Text | Horn tip
In the recent drama market, the popularity of "suspense dramas" has rebounded significantly: the former "Yunnan Worm Valley", which integrates "adventure, action and suspense" elements, won a Douban score of 7.9, and then Tencent and Mango TV successively broadcast "Double Detective" and "Double-Sided Detective" to meet market demand. However, the limelight of this batch of domestic suspense dramas is not as lively as a suspense web drama "Reverse Game" that premiered on iQiyi International Station.
"Did you watch 'Reverse Game'?" "Where can I find resources for Inverse?" "...'Reverse Game' is becoming a new social currency for fans of suspense dramas. On Douban, this work opened with a score of 8.6, and it is still showing an upward trend of word-of-mouth. "Reverse Game" is produced by iQiyi and directed by the Taiwanese production team, telling the story of the police and lawyers in prison who are in prison and have the ability to write criminal psychological profiles behind a sudden serial murder case in Donglin City.
Different from traditional crime dramas, "Reverse Game" takes multi-line intersection as the main narrative of the story, and under the parallel large case of the two male protagonists, a subdivision case also pushes the truth to an organization with mysterious power. Black hell, hunting, suspense, detective, conspiracy, it can be said that "Reverse Game" contains all the elements that the audience of crime films is keen on, and this is also an important factor for the show to be highly acclaimed and active in major resource plates.
Another layer of "praise" factor comes from the creative team of the show. Directors Zhuang Xuanwei and Chen Guanzhong, as well as individual actors in the play, Zeng Jinghua, are all from last year's high-scoring Chinese drama "Who is the Victim". Actors Zhou Yumin and Zhang Zirong are Taiwanese artists who are quite familiar with the mainland market. Especially the former, under the glory of "Meteor Garden" and "Leper Hero", the news of returning to Taiwan after nine years of local creation has excited fans.
Zhu Xuanyang, another male protagonist in the play, was shortlisted for the best new actor and the best supporting actor at the 22nd Taipei Film Awards in Taiwan.
From cooperating with HBO to create a Douban 9.4 high score "The Distance Between Us and Evil", to working with fox to launch the dark Horse Chinese drama "Want to See You" and the local drama "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women", as well as the "Reverse Game" that was broadcast recently and joined hands with mainland iQiyi, the "recovery" consciousness of Taiwan drama in the mainland market in the past two years has been perceived by the public. Behind this, in addition to blindly borrowing the power of "foreign capital", the production ability of Taiwanese scripts cannot be underestimated.
For audiences who are accustomed to the mainland drama chasing model, a drama is not worth chasing, and the priority is to touch the lineup of the drama. As for "Reverse Situation", the heavy responsibility of "propaganda" in the early stage naturally fell on Zhou Yumin, who has a high reputation in the mainland market.
It began in "Meteor Garden", long before "The Hero of the Leper", but finally lost a series of works after Zhou Yumin "went north". His last mainland work, "The Words of the Great Song Palace" with Liu Tao, with a Douban score of 3.8, was called "the lowest level of Li Shaohong's work since the beginning of his career"; looking further ahead, he and Di Lieba starred in "Fire Like a Song" in 2018, which was also unsatisfactory - the drama not only failed to achieve the desired results that year, but the two leading actors were also complained about by netizens because of the "Zhang Shuping" style bun.
And his earlier film works, such as participating in the action film "Anti-Corruption Storm 2" and the romantic film "Single Men and Women 2" with Du Qifeng, all failed to reach the Douban passing line. This Taiwanese male artist with a prosperous beauty and a high start has also once made the market feel sorry. Fortunately, this year, when a group of male artists from Hong Kong and Taiwan are still keen to come to the mainland market to find gold, Zhou Yumin has opened a "local" return after nine years.
In the new drama "Reverse Situation", he plays a criminal who is an elite lawyer with the ability to write a criminal psychological profile, but is forced to enter the game because of an unjust case.
It is such a slightly complex character that makes Zhou Yumin have a different visual experience for the audience: wearing a prison uniform, beard and dregs, and unkempt hair, which is the daily outfit of Liang Yandong (Zhou Yumin); the plot setting of being bullied by other inmates, being in prison but desperately trying to obtain information from the outside world, and reaching an unequal agreement with the police, gives the character a little more sense of fatalism; plus, this is a legal wizard who is extremely intelligent and has the ability to reason in criminal investigation, and Zhou Yumin has a lot of room to play.
At present, judging from the plot performance of the first six episodes, the appearance resembles the "young version" of Liang Chaowei, and the character image of the thoughtful, calm but not much to say is quite brilliant. Congratulations to Zaizai, finally found a role suitable for himself.
From another dimension, the "good look" of "Reverse Game" is by no means limited to the actors. On the contrary, it is based on the high excitement of the plot that Zhou Yumin successfully won this turnaround battle.
Judging from the plot of the first six episodes, behind the truth of the serial murder and corpse case, the marginal characters who are involved one by one, as well as a number of small cases wrapped in it, are gradually surfaced. Liang Yandong, who has just succeeded in reasoning through the case, after hardly gaining the trust of the police, is suspected of being pushed to the other side of the "murderer" and "lie" again due to the subsequent plot reversal...
What kind of trial will Liang Yandong face? How will the Donglin city police deal with the killers and the outside media? What will the deputy director of Donglin City (Zhang Zirong), who "parachuted in", do? ...... Behind the intricate serial murders, Donglin City is hiding another wave of deadly crises.
Black, violent, suspenseful but with a steady rhythm, "Reverse Game" can be described as the largest scale and more meticulous reasoning logic in recent years. If the follow-up drama maintains its current level, it will not be a problem to rank among the top 3 Chinese dramas of the year.
In the public's impression, for Taiwanese dramas, mainland audiences always have quite complicated emotions. Since the popular "Meteor Garden" in the early 2000s into the mainland market, Taiwan opera has survived in the mainland market for more than ten years with its high-quality idol drama creation ability. With the increase in production capacity in the mainland market and the limited creative ability of Taiwan's local funds, Taiwan drama has also gone downhill, and this walk has been more than ten years.
The second return is the March 2019, the Taiwanese production team and HBO jointly created the Douban 9.4 high score "The Distance Between Us and Evil". This realistic masterpiece, which starts from realistic themes and adapted from real events in society, not only leveraged the ultra-high ratings of Taipei Television Station by its own strength in that year, but also completely launched the road to the recovery of Taiwan dramas in the mainland market.
Subsequently appeared in the mainland market "Want to See You", "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women", as well as the same crime theme of "Who is the Victim", "The Third Layout Dust and Sand Confusion" and other Taiwan dramas, are Douban high-scoring works, at the same time, a common trend behind them is becoming more and more obvious, that is, to borrow the power of streaming media platforms to create a batch of works with their own style.
Just like the "Distance Between Us and Evil" mentioned in the previous article, it is a work cooperated by the Taiwanese production team and HBO, "Want to See You" comes from cooperating with fox, and the "Sin Dreamer", "Extreme Road" and "Marriage on the Other Shore" that have been broadcast in the Taiwan drama market have cooperated with Netflix, and even they have launched a special "Uemura Show" theater for the series of works... Looking at this batch of co-productions, it is not difficult to find that there are two reasons for its success:
Part of it is based on the cooperation with external forces, the Taiwan drama in the production, capital level of the full upgrade - like the work "Reverse Game", the capital preparation reached 300 million Taiwan dollars, which is difficult to see in the past Taiwan dramas; the other part is the "dare to be the first", the Chinese drama "The Distance Between Us and Evil" for the first time to target the perspective of the people's servant media and the law, reflecting the real society behind the case from different perspectives, which is a successful case of suspense drama injecting real genes; Douban 9.1 points of "Want to See You", It is with the help of complex and brain-burning suspense stories to tell a love drama that should be a cheesy "crossing" love drama, which is the innovative ability of Taiwan drama to the old theme.
Similarly, there is the wide-scale "same-sex" theme "That Day", and the "11 Spirit Street" about supernatural events. In short, under the influence of overseas streaming media platforms, Taiwan dramas after the recovery have become bold and innovative, which is an important reason why Taiwan dramas can become popular in the mainland market for the "second time".
Returning to the currently broadcast "Reverse Situation", in addition to maintaining the courage of co-production films at the content level, as always, the cooperation model with iQIYI and the original novel based on iQIYI's novel literature is undoubtedly to further expand the influence of Taiwan dramas in the mainland market. However, at present, the drama has no intention of launching the mainland platform due to its excessive scale, and even if there are signs of going online in the future, it also needs to be drastically "deleted".
From the perspective of the platform iQiyi, this may be a new signal to further expand the overseas market layout. As we all know, the three domestic video websites, and even the head film and television companies, have an "overseas layout" plan every year. For example, iQiyi, it is understood that it currently has a total of 7 offices around the world, focusing on the Southeast Asian market, and its output model is mainly based on cheap copyright sales.
If the follow-up reputation of the suspense theme "Reverse Game" is the same as the current, then this crime drama produced by the "Chinese" team and launched on iQIYI's overseas platform, in addition to increasing the influence of Chinese dramas on the international stage as always, the first-to-watch mode for members will undoubtedly increase the income of iQIYI's overseas business.
This is the meaning that "Reverse Game" gives to Chinese dramas from the perspective of the platform side, and at the same time, it also injects another dose of cardiotonics into the increasingly strong Taiwan opera market.