＂start broadcasting! The short drama season is cold, and variety shows can’t save the near fire of IP short drama
Wen | Garlic Pojiao
While the short drama industry is getting more and more in touch with the pulse of the target audience market, the entry # Domestic short drama has gone crazy # has been hung high on the hot search in Weibo, and the amazing story has constantly caused users to vomit and marvel. Different views of different user markets on micro-short plays seem to point to a new turning point in the development of micro-short plays.
Following the arrival of this turning point is the active follow-up of this year’s long video and satellite TV channels. Recently, Oriental TV has launched a micro-short drama variety "Broadcast! Short drama season, the program will provide actors with six short drama audition opportunities for film and television IP. Through the process of IP casting, project performance and short drama incubation, the short drama landing on Oriental TV will be hatched and a new route of short drama+variety mode will be explored.
Since Shanghai Radio and Television Station launched the "China Mini-short Drama Quality Oriental Plan" in September this year, Dragon TV has started to act on mini-short drama. The "Quality Oriental Micro Theater" will broadcast micro-short plays from October, and it is estimated that the total duration of the exhibition will be 2000 minutes by January next year; The industry forum around miniseries is also planned to be held in the first half of next year; And the variety show "Broadcast! The short drama season mentioned that it hopes to provide a stage for more micro-short drama creators.
Obviously, Dragon TV wants to guide the industry to be more standardized in the process of high-quality short plays, explore the content framework of micro-short plays suitable for the mass market, and accumulate advantages in the new segmentation track, but from the current "broadcast! Judging from the market influence of Short Drama Season, the industry needs to find a way to connect with the market for the expectation of fine short dramas.
Let the audience watch the mini-short drama variety show on TV for more than one hour, and Dragon TV’s "Broadcast! The short drama season always makes people feel a little special.
What’s special is that the short play itself is an entertainment product with fragmented time for users, but the program is long in content. The Short Play Season is aimed at regular variety users and film and television drama users, and the "stuffing" of the program is strongly related to the short play. This somewhat fragmented feeling is not only reflected in the form.
"Short Drama Season" itself applies the acting variety template, allowing actors to perform film and television performances in the face of variety shots, which not only satisfies users’ discussion on actors’ acting skills, but also creates topics for the program with the help of film and television IP. The awkwardness of "Short Drama Season" is also particularly conspicuous under such a program template. Because of the fast pace of short drama, heavy plot and heavy emotion, the evaluation method of short drama performance may be different from that of conventional film and television content, but the core of the program focuses on performance, which will lead to no answer on how to perform better.
When evaluating Xu Yizhen, Su Ke, a teacher of Chinese Opera Performance Department in the program, thought that she failed to pave the way for the real inner thoughts of the role, while Jing Ning said, "Maybe what Su Ke said is a big movie, which is the kind of slow play", and the potential expression of short plays will not leave time for the actors to pave the way, including Alina Zhang’s reply that "this is not her problem, but the problem of the script".
This argument about performance intuitively reflects the differences between short plays and long plays in many aspects. As a professional teacher, they have not adapted to this difference, and the ordinary audience will lose the biggest attraction of "competition" when they can’t feel whether the performance in the program is good or not.
The market reaction also verifies this point. Although the program has matching entry marketing and short video dissemination, the popularity of Short Drama Season can only be said to be unremarkable. According to the data of Lighthouse Professional Edition, only 0.39% of Short Drama Season ranked 10th in terms of the market share of all-network variety feature films excluding the network synthesis. Cat’s Eye TV variety shows ranked 12th, which was far from the two-tone comprehensive scores broadcast in the same period. The highest praise of related videos in Tik Tok is 17,000, and the number of likes of performance clips and comment clips in the program is stable at several hundred and several thousand.
"Short Drama Season" is not completely unworthy of watching. The performances of the actors and the evaluation of the instructors in the program are relatively sincere, and the key lies in the separation of user positioning. At this stage, users who are interested in short plays may not put down their paid short plays to pursue a long variety show, and they can’t watch it without their brains. Variety users are not familiar with actors in the field of short plays, and they are not interested in the short play form itself. It is difficult for both types of users to get emotional satisfaction in this program, which should also be an important reason for the coldness of Short Play Season.
"Short Drama Season" is a very brave attempt, trying to find the overlap of interests between short drama users and long content users through variety shows. However, from the overall setting of the program, Dragon TV’s greater hope may be to find short drama preferences suitable for long content users.
The focus of "Short Drama Season" itself is not the performance competition, but the short drama incubation. The program focuses on the casting and project performance of five existing IP works, Du Lala’s Promotion, Liaozhai, ultimate class, Divorce Lawyer, Bao Zheng and Gongsun Ce, and a brand-new IP "I am quiet when I return to 18 years old". The high probability is to quickly know the current user’s acceptance of IP short drama and explore how to do it.
This year, many platforms and copyright owners have begun to promote IP short drama, which is not only a further development of the existing IP, but also a safer measure for those who enter the short drama track later, forming a reshuffle of the market with the help of well-known IP and high-quality content. However, at present, in the existing IP short drama achievements, few really achieve the ideal expectations.
The drama Su Wuming from Datang received 50 million+broadcasts, and the topic of Tik Tok was 230 million, while the topic of the original IP was 10.15 billion. The topic of Tik Tok, a derivative drama of Going to a Windy Place, was 250 million, which was far lower than the original IP’s 23.23 billion. Only Joy of Life, whose theme is closer to the IP of the existing short play, has brought enough heat to its derivative short play "Romantic Youth in Yunian Qing", but more voices in the topic of Tik Tok are dissatisfied with this short play.
At this stage, the popular content in the micro-short drama market is still the arrangement and combination of elements such as hegemony, counter-attack, feud between rich and powerful families, love abuse by sweet pets, etc. The most mainstream IP short drama under the trend of high-quality short drama seems to want to bring more element content to the short drama market, so as to serve the mass user market, but whether the market needs such content needs a question mark.
Users love watching short plays not because they are short, but because they have high emotional value and are cool without brains, which is the only experience that short plays bring to users, and it is also the reason why they can still pay attention to the stories that are not decent enough and not conventional enough. When the quality goal of short plays is to walk with long content, that unique experience is hard to enjoy in the quality content, and there is a high probability that people will return to the "inferior" content.
It is not that we are not optimistic about the rising route of short drama quality, including the IP short drama of film and television, which is also worth exploring. The key is that the industry needs to clarify the fundamental demands of users to watch short dramas, and then upgrade the form and content on the basis of meeting this demand, so that the process of short drama quality can be completed. Obviously, it is impossible to catch the express train of short drama simply by dramatizing the existing well-known IP. As for the variety show of short drama, it may be even more untimely.
Fortunately, the trial and error cost of miniseries is relatively lower, and the short production cycle can get market feedback as soon as possible, so that the industry can adjust itself and iterate more quickly. Perhaps it won’t be long before the boutique short play will have its own new form, so that the wind blowing from the sinking market can also have its own place in the public circle.
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