Since "Star Detective" met the audience in April 2016, this show has always been the ceiling of domestic entertainment reasoning variety shows. Although the challengers are emerging one after another, what can truly shake the benchmark status of "Star Detective" has never appeared.
When Zhuyu could not be surpassed in the front, in order to avoid becoming a low-end version of "Star Detective", find a differentiated path and become the only way out for the successor.
Recently, Mango TV's "Women's Reasoning Society" gave a new idea. The show is adapted from the Korean version of "Female High School Reasoning Class" and adopts the perspective of an all-female MC, and GIRL's POWER has become a huge selling point of the show.
In addition to catering to the social wave of the rise of women's consciousness, I hope to talk about what different colors can female perspectives bring to reasoning variety shows?
What can a female perspective bring to a reasoning variety show?
In 2006, the success of "Star Detective" officially opened the reasoning variety show track of internal entertainment. The show is the ultimate in scripts, scenes, social issues, guest casting, variety show sense and other dimensions. Subsequently, although various platforms have tried this track a lot, it has always been difficult to stand out, and even the original version of the horse tried to replicate a similar variety show on Tencent Video, but failed to get the desired result.
If you want to get out of the encirclement, differentiation has become the only way, that is, choose a subdivision angle and do it to the extreme.
Some shows look for differences in mission settings, such as "The Great Escape Room" cuts from the subdivision of the escape room, with puzzle games as the core focus. "Meng Detective Detective Case" abandons hardcore reasoning and kills IP with variety games and emotional memories to attract the attention of pan-reasoning users.
There are also shows that look for differences in casting, such as "Detective Academy" uses high-energy semi-amateur players to play the game, showing the brain collision between highly intelligent talents.
"Women's Reasoning Society" chose an all-female MC lineup, allowing the show to clearly play the difference between itself and other reasoning programs from the first glance.
Judging by the results, such a setup eats a wave of gender benefits in the first place.
In addition to the 6 protagonist detectives are women, many of the key characters in the plot are also women. For example, the head of the live broadcast department where the MCs are located is a woman, the police officer Chen Team in charge of the investigation of the case is a woman, and many key figures in the case are also women.
This point has also become a concentrated embodiment of Douban's praise: "If nothing else, it's a girl to give me five stars", "I like it very much!" A little more all-female ensemble."
It can be seen that in terms of poking social emotions, the casting entry point of "Women's Reasoning Society" is successful.
Of course, this is only a shallow fawning over the female group.
At the level of the story structure of the show, the female NPCs are implanted in the dilemma faced by women in reality.
The original "Women's High School Reasoning Class" chose a campus scene and incorporated social issues such as school bullying and cruel competition for further education. However, after these issues change the cultural environment, it is inevitable that they will seem unsatisfactory.
In order to accommodate more female group portraits, the show transplants scenes into the workplace, and instead explores the injustices and dilemmas faced by women in the workplace environment.
The first episode of the live plastic surgery broadcast focused on female plastic surgery, and female employees had to choose plastic surgery in order to get a job. The female makeup artist Gao Guang carries the harm to women behind workplace romance and love PUA, because of unequal power.
The second issue focuses on sexual harassment and yellow rumors faced by women in the workplace, and explores the gender gap between men and women behind the reality that "the victims of yellow rumors are always women", and the dilemma of women's voice loss behind it.
In addition to the topic directly hitting women's pain points, in the reasoning design of the show, based on the high empathy of female MCs and female audiences, they chose to weaken the reasoning link and spend more energy on emotional foreshadowing and explosion. In the end, the hardcore reasoning story was transformed into an emotional story that poked people's hearts.
Judging from the results of communication, stories with strong emotional concentration are indeed more able to trigger empathy and discussion of topics across the Internet than complex reasoning.
One of the most out-of-the-loop clips is the parting and confession between mother and daughter at the end of the second issue.
The murderer's mother finally found that the video of her daughter being sexually harassed by her boss was just an AI change of face, but in order to take revenge, she became a murderer and was about to go to prison, and since then she has been separated from her daughter, and her daughter's imaginary wish to resign and go home to be with her mother has also come to naught.
In the small park, the phrase "Mom is not a liar, Mom has never lied to you" pushes the mother-daughter relationship to a climax.
Here, it is necessary to praise the wonderful performance of the NPC guests in the show. Family affection is a common emotion of human nature, and the two actresses also broke out with a strong performance tension, using a sentimental atmosphere to make all the MCs on the scene can't help but burst into tears, turning around and can't bear to face it directly. It also creates a highlight moment of the show.
Strong emotion and weak reasoning are also more able to give full play to the natural empathy ability of female MCs.
Many female guests in "Star Detective", in the face of the hardcore reasoning ability of "Double North", can only bear the characters of "evidence hunting dog", "intuitive queen", "variety sense" and so on.
In a program tailored for women such as "Women's Reasoning Society", it can truly show women's flexibility and agility.
The show has designed a lot of interactive links with NPCs, which shows the high emotional intelligence and communication skills of female MCs. They can collect intelligence during small talk and gossip, attract the attention of NPCs alone, steal key clues alone, and "routine" more clues through heart-warming actions such as comforting NPCs.
These program designs that strengthen femininity have successfully set up a differentiated label of "female reasoning" for the program.
Strong workplace immersion setting, the details of the script still need to be polished
Immersion is one of the points where "Women's Reasoning Society" has been very successful.
The program has a relatively complete world view: 6 high-IQ detectives from the "Good Good Detective Agency" joined the company as employees undercover for the whereabouts of Cheng Lala, a missing person of the 1111 new media company.
In order to strengthen the sense of workplace, each episode of the program has a sense of workplace process design: MCs take the bus to the company to work, enter the company need to clock in, have their own workstation, and reasoning and discuss is the company conference room. After joining the company, he also participated in various live broadcast department tasks based on the background of new media companies.
Compared with a "new world" per issue, these whole seasons of world view structure and ritual design can reduce the cost of audience understanding, and can also reduce the audience's emotions such as "playing" and "embarrassment" when watching NPC performances, thereby increasing immersion.
However, at the level of specific plot design, Leng Yan feels that there is actually more room for improvement.
Taking the necessary workplace work of each issue as an example, whether it is writing advertising slogans for live broadcast products, evaluating live broadcast room products, or reviewing the current problems encountered by the live broadcast department, these contents are actually disconnected from the main reasoning task of each issue. More just to provide a variety sense of the show for the show, and show Li Xueqin's strong workplace ability.
In the "Women's High School Reasoning Class", some of the entrusted tasks received by the members of the reasoning club point to the current task or the final suspense. If the workplace work in "Women's Reasoning Society" can have a better relationship with the tasks of a single period, it will give the audience more surprises.
On the other hand, in the design of the reasoning session, it generally feels that it is not sophisticated enough.
Cold-eyed can be understood, the show wants to weaken reasoning and use more energy to tell stories and lay out emotions.
However, when the proportion of reasoning in a reasoning program is not high, it is more necessary for the program to inject enough ingenuity into the limited reasoning plot.
Hardcore reasoning variety shows such as "Star Detective" can use a grand world view, complex timeline, and exquisite mechanisms and scenes to make the audience have a "bullish" impression in a short time. And "Women's Reasoning Society", which takes the route of life, the scenes close to life are easier for the audience to find bugs, and it is also necessary to avoid being reduced to the series of some simple puzzle games, and the embarrassing scene where the barrage deduces the chain of evidence and the MC group cannot find it.
In the structure of the story of the whole season, how to use the suspense of the whole season to connect the relatively independent single-issue story of each issue is a direction that reasoning variety shows have been working on. Its benefits are obvious, it can lead the audience to chase dramas during the period, enhance stickiness, and avoid loss.
But how to achieve this purpose cleverly, each variety show has different attempts.
In "Let's Start Reasoning", choose to let the show start from the seventh case, and the results of the reasoning of the early case will affect the direction of the subsequent plot.
"Women's Reasoning Society" also adopts this structure of "big cases and small cases".
At the beginning of the show, it was pointed out that "finding Cheng Lala" was a task for the entire season. In the process of single-phase investigation, there are also constantly relevant clues released, such as a photo of a strange man and Cheng Lala in the clean locker of the cleaning aunt, the "unknown sender" that appeared in the evidence several times, and the abnormal physical condition of the employee, which all hint that there is a greater conspiracy and secrets behind the company and the case.
At the beginning and end of each issue, guests also constantly said: There are still many mysteries that have not been solved.
However, these scattered clues are still questionable about how much traction the audience has.
In the "Female High School Reasoning Class" class, the layers of suspense are revealed and the pace is obviously much faster. In the first issue, the MC group touched the scene of the school's "collusion between officials and bandits", and disclosed the key high-school gas explosion accident 20 years ago in the first quarter, which led to the death of all students, and the members of the reasoning club secretly sneaked into the boiler room to explore evidence. Halfway through the season, the key clues that Class S members were forced to take green pills for body modification were released.
With the reversal of the teacher's kind character, the secret laboratory after the school and other plots unfolded, the suspense gradually strengthened, and finally the secret of insinuating the Korean cult sacrificing the lives of students was revealed, achieving the "amazing reversal" at the end of the season and gaining a super high reputation.
The current three episodes of the variety show will largely determine the overall ratings performance of the program, and if these large story lines and suspense cannot be released as soon as possible in the early stage, it is easy to keep up with the speed of audience attention loss, affecting the final broadcast effect.
The show is currently updated to its fifth installment, and from a fundamental point of view, the attempt to choose a female perspective to cut in is successful.
Cold eyes expect that as the subsequent plot continues to unfold, the final suspense will be revealed with a reasonable and meaningful "God reversal" that has enough social discussion significance to push the reputation and volume of the show to a new level.