After getting rid of the refrigerator, the Douban score of "Please the Refrigerator" has a big fault, and a slow variety show of life observation that has gone through six years now has to face its seven-year itch.
(As of press time, the seventh season of "Please the Refrigerator" had a Douban score of 3.7 points, and before that, the average score of the series was 7.35)
Controversy comes from the show's modalities and guests. The previous highlight of "Please, please" was severely weakened, and instead of a number of game sessions in the three-story interior space, the new resident guests not only failed to highlight their value in the show, but also became the target of public criticism because of the language barrier and the history of insulting women.
This has to make people return to the topic of the revision of the N generation, when the "Extreme Challenge", "Run Bar Brothers", "The Voice of China" and other fast comprehensives have gradually found a new direction in the past two years of revision, under the illumination of countless spotlights, can the slow variety show represented by "Please ask the refrigerator" still give its own innovative method?
From "Please the Refrigerator" to "Please Boom"
As early as the release of material information by the "Please, Please, the Refrigerator" program group, the term "subversive upgrade" has revealed signs of major revisions. Food and interviews give way to social networking, booming and other "young people's most fashionable and in-depth lifestyle", Gao Qingchen, Liu Zhang, Chen Ziming and other talent show newcomers were invited to become resident guests.
But until it premieres, viewers familiar with the show may not have realized what the redesign meant.
In the new season's broadcast content, interviews, food, and the two core links of the show have almost no sense of existence. The living refrigerator of the flying guests has been replaced by the sponsor's refrigerator, and the ingredients inside are obtained through the game blind box. The most important thing is that the interview content that tells the story through the appearance, decoration and internal ingredients of the refrigerator is missing, which is nothing less than an adventure for the program group that has gathered a large number of valued audiences through "food + interview" for six years.
If the effect of the bombardment is acceptable, perhaps the program group will not be so controversial, but it turns out that in the variety show where everything can be played, the audience does not buy it without grasping the depth of the topic and cultural core through the game. In the first episode, three games of food competition: fitness bikes, number talking, and hide-and-seek take up the vast majority of the time, and after a flurry of giggles, the winner receives a delicious reward and the loser orders takeout in violation of the rules (according to the program team design, the loser needs to cook their own food).
It's hard to imagine that a food show that has insisted on inviting a large lineup of chefs for six years will not only drastically reduce the cooking skills display in the new season, but even order takeaway.
All of the above may also be attributed to the cost of trial and error in the comprehensive N-generation revision, but the mistakes in guest selection have become the last straw that crushes the brand image of the show.
Broadcast information shows that Gao Qingchen, Liu Zhang, and Chen Ziming are from the talent show "Creation Camp 2021" and "National Style and Beauty Youth" respectively. It is not unusual to introduce traffic love beans, the new star Xiaoxian Kitchen added to the sixth season of the show is an attempt, of which Dong Yanlei, Ming Liang, and Lin Yuzhi are also from the talent show, which may reflect the new gameplay that Wang Xinxuan, who has taken over the producer position since the sixth season, hopes to explore.
But compared with the previous season, the young guests of the boom season obviously failed to play their due role, on the one hand, too many resident guests distracted the topic focus of the flight guest Zhao Liying, when netizens praised Wu Lei for taking care of Zhao Liying in the program, the problem of the program in the guest configuration has actually been exposed.
(In the Douban score of the "Please please the refrigerator" boom season, the proportion of bad reviews is as high as 60%).
On the other hand, the selection of new resident guests is also debatable. Gao Qingchen is from Thailand, and although he was able to complete the basic Chinese dialogue in "Creation Camp 2021", he had to "hire" Wang Jiaer as his Chinese translator in "Please, Please".
Whether Gao Qingchen can understand the food culture and life concept with medium and Chinese in the next show is not yet known, but one thing is clear, if Wang Jiaer is required to constantly relay the dialogue between guests throughout the season, then the audience must not only "please boom", but also "please Gao Qingchen".
Perhaps the most deadly problem comes from Liu Zhang. Judging from the ratings of Douban netizens, the problems of the program focus on the complete revision of the face, Gao Qingchen's language barrier, and the program group's invitation to bad artists. The last question points directly to Liu Zhang. Because of the black history of not respecting women by netizens, Liu Zhang has previously flipped over the endorsement of the king of tea, "the heavier the woman, the lighter the status, the fat man only has a stomach, no future" full of male gaze.
The content of the show has lost its soul, the guest lineup has attracted criticism, when "Please the Refrigerator" gradually got rid of the refrigerator, is it still the "teenager" it was before?
According to the official information released since the seven seasons of "Please the Refrigerator", the change did not start this year.
For example, the constantly adjusting program slogan, from "the world's food is in your refrigerator", to "open the refrigerator, cook life", and then to "cooking is the way we love life", the symbolic meaning of the refrigerator object gradually extends from food to life, love and other keywords with humanistic feelings and emotional resonance;
For example, the rhythm of the show, the earliest chef lineup only needs to compete in 1v1, presenting creative food in 15 minutes. However, from the fourth season onwards, the original individual battle became a 3v3 team battle led by guests;
Either way, the revised content always revolves around the refrigerator, and its program ratings are limited to small fluctuations. Once detached from this core concept and tilted from content to traffic, the creators had to face negative feedback that collapsed at the beginning of the broadcast.
Slow comprehensive revision: "fast with slow" is not a good idea
From "Please the Refrigerator" to see the slow variety shows that have been popular in recent years, the revision is a topic that cannot be bypassed.
On the one hand, if the N generation wants to form a benign commercial operation, it is necessary to tell new stories to capital through the innovation of form and content, for example, "Please ask the refrigerator" specifically mentions the commercial value-added of the program in the material delivery, "taking food as the entry point, covering eating and traveling." Immersive marketing of a full-line lifestyle...".
On the other hand, in the face of the rapidly growing number of variety shows at both ends of the Taiwan network and the increasingly homogeneous program content, program creators have to update their means and concepts to meet the higher expectations of young audiences.
Taking "Longing for Life" as an example, despite the lack of competitors of the same type, the program team still strives to incorporate fresh elements in each season, such as the standard of exchanging food refers to the farming scenes in different regions. Therefore, although "work-eat-talk about life" has become a regular process every season, different contents such as planting rice, picking pineapples, planting trees and even visiting warehouses have maintained a certain freshness and creative tension of this show.
The above situation shows that the creators who hold the explosive slow variety IP can not eat the "old book" once and for all, as long as the program has the opportunity and plan to broadcast the next season, it must be revised and innovated into the creative consideration, and it has to face the risk of revision.
Counting most of the slow variety shows that have entered the series, "taking the fast with the slow" has become a new choice.
The so-called "fast with slow" refers to the slow variety show consciously speeding up the pace or borrowing from the fast variety show's gameplay. The competition mechanism is a common means of modification of slow variety shows, in addition to the upgrading of the format of the cooking competition in "Please Please the Refrigerator", the third season of "Dear Inn" directly indicates that it is necessary to break the mode of slow variety shows and transform into workplace variety shows that reflect reality, specifically, guests need to complete the KPI of personal income generation, otherwise they will face a crisis of elimination.
Another "accelerating" trend is to focus on contradictions. The "clear words" of the third season of "Chinese Restaurant" and the "mutual pity drama" of the second season of "Flowers and Teenagers" have helped the show to quickly go out of the circle and gain heat. Bone data shows that the cumulative playback of the third season of "Chinese Restaurant" reached 1.96 billion, of which "Huang Xiaoming responded to Mingxue" and "Wang Junkai Yangzi imitated Huang Xiaoming" and other hot searches on the whole network as many as 103 times, while the second season of "Flowers and Teenagers" was played more than ten times (93.35 million) of the first season.
It should be noted that "Chinese Restaurant" hopes to convey Chinese food culture through star management, and the second season of "Flowers and Teenagers" is positioned in "humanities", but the actual broadcast of the show shows that cultural positioning has become a foil for guest contradictions.
All of the above, through the "fast and slow" way to revise the variety show, the final result is "the faster the slower", the revision controversy of the "Please the Refrigerator" season means that the program team needs to spend longer to fill the generation gap between content and demand; after "Ming Xue", the fourth season of "Chinese Restaurant" that started the Yangtze River journey is slowly recovering the reputation of the previous season, and Huang Xiaoming himself does not have enough "goodwill capital" to support him to continue to maintain the personality of the domineering president; and "Flowers and Teenagers" has been stopped.
Where to revamp: Finding the cultural core of the show is more critical
Of course, traffic, IP, and burst points are the catalysts that drive the topic and broadcast volume of variety shows, but for a program that hopes to continue the brand and maintain its reputation, it is more critical to find and adhere to its own cultural core.
"We've been looking at vertical categories that can be varietytized. When a content product has its own cultural core, it has public recognition, and its vitality will become very strong. The words of Bai Hongyu, the producer of "Strange Life", may be able to inspire all the creators of slow variety shows.
"Strange Life" opens the guests' exploration journey in the form of "documentary + reality show", and what is different from other travel programs is that the celebrity's travel does not stop at the variety show of the horse, but closely follows the theme of "Life Adventure", and bursts out of real emotions in the strong contrast between time and years, mountains and rivers and individual limitations.
When Xu Xidi visited the African elephant orphanage, she encountered the scene of the indiscriminate killing of living beings and the exposure of corpses in the grassland, needless to say, the camera has conveyed the concept of responsibility of "protecting living beings"; Dou Xiao's emotional close-up of repeated attempts to climb the Chaya Peak but cannot, slowly and powerfully explain the dialectic between the process and the result; and the characteristics of such programs further highlight the humanistic feelings behind the trip.
In fact, variety shows with cultural cores can completely start from their own cultural positioning to explore the boundaries and scales of innovation. With "interview + reading + light analysis" as the main mode, "Reader" has made a large scale adjustment and upgrade for each season, and the second season has added genres such as more difficult texts and letters to read aloud, and unlocked new models and new scenes for multi-person reading and multi-local reading; the third season not only built a "one-square-meter" reading booth, so that the right to interpret the text returned to the public, but also went out of the "ten thousand kilometers" to listen to the voice of reading aloud in the daily life of ordinary people and find the power of reading.
Returning to the "Please the refrigerator" that opens life with the refrigerator, on the one hand, the refrigerator itself is an important carrier of time and space scenes, from traditional festivals such as the Spring Festival and the Lantern Festival, to the three meals in the morning, middle and evening, the refrigerator is Chinese given a variety of functions in different scenarios; on the other hand, for the Z generation with a faster pace of life and a more different dietary concept, the ingredients in the refrigerator obviously have the potential to tell more trend stories, personality values and new consumer brands.
In other words, starting from the refrigerator, the program team can also expand the boundaries of the guest type, the boundaries of the topic of discussion, and the consumption value of the refrigerator. In order to care for more slow variety shows facing the problem of revision and innovation, it is better to think more with a sentence in "The Getaway" in the afterglow: "Science looks at space, looks at the future of mankind, looks at the new colony of the moon, and looks at the incredible interstellar war between the earthlings and the Martians." I looked into space, at the past of mankind, at astrology and the celestial charts, at the dreams of priests, at the superstitions of chiefs. ”
For the slow variety show of "sitting and talking about the Tao", if you want to chat longer and talk brilliantly, you must always explore the story from the past cultural genes and release your feelings.