Rhino Entertainment Original
Text|Fat Department Editor|Park Fang
Another legal professional drama "Ordinary Road" has been broadcast, which seems familiar, but it is obviously different.
"Professional drama PTSD" patients will still show up to discuss some "irrationalities", such as "In what age, don't lawyers have mobile phones?" Customers are still looking for people through the company's landline, but overall, the focus this time is no longer on the "unlike" profession itself, nor is there anything wrong with professional common sense.
In fact, the show gets more cheers, and it crosses the circle of applause. At present, "Ordinary Road" not only continues to score 1 performance in eight sets of CCTV (the highest break 1.3), but also the fastest urban drama on Tencent Video to break 25,000 on the site this year, breaking 26,000 the day after it was launched, and the single data is even better than "Long Season".
Objectively, this is the advantage of legal professional dramas, such as the family narrative behind divorce cases, the workplace encounters of small people, etc., which can drive a good market foundation. But the reputation of "Ordinary Road" is mainly based on empathy.
In other words, the play does not take elite lawyers as the perspective, but filmed "ordinary people" who have not been seen for a long time in domestic dramas, which is where the real sense of difference lies. Pan Yan, played by Guo Qilin, allows the audience to perceive the workplace difficulties he encountered, and with empathy, he will be moved and think about his indomitable struggle.
The landing point is the struggle of youth, and it has also embarked on a road of "mainstream value narrative" that is different from the main emotions and women of previous professional dramas.
Not only "Ordinary Road", in recent years, domestic dramas have frequently broken through at the level of professional narrative, from last summer's word-of-mouth hit "Police Honor" to this year's "Love Only" career topic was recognized, which is extremely rare for professional dramas before, including "City of Youth" also performed very well on TV, and a mainstream value of consensus and empathy is dominating the development of professional dramas.
Do personality on small people
Find commonalities in professional dramas
At this moment, Rhino Jun tasted a "Eggs Benedict" immersive writing that cost 48 yuan. In the play, under the intercession of Zuo Na and Shu Yinan, Pan Yan escaped the expulsion of lawyer Du, and wanted to order a takeaway for the two as a thank you, and the Oxford man Shu Yinan ordered "Benedict eggs", and as a result, Pan Yan did not even remember the name several times for people's daily food. (It's delicious)
In the play, there are many such small details, showing that the two newcomers are out of place. In this processing, you can feel the accuracy of the script, that is, the precise difference between the state and cognition between different circles; It is also through these differences that the audience, as ordinary people, will see the cruel world faced by small people when they work hard from Pan Yan's perspective.
Du Feiyu, the lawyer in charge, will agree to keep Pan Yan because of the shortage of manpower, but after Pan Yan worked overtime, Oxford Law Master, who came to the door the next day to seek employment, and Shu Yinan, who came from a lawyer's family, would make Du Feiyu immediately decide to fire Pan Yan, an undergraduate student at a certain university; Even the formal wear that Pan Yan thinks is a reason to add a fire in his eyes.
The ingenuity is that this cruelty is dissolved in the play through the overall relaxed atmosphere. Zuo Na was ordered to win the contract that Pan Yan had already received, and the two came around the conference table for a "King of Qin around the column"; And Pan Yan in order to blend into the high-end community to meet the parties, actually dressed up as a decoration worker and student, after showing absurdity, the helpless figure squatting at the door will make people dumb.
At this moment, the audience will really feel the accuracy of Guo Qilin's casting, his natural affinity and faceless face, with a small person-like clever philosophy of life, and also wrote "I want to see the fairness and justice of this world"; The mixture of character shaping makes the sense of value of the main struggle of young people and the pursuit of dreams by small people more distinct.
To some extent, the two characters of Pan Yan and Shu Yinan have their commonalities, that is, with the vigor of entering society for the first time, but also with a relatively idealized ultimate goal, perhaps there are difficulties and dangers on the road to chasing dreams, and there will also be negative effects on education, family, workplace and other levels, but for a good enough dream to stick to, it is already the most credible mainstream value in professional dramas.
Whether it is script completion or character portrayal, "Ordinary Road" has a good degree of completion; At the same time, including the layout of the law firm environment and the ingenious telephone bell, these narrative details can let people see the texture of the play.
Of course, the problem also exists objectively, such as the aforementioned above, some plots still have logical problems, and when dealing with Zhang Rumei's divorce case, the final result is also slightly idealized. But these problems did not affect the pleasure of watching the whole drama.
Thanks to the excellent narrative rhythm, the mixture of comedy and reality, and its own solid story foundation and texture, "Ordinary Road" shows the advantage of opening up the needs of different circles, which can be confirmed by the good data of the show on both TV and webcast.
And Pan Yan's sense of value further moved the audience, he can keep smiling under the humiliation of his girlfriend's father "only giving his daughter" to "only give his daughter", but will return to the company to work overtime with tears in his eyes after saying goodbye; He wouldn't say a tough word to the touching party that blackmailed the client's son, but when the other party was going to make a rough move, he would always stop in front of the two ladies.
In this role, "fairness and justice" is no longer just the slogan of lawyers, in addition to professionalism and immersion, the sense of value has become a plus for the professional narrative of the whole play. This style of play is currently gradually proving its role in professional dramas.
Mainstream values merge with professional dramas
Trend
For the field of domestic dramas, professional dramas have been regarded as the standard for bad dramas for a long time before, and a large number of traffic dramas with professional skin and sweet pet cores have impacted the market; After 2019, the rise of reality dramas, the combination of professional dramas and women's issues, did not achieve good results, and career topics were trampled in a crisp sound of high heels.
The turnaround seems to come with the integration of mainstream values. In 2021, the main theme became the keyword of the national drama that year, and drove the industry's pursuit of mainstream value expression, in addition to the content layout of various companies in ice sports, there was also a word-of-mouth work "You Are My City Stronghold" that tells the love of SWAT.
Then in 2022, dramas such as "Police Honor", "The Bottom Line" and "County Party Committee Compound" that tell about public service careers such as police, judges, and civil servants, as well as "Song of Lushan Mountain" based on the mainland's new industrial reform, the development of realistic themes and the demand for mainstream value narratives are driving continuous progress in the narrative of these professions.
It should be pointed out that including this year's "City of Youth" with the theme of intelligent robot entrepreneurship, although the online broadcast effect is mediocre, but like the above-mentioned word-of-mouth dramas, it has performed extraordinary on the TV side, and the ratings have broken 1 in the entire premiere cycle of CCTV; In contrast, last year, "The Bottom Line" had a market share of about 4% in the first round of Hunan Satellite TV, and "Song of Lushan Mountain" continued to break 1.
The performance of the TV end proves to a certain extent the value point of this mainstream value narrative, which can open up a broader circle market, these audiences may not be mainstream online video users in the traditional sense, but with the full circle coverage of long video audiences, the aesthetic intersection of the two is opening up market demand.
In addition to portraying the image of police, firefighters, soldiers, etc., "County Party Committee Compound" at the end of last year is actually the category of professional dramas, and this part of the content has always been the main force of mainstream publicity.
In addition to public service professions, the permanent protagonists of professional dramas at home and abroad, such as lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, usually show more mapping of social reality, and from the perspective of realistic themes, the convergence with mainstream value narratives in recent years is also the norm.
Coupled with the need to promote better review and scheduling of dramas at the practical level of the industry, it is normal for platforms and industry companies to integrate mainstream values in professional dramas. It should be noted that although through the above dramas, we can see the landing of a domestic drama industrialization route in professional dramas, the industry still needs to further update its ideas.
It should be considered that this industrialization route reflects the intention of Chinese dramas to catch up overseas, at least at the level of professional dramas, inviting professionals as consultants, checking all links from the script to the post-filming stage, visiting domestic representative enterprises, collecting classic cases and integrating social topics, these production processes are almost the standard for the production of similar dramas, and strive to fill the professional shortcomings of professional dramas.
But how to tell a story well in the development of industrial production is still a compulsory course, including "Walking to the Wind" about aviation people and "Lady's Character" in the media industry, with Douban scores of 6.9 and 6.6 respectively; last year's legal drama "Lady's Law", with a score lower as 5.1. After the hardware level is improved, the software needs to be supplemented.
This year, there are also Tencent Video's "Public Prosecution" and "This Peace of Mind is My Hometown" around public service professions, iQiyi's "Gold Medal Customer Service Dong En" and "I Want to Go Against the Wind", Youku's "Houlang" with traditional Chinese medicine themes, and "Minglong Boy" with education themes, Mango TV's "White Castle" and other dramas, which are opening up more uncommon occupations in the past and bringing freshness to the market.
And how to bring aftertaste after freshness, domestic professional dramas still have their own way. At least the mainstream value narrative gives an answer, relying on industry characteristics to do topics, relying on industry commonality to do empathy.