Suspense short plays, represented by Extraordinary Witness, White Moonlight and Skyscraper, have been regarded as the most competitive type in the domestic online drama market. (All TV series posters) Cartography: Li Jie
The popularity of online dramas has been rising for several months. The three major video websites of "Ai Youteng" have previously launched three suspense short plays, Very Witness, White Moonlight and Skyscraper, which have all divided the attention of young drama fans. These three suspense short plays have been regarded as the most competitive types in the domestic online drama market-movie stars with excellent acting skills, film directors with strong image style, and details of service that can stand the "close shot" of personality, all of which give these works an audio-visual quality beyond ordinary TV dramas.
Interestingly, these three productions have their own advantages, and the lineup behind the scenes is equal. At present, the Douban scores obtained show an obvious ladder arrangement: Skyscraper 8.1, White Moonlight 6.6 and Extraordinary Witness 5.6. Judging from the comments of fans, it is the script itself that determines the score. What echoes this is the fact that among the three works, only Skyscraper, which has the highest score, is an adaptation based on a literary background, while the previous Hidden Corner is also adapted from a successful genre novel.
It is true that excellent novels can not be equated with excellent film and television dramas, but the performance of recent hot dramas has forced people to see that high-quality literature books are the "escort" of the series. In the eyes of people in the industry, online dramas entering the era of high-quality blockbusters are paying more and more attention to literary works with humanistic thickness and literary value. On the contrary, it is easy to become a mystery in the eyes of the audience without the support of rich and thick texts and the addition of literary forms.
Typed creation with a large lineup has become a powerful starting point for differentiated competition of online dramas.
The irreplaceable category feature is one of the signs that a literary style is really maturing. Domestic online dramas can compete with traditional categories such as movies and TV dramas, which is due to the innovative methods accumulated by years of differentiated competitive thinking. Among them, the front-stage and behind-the-scenes lineup, typed creation and short film theatrical operation of comparable movies have become the most favorable mode for online dramas to incite the market. The masterpiece of this creative mode is undoubtedly the well-received and well-received Hidden Corner. The intensive publication of three works, Skyscraper, White Moonlight and Extraordinary Witness, has further opened up the operation path of high-quality short plays.
Skyscraper, which connects the life of a female victim with a murder case, has been praised by the industry as the leader of domestic "her suspense". Just looking at the production lineup, the audience will think that this is a film work: the actors gather "familiar faces" in big screens such as Guo Tao, Yang Zishan, Angelababy, Jiao Gang, Ni Hongjie, Lv Yulai, etc. What surprises the audience even more is that Wang Shengdi, who plays the girl "Pupu" in "Hidden Corner", also plays an important role in the play; Director Chen Zhengdao has directed films such as Master of Memory and Master of Hypnosis that combine business typology with personal style skillfully. Like the first two films directed by the director, Skyscraper also focuses on multi-point narration and plot reversal, so this online drama is also listed as the "Chen Zhengdao Trilogy" together with the first two films.
White Moonlight, also from the female perspective, tells a suspenseful cheating story. The lineup of this work also aroused great expectations of the audience. Song Jia Jr. partnered with "Lv Xiucai" and Yu Entai’s husband-and-wife combination of "the woman is the master outside and the man is the master inside", which made the audience shine, and more powerful factions such as Liu Mintao and Huang Jue joined in. Liu Ziwei, the director of this drama, was nominated as the "Best Director" in the 19th Shanghai International Film Festival for his debut novel "My Heart is Jumping", and it was the "deep diver" in the field of online drama who escorted the newcomers to the academy-500 who directed hot dramas such as Psychological Crime and Antique close encounter of mahjong as the producer of this film.
The online drama "Very Witness" and the previous online "Ten Days Game" and "Hidden Corner" belong to the "Misty Theater", which tells a story of chasing the murderer that spans 20 years. Song Yang and Yuan Wenkang, the leading actors in the play, are not big hit stars, but all of them are low-key acting schools with film works. The former has appeared in many domestic films, including The Arrow and the White Ape, Master, The Great Cause of Building the Army and The Chang An Thief. In recent years, a film "Violent Silence" has made Song Yang the best actor in Tokyo Film Festival.
Professional visitors enter the market, and it is the thickness of the text that is used to compete with the online drama of overseas hot dramas.
The lineups of the three online dramas are also expected, but the word-of-mouth gained after the launch is quite different: Skyscraper ranks first, White Moonlight ranks second, and Very Witness scores the lowest. Professional audiences who have mastered the right to speak online are divided into three levels, which makes the three "competing products" show a possibility to detect the aesthetic consensus of the current audience. What separates the three works is precisely "the foundation of a drama", and "explosion" relies more and more on the literary and humanistic values in the script.
Among them, the most humanistic information is Skyscraper supported by a literary copy of the same name. The drama series runs through a female murder case in a skyscraper, but it reflects all the social beings represented by the owners in the skyscraper. In the unfolding of the stories of the suspects, the embarrassing life experiences of the female victims are constantly supplemented. Therefore, the proposition of "Who killed women" has been endowed with double connotations of law and sociology. In the form of expression, the multi-perspective advancement makes the "unreliability" of narrative give more room for suspense and reversal.
In contrast, White Moonlight, which belongs to the female theme, appears to be more literary than informative. The whole play revolves around a husband’s affair, and the wife who trusts her husband is in doubt and temptation, and finally falls into collapse. This delicate exploration of women’s inner world is worth encouraging, but the conflict between the slow pace and the absent character drama will inevitably lead to a psychological gap among genre lovers. At present, Extraordinary Witness, with the lowest score, has broken the narrative rhythm and weakened the logic of investigation because of the accumulation of redundant stories that are constantly separated from the main line. Every character in the play has mastered part of the truth of the murder case 20 years ago, and this "jigsaw puzzle" narrative opening is amazing. However, the story is already halfway through, and the scattered information still fails to produce a staged confluence. The people in the play pretend to be deep in literary and artistic remarks and beautiful lighting, which makes the series look more like an MV with good sentences but no good chapters.
Grading with clear steps reflects the young audience’s aesthetic consensus on genre works, and also shows the professionalism and expression desire of contemporary audiences. A noteworthy phenomenon is that in the online reviews of the three works, the names of overseas high-scoring suspense masterpieces such as Dr. Foster, Big and Small Lies and Your Turn appeared. It can be seen that in the audience’s mind, the competitors of high-quality domestic online dramas are no longer domestic TV dramas, but overseas dramas that have gained international recognition. In the face of a well-informed professional audience, the final competition of online drama is the thickness of the text. Reporter Zhang Yuxi
