"Crazy" vs. "The Three-Body Problem": The first half of the national drama

Looking at the data of Chinese dramas in the first half of 2023 compiled by data platforms, Poison Eyes found that although Youai Tengmang still continues to make efforts in a variety of themes, it has gradually developed the "character" of its own platform.

"Crazy" has become a phenomenal hit, and it is also a well-deserved "first explosion in the first half of the year". Behind it is not only the explosion of iQiyi's years of cultivating the suspense theme, but also the result of the reattention to the head content, although the anti-black content is irreproducible, but the grasp of the suspense content for many years and the foundation of the previous national situation drama "Icebreaker Action" is still a lot of help.

On Tencent's side, "big IP" has always been not a bad thing, the key is how to do it. The theme of "heavy industry" such as "The Three-Body Problem" seems to be appropriate to appear on Tencent Video, and the appearance of "Long Season" together with X Theater has contributed to Tencent Video's refresh of its previous image and shape an innovative and word-of-mouth label.

Youku is in this half year, the left-handed fairy and the right-hand youth, "Long Moon Ember Ming" and "Heart Protection" exploded, and the three summer youth dramas "Secretly Can't Hide", "When I Fly to Miss You" and "The Day of Chasing Light" are also in Youku, no matter what the theme has a bit of "youth storm" flavor.

Mango TV's urban dramas highlight a hot spot, the previous "I'm Very Good in Another Country" wrote heart-wrenching Beipiao stories, and now will do "Go to a Windy Place" to write a healing story of leaving Beijing. The recent "My Human Fireworks" also has a lot of discussion.

"I'm fine in another country", "Go to a windy place", "My human fireworks"

While stockpiling differentiated content, platforms are also using the gradually increasing proportion of unique content to build a moat on content.

In the first half of 2022, among the new dramas on the video platform, the proportion of solo broadcasts of TV dramas increased to 66%, and the proportion of independent broadcasts of online dramas remained stable at about 80%. This year, the proportion of independent broadcasts of new dramas on the platform in the first half of 2023 has increased to 83%, and the proportion of unique dramas of Youai Tengmang has increased.

Three years after the pandemic, the drama market is turning again. The vast majority of the national dramas in the first half of the year were produced during the epidemic, and they were released to the afterlife and were tested by the audience. The cold and heat it receives are also signals of new movie-watching emotions.

"Crazy" leads the way, and the market recovers

Data across the broader market is picking up.

The number of episodes aired is increasing. In the first half of 2023, there will be 209 new domestic dramas, an increase of 34 year-on-year. The overall number of views is also increasing, although it only has a cumulative increase of 150 billion and a total of 1%, but at least it has stopped the decline for consecutive years.

While the total number of broadcasts increased, the Chinese drama market in the first half of 2023 also had the best drama king "Crazy" in recent years. Detaven, Lighthouse Pro, Maoyan Pro, Yunhe Data... Basically all data platforms, "Crazy" is undoubtedly the first. In the dehydration statistics of Yunhe Data, "Crazy" is also a member of another "10 billion views club" after "Qing Yu Nian".

Source: Lighthouse Pro

"Super Series" has a leading effect, with "Crazy" in front, and the results of the "players" behind have also improved slightly compared with last year. In the effective playback list of Yunhe data in 2022, the number of works played more than 1 billion is the top 12, but by 2023, breaking 1 billion can only be in the top 16, almost falling out of the TOP20.

The number of people who give high-reputation works on Douban is much higher. In recent years, Douban score, as the main reference indicator of word of mouth, has become a battleground for drama marketing, in order to offset the regulation of the "water army", the audience has also begun to pay attention to another indicator "number of ratings", in order to judge the real recognition of a high-reputation work.

Among the top 10 new dramas in 2023, 7 works have more than 100,000 Douban ratings, and there are two works with "Long Season" and "Crazy" with more than 770,000 ratings, while in 2022, only 5 works have more than 100,000 Douban ratings, and the top two ratings are "The Beginning" with 750,000 and "Menghualu" with 550,000.

However, for the industry, what is more exciting than the warming data is that there is no shortage of works in the head drama that have stepped out of the comfort zone, and they are not walking on the familiar "explosive" old road. Just looking at the content of the head dramas in the first half of this year, Yunhe Data effectively played TOP20 covering urban, suspense, fantasy, love, martial arts, spy war, era, science fiction and other genres, and also played some new tricks.

Urban emotions have always been the mainstream of domestic dramas, and this year's urban dramas especially emphasize "life flow", the protagonists of the two hit dramas "Love Only" and "Go to a Windy Place" are not "rolled", and the nuanced feelings of life match the slow pace of the plot.

This is the real feeling of the main creators, and in a certain sense, it also reflects the social reality. The producer of "Go to a Windy Place" once said in an interview that he felt very tired in 2019 and wanted to do nothing from time to time to go to Yunnan to lie down. "Compared with other film and television works, which are talking about how to be 'fast', doing a play that is 'slow' will be fresh and healing."

And in the ancient puppet dramas of handsome men and beautiful women, two different costume dramas have been created: "The Legend of Yunxiang" and "The Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope".

"The Legend of Yunxiang" "The Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope"

"The Legend of Yunxiang" returns to the old-school martial arts, and the male protagonist is a rare protagonist in martial arts dramas with a force value of almost 0, and the drama is all borne by the female protagonist. Such an anti-routine, but reaped miraculous results, became iQiyi's most played costume drama in the first half of the year; "The Silk Silk Case of Daming under the Microscope" as a historical drama with only 14 episodes, and the episodes have been effectively broadcast more than several fairy tale dramas, which is not easy, and it also slaps the face of the argument that "young people don't like to watch historical dramas".

There is another place that cannot be ignored in this half year, naturally "The Three-Body Problem" has opened a new journey of sci-fi dramas for domestic dramas.

"The Three-Body Problem" has a unique special feature in this year's work. The "aura of the original" coupled with the great difficulty of development, as well as the almost blank hard sci-fi theme in the field of dramas, means that it has no experience to refer to, and every step forward is an exploration of new fields. In the apprehension and doubt of many people, the drama version of "The Three-Body Problem" handed over an answer that exceeded expectations. More than 400,000 people scored a high score of 8.1 for "The Three-Body Problem", which is the audience's recognition.

Drama version of "The Three-Body Problem"

It turns out that viewers pay for good content that doesn't follow the old path.

Short video anxiety, there is also a solution

In the past year, not only the "taste of competition" between long videos has weakened, but the smell of gunpowder on long and short video platforms has also faded a lot, and the two sides have changed from war to friendship, and competition has become "competition".

Following iQiyi and Douyin last year, on April 7 this year, Tencent Video announced that it will cooperate with Douyin on the linkage promotion of long and short videos and the derivative creation of short videos. Tencent Video will authorize Douyin to enjoy the right of information network dissemination and sub-licensing of long videos, clarifying the methods and publishing rules for derivative creation of short videos, and jointly promoting the creation and dissemination of short videos.

The spread of short videos by the creators of Chinese dramas has also changed from the saber rattling in the past to the generous embrace of today. Guo Jingyu, producer of "Tang Dynasty Mystery" and founder of Changxin Media, believes that this three-nil drama without big IP, no traffic stars, and no large-scale publicity can be loved by everyone, and the second creation is indispensable. "Erchuang is likely to become the most important booster for movies and long dramas in the future, and the copyright is repeatedly sold." Guo Jingyu said later.

More importantly, in the face of impact, long videos no longer deform their expression because of the fast pace of forcibly integrating into short videos, but make the irreplaceable characteristics of short videos more prominent.

Watching "Love Only" and "Going to a Windy Place", the plot evolution is not the point, the lines are the key, the important thing is not what will happen next but how they discuss what happened in the past, everything slows down. Although such dramas have derived the strange concept of "Little Red Book Drama", the more you can "plant grass to the platform" in this way, the more it can be explained that this "healing" can only be felt by watching the whole text.

"Crazy", "Who is He" and "Thirteen Years of Dust" are all solved cases spanning more than ten years, and each episode is buried with clues, and if you don't chase after watching it, you can enjoy the fun of solving puzzles. "Long Season" does not deliberately distinguish between three time and space, skipping or doubled the speed of the audience is easy to miss the amount of information, it also takes the director's style to the extreme, feeling the muffle pain of the first eleven episodes, and the last snow across time and space will be so moving. These feelings are all experiences that short videos cannot bring.

In the field of micro-short dramas where short videos are challenged, long video product platforms have also accumulated works.

In March this year, the clip of "provoking Xiaoma Literature" became popular on Weibo, and a simple trailer revealed a variety of popular elements in the plot: revenge, Xiaoma's betrayal of German literature, childhood sweetheart, broken mirror reunion, etc. This Republic of China love suspense micro-short drama "Provoke", which was launched for two weeks, divided 8 million, breaking the biweekly account record of Tencent Video micro-short drama, and the cumulative account distribution has exceeded 15 million as of May, creating a popularity record for Tencent Video micro-short drama. This is also the only micro-short drama with more than 100 million views in the statistics of Yunhe Data.

From the Online Audiovisual Conference to the Shanghai TV Festival, there will be mini-drama forums at every important drama exhibition site this year. In addition to the short video platform, there are also relevant persons in charge of Youai Tengmang, and some head drama companies are also involved. The creators of the series, while polishing the irreplaceability of long videos, are also learning the expression of micro-short dramas.

Find "Unique"

This summer, the platform has its own reserves. In previous years, it was basically a brain-rolling ancient puppet, but this year there is a different solution.

Youku released three youth dramas in a row, "Can't Hide Secretly", "When I Fly to You" and "The Day of Chasing Light". The three youth dramas have their own styles and emphases, "Can't Hide Secretly" amplifies the feelings of "secret love" to write, "When I Rush to You" strengthens the theme of mutual encouragement and common growth, and "The Day of Chasing Light" directed by the Department of Teacher Work of the Ministry of Education focuses on the relationship between teachers and students.

"Can't Hide Secretly", "When I Fly to You", "The Day of Chasing the Light"

The platform for putting ancient puppet dramas does not lengthen the cycle, and chooses to release it in a short time, so that there are ancient puppets discussing topics every day. "Jade Bone Yao", which began broadcasting on July 2, the offline IP starring Xiao Zhan and Ren Min actually chose to broadcast 40 episodes in 19 days, and quickly did not leave air for fans' "urging". Some drama bloggers analyzed that if this rate is followed, Tencent Video still has two ancient puppet dramas in the summer.

Such a costume IP drama, the momentary popularity is not enough to cover its high production costs and publicity costs, and the long-tail effect after that is more important. "Do You Know If It Should Be Green Fat Red Thin" has been broadcast so far, and it can still be on the drama popularity list in the first half of the year. "Knife in the Snow", which was broadcast at the end of 2021, is still a hot drama in 2022. The flexible scheduling of the Internet has given costume dramas a longer vitality.

Even if it is a scroll, the platform is thinking of new ways to attract the audience. iQiyi previously announced that it will cut into the ancient puppet track to create a "drama complex", and "Ning'an Like a Dream" starring Bai Lu and Zhang Linghe will be the first, and the show will be designed for variety through the collection of fans' wishes, presenting a 6-episode "drama complex" of three days and two nights, which will be broadcast with the series.

"Ning'an Like a Dream" variety show "One Million Agreements"

"First" is no longer the focus of platform competition, "only" is.

This is an important signal released by Wang Xiaohui, iQIYI's chief content officer and president of the Professional Content Business Group (PCG) at this year's iQIYI World Conference, saying that "the only iQIYI" is more valuable than the "first iQIYI": "In the past, everyone would go out of shape in order to be the first, market share, number of members, etc. Seeking everything and seeking more, coupled with the large influx of funds in the market, irrationality has caused a lot of costs. ”

Under the value of "only" rather than "first", the platform can even generously admit that we just can't do a type of drama. Gong Yu, founder and CEO of iQiyi, said in an interview: "Tencent Video did a lot of costume sweet pet dramas, and for a while we did a lot and very good, and then our team did it, but last year we decided not to do it, and gave it all to the ledger drama, because we found that we were not good at it, and the market is actually not large." Just hearing that others are doing well and we follow suit, which is a particularly wrong practice. ”

There are types that do not do well, and there will be types that only can make characteristics.

It is no accident that Youku released three youth dramas in succession in the summer, and last year's suspense drama "Coward" was superimposed with the label of "Northeast Youth Cruel Story". iQiyi has been working on the suspense track for many years, and now it is trying to add various plots, elements and suspense to see what new things can be reconciled. Mango TV has been echoing the emotional hot spots in the field of urban dramas, and Tencent Video wants to continue to stay ahead on the difficult road of science fiction, and the second season of "The Three-Body Problem" has appeared in the film list.

"Coward"

The platform does not want to roll up the "first", and finding "irreplaceability" is the antidote to anxiety.