and as the camera panned through the clouds and then fell back to the ground, the camera became the elderly Wang Xiang who drove a taxi in 2016.
At the end of the second episode, the elderly Wang Xiang accidentally discovers the suspect of the murder case in the deck car case, he cooks a table full of meals, and meets his son Wang Yang in his sleep. The camera pulled away from behind the sleeping Wang Xiang, Wang Yang's portrait appeared, and the foreshadowing laid by the old case 18 years ago also began. Including the first encounter between his son Wang Yang and Shen Mo, in the soundtrack of "Blue moon", the transitions in 1997 and 1998 are also very smooth, and the state of the characters has changed greatly, making the series full of suspense.
The excellence of this audiovisual language is reflected in "Hidden Corner", the creative image that the director is good at is full of high-end sense, making full use of audiovisual language to explain the expression of the narrative, so that the audience is full of fun watching the drama, and the scene of the whole people guessing the plot is also reproduced in the barrage. This broadcast platform also created the function of barrage rewinding, which began to rewind the barrage as soon as it involved the past plot, and also made a lot of assistance for the audience to understand the timeline of the story.
This kind of viewing experience obviously requires the audience, but it also expresses the respect of the creator for the audience. Domestic dramas have always defaulted to the audience's inability to accept too brain-burning settings, and the direct way to solve the case often makes it difficult for suspense audiences to have fun, and the incomplete logic cannot meet the needs of professional audiences.
The Long Season doesn't have that problem. On the one hand, it uses the Northeastern-style comedy to express the interest of the three old men in solving the case, and on the other hand, it cuts open the wounds of the times from time to time and pulls them in front of the audience, without avoiding the heavy blow brought by the unsolved case to the parties. Wang Xiang, who thought that his family had returned, and Xing San, the former security section chief who lost his dignity by clutching the urine bag around his waist, these middle-aged and elderly people who had been defeated by accidents wrote the sorrow of small people with their own stubbornness and persistence.
This complex character background also increases the social significance of suspense dramas, and suspense dramas solve cases not only to do guessing games, but also more unsolved cases have their social motives. When we look back at unsolved cases and try to disassemble the truth in them, more often we may encounter those cruel truths and see the poor people involved. This is the question that "The Long Season" tries to surpass ordinary suspense dramas, and it is also a question that should have been answered long ago by the suspense genre.
The soundtrack of this episode also adopts the original cast, and the just right film-level soundtrack is no longer the redundant background sound of the series, but plays the function of supplementing the narrative at the key plots. In addition, the play also challenged the very rare physical special effects makeup of domestic dramas for the first time, when Qin Hao, Fan Wei, Chen Minghao and other actors became fat and aging, Wang Xiang, Gong Biao, Ma Desheng three tired and troubled elderly images were born.
The "iron triangle", which has broken the inherent image and is so old that the audience cannot recognize it, has once again challenged the higher realm of their respective performances, and I have to say that such a performance and the plot and production match can indeed bear the highest score of the year evaluation of domestic suspense dramas. On the road of genre innovation of domestic suspense dramas, "The Long Season" shows the self-renewal of the creators, and various iterations of narrative, video and technology have brought many surprises to the audience, and such self-innovation will be most sincerely recognized by the audience. Readers who have not yet seen the art bloom can click up and brush the drama as soon as possible.
Author and editor of this issue: Li Xiazhi
Executive Producer: Zhou Nanyan