Author | Akagi Jarko
Edit| Mia
In the past, there was a Wuha group to Laos by train, and then there was the Times Youth League and Cai Guoqing drilling wood on a lonely island to make fire, and then Guo Qilin doing "eating and broadcasting" in the Northeast.
Taking stock of the new topic variety shows in recent times, the Wuha group staged a joke about the language barrier at the beginning of Laos, this season of "Hahahahaha Season 4" (hereinafter referred to as "Wuha 4") staged a scene of "Laos embarrassment"; the island exploration variety show "This is My Island" put the "teenagers" of different ages on the desert island to start "survival" from building sheds and looking for water; The three brothers with completely different personalities in the friend travel group variety "We Three" cover high-energy people and raunchy jokers, The lying flat players who mainly accompany show a kind of human reality.
When "Flowers and Boys 5" ended with high scores and launched the friend season, all kinds of "tour group comprehensives" made a comeback in another form. Entertainment unicorns are more willing to boil it down to different categories of "acquaintance groups". There are "We Two" and "Wuha" in the travel category, "Cat in the Box" in the secret room exploration category, and "This is My Island" in the desert island survival category, supplemented by intergenerational communication...... Compared with the after-sales group of the drama, which needs to consider the audience's emotions, in the original acquaintance group comprehensive, the intimacy that the guests have cultivated before and the dimensions of reality show rhythm and stalk throwing have less scruples about "offense", which has become the laughing point and cool point of this kind of show to the audience.
Reality Show Acquaintance Bureau: "Offense Art" maximized
A major category of acquaintance group variety is the after-sales of IP such as dramas and variety shows. The screen partners familiar to the audience, through the form of group variety, fancy sprinkling of sugar or reverie that brings the audience the extension of the plot, have also made the acquaintance group variety derived from dramas and even variety shows a trend in recent years. Another category of acquaintance group comprehensive is the original acquaintance group comprehensive, most of the guests in the show are acquaintances and friends in reality, which meets the main trend of young people looking for all kinds of "partners" in recent years, travel pairs, game pairs, and secret room pairs...... And the celebrity friends who are familiar with each other are the excellent partners who can best amplify the guests' sense of relaxation and make each other have no scruples, and they can also let the audience be nourished by this sense of relaxation.
If the essence of reality TV is to maximize the art of offense, then acquaintance reality show is to offend again. For example, the cultivation acquaintance IP like "Wuha" comes from the years of recording experience of "Running Man" and "Extremely Picky", which has already made some guests familiar with it anymore. As a result, you can see that whether it is doing your best to play games in order to take the car to the hotel, or "skinning" the car away when your friends go to the store to ask for directions, everyone shows the most authentic personality.
Wang Zhengyu, director of the "Wuha" series, once admitted frankly at the viewing meeting that the essence of reality shows is the same as talk shows, and the biggest attraction comes from "offense". This kind of offense is not only an "offense" between the guests, but also a mutual "offense" between the guests and the director team. In the first few seasons of "Wuha", Deng Chao was the leading guest of the show, only Chen He was able to offend him, and everyone else was a "junior". However, after Fan Zhiyi was added, a relatively fixed structure of "mutual intimidation" relationship was formed. Two years after Wang Mian joined the show, he and Deng Chao, Chen He, and Lu Han became real drinking friends, and they were able to "offend" each other. This has become what the director calls a "stable structure".
So I can see that they "play" and ridicule each other, but they will not make themselves and the audience feel uncomfortable, but like good friends around them, joking and messing around is just the spice of travel, and the day will pass with a smile. This is also the way for ordinary people to spend the day with friends, and realism is always the most empathetic weapon.
Acquaintance variety shows also have the probability of activating the mechanism for guests to play memes on their own. For example, in the acquaintance group variety "Let's Go Now", after the guests Zhou Ye and Fan Chengcheng failed in the game, they pinched their noses and jumped into the water without saying a word. The acquaintance atmosphere can not only arouse the guests' desire to win or lose the rules of the game, but also allow the audience to see the chemistry of the guests as old acquaintances.
Another example is the recent new variety show, there is a secret room reality show "Cat in the Box" that gathers guests from "Running Man" and "Extreme Challenge", in the game session, NPC asked Huang Xiaoming "What is the leader of the sect", Chen He blurted out: We are the higher education, and this (Zheng Kai) is our deputy leader. can't help but make the audience have a sense of immediacy that the Internet mouth rushes into the screen and plays crazy memes.
(Cat in the box)
In the previous group drama "Happy Restart", which had a Douban score of 9.6, the 0713 men's group played a stalk that made the audience afraid: outdated male artists, wedding singers, divorce gossip, etc., which once made "domestic entertainment alive" a hot search topic. On the premise that the original relationship of the guests is strong enough, the more "offended" it is, the more it can bring about chemistry.
The ultimate of travel + acquaintances, is it "internal entertainment"?
The travel variety show "Flowers and Teenagers Season 5", which ended earlier this year, was called the best season in history by the audience, and it also made "Flowers and Teenage Friends" start recording in the eyes of many expectations.
Looking back at its explosive logic, it is not difficult to find that since the attributes of all comedians were exposed, the guests were heroic, real and unpretentious, and other characteristics, which also made the audience's favorability rise. "Zhao Zhaoyi laughed cautiously", "Xin Zhilei's mental state is ten years ahead", "If you don't have any comedy talent, you can't enter the Hua Shaotuan" and other topics have rushed to the hot search topic list.
The sense of rawness, roughness, and realism can basically summarize the main characteristics of non-competitive high-score/popular reality shows. For example, "Wuha" never writes about the script in advance. All the flyers will be curious about what they need to do tomorrow and whether they need to do it or not. So the script that the director team faced with them was, "What time do you usually sleep at night?", "Is the amount of alcohol good?" and other irrelevant content.
Wang Zhengyu said frankly, "Because after you design the field correctly, the biggest attraction is not the game itself. The first is that the scene can stimulate your state, second, all accidents are the biggest laughs, and third, after laughing, what is left is a touching aftertaste. "In these group reality shows, the majority of the audience is obviously the fan base. Trivial clips and empty shots without a story do not hinder their enthusiasm for watching the show.
For the producer, compared with the guest team formed after many considerations, they are not familiar with each other enough, and it takes time to "cold start", and the pros and cons of "hot starting" acquaintance guests are also very obvious. The guests will quell each other, triggering more chemical reactions, and greatly reducing the time cost of the director team to get the guests excited. The "disadvantage" lies in the "challenge" to the director team. For example, the guests gathered together to discuss the adjustment of the rules, and the recording opening took too long because the guests were happy to greet each other and chatter.
But in general, the benefits of acquaintance variety shows are still huge. Most of the Douban scores of mature reality shows were high. Several familiar human travel variety shows that have been launched recently have also performed well, such as "We" CVB rating of 0.348%, which continued to dominate the list after four episodes of broadcast, and won four consecutive championships; "Wuha 4" has been online for 28 days and has also won the championship of the video platform popularity day many times; "This is My Island" has reached 10,000 popularity peaks in Maoyan. Behind such achievements, on the one hand, it is because of the high level of variety show production, rich materials, and guaranteed content quality.
On the other hand, in acquaintance variety shows, the familiarity between the guests will bring "uncontrollable" development to the recording. They will take care of each other, and their cheerful and talkative friends will take the initiative to guide the atmosphere. For example, in the real-life friend travel variety show "We Three", the three friends and guests walked in a lazy style, energetic Wei Daxun, Mao Buyi, who talked little, and Guo Qilin, the king of the atmosphere. Wei Daxun basically assumed the role of a high mental state, boosting everyone's mood, taking the initiative to find topics to liven up the atmosphere, trying to arouse the enthusiasm of the other two non-high-energy travel partners, and also providing more material for the show.
They will also go "crazy" directly when they are in the right state. For example, in the first episode of "Wuha 4", the program team invited the well-known dancer Uncle An to host a street dance competition for the guests. Although he is not a professional dancer, Deng Chao "amazed" the audience with his performance with the temperament of a "crazy artist". The director once said that the scene at that time was very explosive, because Deng Chao was "crazy". When you "ride" people up, it's enough to let them be themselves.
As long as the sense of realism and raw edges is in place, even if it only presents the most bland relationship, it will move the audience at a certain moment. For example, the acquaintance variety show "Happy Adult" derived from Shen Yue's Vlog before, the content of the show is just Shen Yue getting along with friends in real life, and the guests have no artist baggage in the show, and the relaxed healing style has also made it get a high score of 9.2 on Douban, and it has been hotly discussed on the Internet.
Of course, if you move the acquaintance scene to an extreme environment, the chemistry and visibility will be infinitely magnified. For example, in "This Is My Island", on a desert island, there are all the resources for survival and nothing, and the "big boys" and "little boys" of the three ages start by looking for water sources, drilling wood for fire, and building houses. In the context of the typhoon cooling down in Hainan, on the desert island where the ant nest will be stabbed if you are not careful, what the audience and Mr. Cai Guoqing did not expect was that the guests did have to sleep in the "house" they built during the day at night.
It can be seen that taking the narrative of "living people" in internal entertainment and watching the most real appearance of artists has quietly become the audience's content demand for long video platforms. And a long video content that can provide emotional value and reduce psychological pressure is the common appeal of creators and audiences.