One criticism that has been surrounding the content of Netflix's original series over the past few years has been about their length, a phenomenon that media outlets have called "Netflix bloat."
Many viewers can also feel that in the past few years, a considerable part of the streaming media platform, especially the Netflix episodes, has indeed broken through the traditional 45-minute duration, basically starting in one hour, and sometimes even reaching the length of a movie.
"Iron Fist", "League of Defenders" and "Black Money Resort", which have been criticized for narrative rhythms
At the same time, there is not enough plot filling, so either the early content seems to progress slowly or inconsequentially, the real narrative preparation is too long, or the drama in the middle and late stages is weakened, and the story development becomes weak and loses its appeal to the audience.
In fact, almost every TV series faces this problem, and even in the traditional model of 22 episodes per season, episodes will trigger similar narrative fatigue at some point, and the original dramas of streaming platforms have only accelerated this situation.
Many of the drama series broadcast on television in the early years were usually introduced and resolved in 45 minutes in a unit-by-episode manner, while driving the main line of the series. Now streaming platform collaborators have largely abandoned this model, producing the entire series as a 10-hour or 13-hour long film, completely ignoring the meaning and value of the individual episodes.
To a certain extent, this problem is also one of the negative effects of the platform respecting the will of creators, everything has advantages and disadvantages, creative freedom can not only break the boundaries to inspire inspiration, bring excellent film and television works, at the same time, it will inevitably lead to side effects such as uncontrolled costs or duration.
However, it is clear that several major streaming platforms, led by Netflix and Amazon, have realized this and turned their attention to another diametrically opposed direction, beginning to experiment with the production and broadcast of short film series that are lower than the traditional length.
This year, for example, Netflix launched the animated short film collection Love, Death and Robots, which consists of 18 parts, each lasting 5-15 minutes. There's also Ryan O'Connor's autobiographical play The Very Sick, and the sketch comedy Tim Robinson's Shorts: Not Gone Yet. What they all have in common is that the total length of the show is basically no more than two hours.
With more and more choices in TV series, smaller screens for viewing, and more and more difficult to maintain the attention of Internet users, short films have become a new trend in the growing growth of television production, which is easier to watch on mobile devices, less expensive to produce, and more suitable for today's era of online content consumption.
However, to tell a complete story in a limited time is also a greater test for creators and actors.
In this regard, Sundance Channel's new drama "Marriage Crisis" (also translated as "Marriage Speech") on May 6 seems to be very trustworthy on Cass: the screenwriter is the British writer Nick Hornby, whose novel masterpieces include "Lost Love List" and "About a Boy", and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay twice for "Growing Up Education" and "Brooklyn".
The director of this drama, Stephen Frese, is a household name, with countless masterpieces, and has directed the film version of "Lost Love List", which has a relationship with Hornby.
In addition, the two lead actors are also familiar faces: Ms. Pei Chunhua from "The Vanishing Lover" and Chris Odolyd, an actor who is widely loved by the audience for starring in "It Madman".
"Marriage Crisis" has a total of ten episodes, each episode is about ten minutes, the scene is fixed, all set in the same bar, telling the story of an estranged couple trying to save their marriage, starting a weekly marriage counseling, the show records the conversation between the two people in the bar before the consultation.
So, although the promotional poster of the series looks like a couple sitting on the couch in the counseling room, there is never a scene of the two actually having marriage counseling in the play, usually ending at the door of the counselor's office.
Tom (Chris O'Dodd) and Louise (Pei Chunhua) are a middle-aged couple in their forties who, after 15 years of marriage, suffer a sudden relationship crisis, partly because Tom lost his job as a music critic and was tired in terms of feelings and sex, and partly because Louise had an affair during this low tide.
So they prepared to start counseling, hoping to find out if the marriage could be saved. Every week, before going to see the counselor, the two would meet in a small bar across the room to prepare for the next conversation, including topics in their consultation, topics to open up to, secrets to keep, and whether their relationship improved in the process.
In just ten minutes, the conversation between the two is very extensive, talking about various things, joking or flirting, talking about complaining and accusing each other during a consultation, and sometimes through the window of the bar, observing and making fun of troubled couples who come out of the counselor's office.
Because of this, all the information that the audience learns comes from the dialogue between the two people. We never followEd Tom and Louise into their counselor's office, never met their children, never glimpsed a glimpse of their life in London outside of these brief pre-consultation meetings, and everything we knew depended on the content of the conversation between the two protagonists.
Creating a dialogue between two people in a fixed setting and a limited time is a very common writing exercise for screenwriters, and the dialogue must not only be close to reality, but also have a clear story drive, can construct and enrich the character setting, and its importance is self-evident.
In this regard, the show has undoubtedly done a very good job.
Louise and Tom, like many of the many other characters Hohenby created, are intelligent, thoughtful, have little knowledge of popular culture, love language rhetoric and wordplay, bring up Kant and rationalism, compare their conversations to Bergman's Married Life, and often use elaborate analogies to discuss their relationships, such as the similarities between divorce and Brexit.
The couple's conversation, while beginning with specific issues of sex, love, and marriage, is often off-topic and almost never tiresome.
Surprisingly, the two actors are not only cute, but also surprisingly chemically together, but also surprisingly, their accents are also very matched, and O'Dodd's vague Irish accent and Pei Chunhua's clear British accent are very suitable for the role setting: an immature husband and a well-educated wife.
And it is not difficult to see that although the marriage of the two has encountered many problems, and because of the unemployment of one party and the infidelity of the other party, it is difficult to repair the problem, but they still have a moment of pleasant tacit understanding in the process of conversation, and they do not hide it.
For example, when Tom and Louise see an elderly couple in psychological counseling and think that each other may die alone, they suddenly make a death pact, or fantasize about the possibility of a future partner for each other, this moment makes their relationship seem promising.
In this day and age, where the traditional concept of the family is clearly in decline, many people are inclined to "if the marriage is not as expected, then end it and start over", and the short series "Marriage Crisis" is very refreshing in this consensus, and may provide some relevant reflections.
We can see how the characters really feel, even if that short ten minutes are only a small fragment of their lives, and it is a good way to show them their broken predicament and the struggles they are going through, the internal struggles they are trying to solve, without any meaningless dramatic plot.
When people fall in love, they tend to think that love is the whole meaning of a relationship, but real adult marriages are more delicate and complex things, which are not easy, require a lot of effort, and may be completely different from what they expected in their twenties.
Set over a ten-week time span from start to finish, "Marital Crisis" is sometimes reminiscent of Linklater's "Love In" trilogy, or the film "A Day," an adaptation of David Nichols's novel of the same name, that is, showing only fragments of the protagonist's life, for the viewer to observe and speculate about the changes they may have undergone off-camera.
When Louise sits next to Tom instead of across from them, does that mean their relationship has eased up? When Tom changes into a new suit and Louise changes her hairstyle and dress, does it mean that the two are ready to start over? These intentional and unintentional clues have also become a small fun in the process of watching the play.
And the details of this play are indeed handled well, not limited to dialogue and performance, another noteworthy and appreciated place is the director's mind. Although the scenes in the show are fixed bars and streets, the angles from which the protagonists are filmed in each episode are different, and their position on the screen is different.
The way the two enter the bar at the beginning of each episode and leave the bar to walk towards the consultant's office at the end of each episode are also different, so that the visual language of the show always seems fresh.
"Marriage Crisis" is more realistic in its view of marriage, but it still contains a romantic component, because its essence is still optimistic, just like in the last episode, the two saw the old couple before the smile from the counselor's office said, there are always some moments to let people see the future of the good and hopeful.
The more important implication is that when a marriage is in crisis, this is the appropriate way to deal with it, rather than: