Pioneer and experimental.
Author | Bobby (Beijing)
Boundaries may be the key words to understand the drama market in 2023.
As dramas bid farewell to the era of traffic, dramas have touched the boundaries of growth in the past few years. Therefore, each platform seeks to produce high-quality products, and dramas need to improve their quality in order to maintain the stickiness of the stock of users within the boundary, and for their own innovation and the exploration of the content boundary of the drama, it is the possibility for each platform to find the outward development of dramas in the stock era.
Just last week, after the broadcast of "Black Soil Without Words", the first season of Tencent Video X Theater ended, providing a new perspective on this issue. The theatrical model has gone through several years, but Theatre X still offers a lot of freshness to the market, not limited to the form of the past theater, but to explore the diversity of subject matter, so as to pursue experimental, avant-garde and literary content.
In the era of drama innovation, Tencent Video uses X Theater as a method to provide an experimental place for drama creation. Theatre has become a more avant-garde creative space, and many of its works may have broken the inertia of the market, but it is also a process of cultivating the market.
In the longer term, that means greater possibilities for content and the opportunity for the show to push the boundaries outward.
1. X Theater in the Boutique Era
The overall traffic of last year's dramas remained relatively stable, and in 2023, the industry is more concerned about inward innovation.
Theater is an attempt by long video platforms to aggregate high-quality drama content, and since 2020, the theater model has been launched in the industry for a period of time. In the past, theater was more of a type of content aggregation to use the scale effect to keep short plays warm up.
When it was first born, this model brought a lot of discussion, but in recent years it has also faced some bottlenecks of its own, some from the continuous production of high-quality content, and others from the demand for content from consumers themselves.
When the X theater was launched in 2013, Tencent Video was standing in a transitional stage of theater development, and the public's initial impression of the theater had been established, but the market was a little at a loss as to how the theater could develop and where it could go.
Looking at the productions released this year, it can be seen that Theater X is not at all going to be a theater that is understood by the public. Theater X is different from the theater model that was generally understood in the past, and even violates the theater logic in the public's impression.
On the premise of maintaining the form of short series, X's theatrical form is not an aggregation of the same type, but a play and a style. Each episode aired has a very different style, subject matter, and mode of expression. "The Long Season" belongs to the suspense of life, "Huan Yan" belongs to the legend of the era, "Under the Prosperous City" belongs to the classical suspense of the East, and "Black Soil Without Words" is a cold realistic criminal investigation drama.
It can be said that Theater X has made a refreshing theater with an "anti-theater" attitude. Although the styles are very different, Theater X has an internal unity, "one play, one style", and the pursuit is not the large-scale effect of the same type in a short time, but the continuation of authorship and innovation, and also shows the internal unity in literature and oriental aesthetics.
The essence of theater is a label effect, which can be accomplished through the aggregation of the same genre or through a unified tonality.
Judging from the performance of the whole season of Theater X, the market has also shown welcome and surprise for this new attempt. From the perspective of word-of-mouth, "The Long Season" currently has a Douban score of 9.4, and "Under the Prosperous City" and "Huanyan" also have high scores of 8.5 and 7.9. In terms of social word-of-mouth, these works can often cause a strong diffusion effect and stimulate discussion.
In terms of playback, "The Long Season", "Huanyan", "Under the Prosperous City" and "Black Soil Without Words" Tencent Video have all exceeded 24,000 peaks in popularity. According to the data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, "The Long Season" and "Under the Busy City" have also entered the top 10 in the market share of monthly dramas, which is already a very good result compared to its genre methods that challenge the inertia of the market and the length of short episodes.
As early as 2021, Tencent Video adjusted its internal strategy and put forward the "technology-driven + art-driven" Tencent online video business development strategy. Among them, the art drive means that the production of some works with high artistic value but relatively unclear commercial returns is encouraged, and X Theater is undoubtedly a prominent embodiment of the art-driven strategy.
Tencent Video's adjustment is naturally in response to changes in the market, so what does the X Theater born in the changes mean to the drama industry?
2. A new space
Space is a dimension to understand the value of X-Theater.
In the current content market, dramas have been divided into different creative fields. In different fields, factors such as platform will, market return, and consumer preferences are all gamed, and drama creation is contested and shaped by these forces. The X-Theater is characterized by a more experimental and avant-garde creative space, which is more open and less constrained to the creators.
First of all, there is the experimental space of the episode genre. Pioneering and experimentation is the first step in content type innovation. New genres of work are often contained in the experimental works of the previous stage.
However, avant-garde and experimental works often mean uncertainty about market returns, and it is difficult to obtain production support. Xu Bing, the chief screenwriter and director of "Huanyan", only wrote the script for the first two episodes at first, but because the feedback he received was not optimistic about its market prospects, it was shelved for seven or eight months, until it was seen by the producers of Tencent Video, and the story that was broadcast in the X theater later appeared.
In the logic of X-Theater, we do not simply understand "uniqueness" as the uncertainty of commercial returns, but see the certainty of avant-garde and experimentation in it.
With the establishment of experimentation, Theater X also constructs a space for artists to express.
In the drama industry, the greatest common divisor of dialogue with the public is often sought, and in the process, the authorial expression of the drama series is often compressed. But artistry, or authorship, is still an important element to improve the quality of dramas, and there is a strong necessity.
Tencent Video X Theater has given creators greater tolerance, and they have more full self-expression in their works. "The Long Season" is a stark example, director Xin Shuang did not want to create the usual suspense film after entering the script creation, but wanted to focus on the fate of the people involved in the case.
The producer and chief screenwriter of the show, Wang Xiaoquan, and the original screenwriter Yang Guoliang once said, "Maybe everyone is looking for novelty and excitement, but we just took a rebellious path, and we want to make the most ordinary and true story to restore the simple and simple imprint of that era." 」
And these "rebellions" are actually a gesture of expression. The success of X-Theater also shows that authorship and literacy do not mean staying away from the audience, but rather reaching a new consensus with the audience about the meaning of the series. The production of dramas is also a process of negotiation with the audience, and from this point of view, the operation of X-Theater has created a new consensus space between creators and consumers.
This space also provides a new starting point for newcomers, who in the past may need to engage in more mainstream works to start their careers, which means that creators need to follow the conventions of production. X-Theater allows them to have small adventures at an early stage, which also helps creators explore self-expression earlier, which is conducive to the formation of style later.
"Under the Prosperous City" in the X theater boldly grafts the social reasoning drama technique to the costume drama, and this is only the directorial debut of director Wang Zheng, and it is also the first feature drama produced by the producer Sanchuan Media in the whole process. Director Wang Zheng mentioned in an interview after the broadcast that "Under the Prosperous City" does not have many works to compare in China, and Tencent Video did not raise too many doubts about the "structural adjustment" of this innovation when it was setting up the project.
Respecting the basic structure of the creative team at the time of creation undoubtedly means that the X Theater has given new creators more creative space.
3. Theater as a method
The discussion of Tencent Video X Theater ultimately points to the discussion of the boundaries of the series.
Creators need to constantly push boundaries to break the public's inherent definition of a series in order to provide more imagination for the series. The expansion of content boundaries will bring about the outward development of market boundaries, providing the possibility of breaking through the circle when the total traffic of dramas is relatively stable.
The value of X Theater lies in the innovative use of theater as a vehicle for experimental and authorial content. If it can't become a hit, the innovative attempt of a single work will inevitably be smaller. The theater has more spatial and temporal continuity, allowing the efforts of different authors to form a synergy here.
When the theater becomes a publicly-recognized label, it means that the theater has more opportunities to connect with more excellent creators and provide them with a place for drama innovation, and this brand effect also means long-term and diffusion. After the end of the first season of X-Theater, the market has formed a preliminary understanding of this, and when the next season of the work is broadcast, the public will naturally understand the series with brand awareness.
For example, when "The Long Season" first aired, there were still voices that thought that the way its three timelines intersected narratives did not meet the public's viewing habits, but by the end of the broadcast, this voice had almost disappeared. With the X-Theater already a label, the public will look at new works with the mentality that this may be a new attempt.
From this point of view, the proofing effect of the first season of X-Theater is undoubtedly a success. Of course, this will also bring more challenges to the new season of X-Theater.
But taking the first step is the most crucial. X-Theater's attempt is synergizing with other market efforts. So in the last year, we were able to see more dramas break through the boundaries and innovate, and this innovation is widely present in Tencent Video's works, as well as in other high-quality dramas in the market.
Of course, the advantage of X Theater is that it is a long-term institutionalized practice, and it is more pioneering and experimental at the text level, which is in line with Tencent Video's concept of insisting on difficult but correct things, and it is also the greatest significance of X Theater to the market.