Come on, a question that has been asked repeatedly: Why do domestic dramas have no life? The more you ask, the more you get used to it, and it seems like you don’t need to answer anymore. "That's it." "The drama is the same as life, so do I still need to watch it?" ....

The 66-year history of changes in domestic dramas: From "Kangxi Dynasty" to "My Name is Liu Jinfeng", why have the quality of dramas that people love to watch declined?

Come on, a question that has been asked repeatedly:

Why do domestic dramas have no life?

I’ve asked a lot of questions, and I’m used to it, so I don’t seem to need to answer anymore.

"That's it."

"The drama is the same as life, so do I still need to watch it?"

"The writers have never worked."

...

sir What I want to say today is that the disappearance of the sense of life, Maybe it didn’t start with domestic dramas.

01

What is life?

Food, clothing, housing and transportation.

Every detail affects whether the audience can take it in.

And what we see most often is:

The protagonist wears the name of an ordinary person, but never does ordinary things.

Luo Yue (played by Jiang Shuying) in "Mr. Love" is so miserable that she lives on the streets in a foreign country and digs through trash cans.

can actually insist on changing clothes and putting on full makeup.

Luo Zijun (played by Ma Yili), a housewife in " My First Half of Life ", has seen her income plummet after her divorce, and she has lived a life of packing up Xiaolongbao.

But when she was poor, she still carried her Hermès bag worth more than 100,000 yuan.

Fan Shengmei (played by Jiang Xin) in " Ode to Joy " is born in poverty, trapped in the pull and exploitation of her native family, and on the other hand, she wears makeup and a high-priced facial mask.

The roles in domestic dramas, regardless of class, must all be arranged.

An actor cannot become "ugly" or "browsy", for fear that he will not be refined enough.

I am also very particular about eating.

In " My True Friend ", Cheng Zhenzhen (played by Yang Ying), who earns two thousand a month, has a desolate scene when she owes five thousand on her credit card:

She is sitting alone on the sofa of the luxurious one-bedroom apartment she rented. , feeling aggrieved, it seems that I can only eat fast food tonight.

Two pieces of May Day instant noodles? No, no, no, it’s twenty or thirty-one buckets of self-stimulating pot.

Just eat, she will also get a small bowl. But isn’t it true that everyone eats fast food just to wash less dishes?

As for living?

The beds in many Chinese dramas are evenly laid out than in hotels, and there is no trace of anyone sleeping on them.

The thick hardcover foreign books on the bookshelf are actually just a pile of cardboard boxes.

The high-end, spotlessly decorated hospitals and clinics even make people wonder if they are just CG special effects made with green cloth to save costs.

is more like a model room than a model room.

△ "A Smile Is Charming", "July and Ansheng" and "Mr. Love"

Among them, there are many dramas that focus on "fireworks", "human touch" and "common people's daily routine".

In "North and South", Grandma Bai (played by Liu Xiaoqing) lives in the Orson Villa in Beijing. The windows are bright and green and the trees are shady. It seems that the years are peaceful.

The house is full of seasoning bottles, bacon, and pickles, which seems to emphasize that this is a grandma who manages her life carefully.

However, this kitchen, which is larger than an ordinary person's bedroom, with transparent windows on three sides, and luxurious decoration, has already thrown ordinary people away.

If you want to create a warm atmosphere, which audience can empathize?

suspended.

But this is version 1.0 of the domestic drama No Life, which has been criticized many times. After

, things did not get better, but got worse.

In the past, when watching idol dramas, the suspension of attention could be forgiven, but now many realistic themes that focus on social topics have changed their approach.

For example, the "Mortal Song" written by Sir before retains its smoky atmosphere:

Ordinary migrant workers live in rented houses and commute morning and evening. Middle-class families have a bright appearance, but they have to drink and vomit in order to work... ...

But the story gave way to the conflict deliberately created by the screenwriter.

forces confrontation, conflicting values, and accumulation of dilemmas...

uses extreme assumptions to attract the audience's firepower.

In order to create dilemmas, the characters make unreasonable choices, giving the audience a sense of wonder and absurdity.

is similar to " Good Reunion ", which is used as a life drama to spread blood.

is obviously a narrative from a female perspective, but it still relies on the accumulation of bloody plots and uses a large number of short-drama-style eye-catching explosive design.

Scumbag, cheating, and catching mistresses.

Just like what sir said, every fragment seems to make sense when taken alone, but repeated stacking and loss of daily necessities turn the so-called "life" into emotional garbage that stirs up the audience.

What domestic creations lose is not the spirit of life, but also real people.

The rest are novelty tags extracted from life.

Without noisy and tearing, you cannot write the story of life.

Domestic dramas that lack the flavor of life are like large-scale love dramas rehearsed over and over again with different skins.

02

What kind of drama is called "Life"? It’s not that we have never experienced

.

"The Happy Life of the Poor-tongued Zhang Damin" in 2000.

Zhang Damin's family of six are crowded into a small bungalow in a courtyard in Beijing. The living room and bedroom are in the same room. The floor and walls are full of things. The kitchen is "extremely narrow at first, so it can only be used for people."

For daily meals, there is not even room for 6 chairs in the house. One person always has to sit on the bed to eat. If a guest comes, he has to eat standing up.

The quality of each object has a sense of age.

There is a section in the play where Zhang Damin (played by Liang Guanhua) is getting married to Li Yunfang (played by Zhu Yuanyuan). In order to buy a double bed for his home, Zhang Damin racked his brains.

Do you want to express that newlyweds at the bottom cannot afford to get out of bed?

No, the house is too crowded and there is no room to put a new bed.

So he calculated hard for several days before reorganizing the furniture and carefully planning every inch of the house.

This is the life of a small citizen who is careful and caressing about every detail.

Life is not about fighting with each other all day long.

More often than not, it is you and your family who pile up small stones one after another day after day.

Of course, there are also "reference answers" that cannot be avoided when producing many life dramas, such as " please answer 1988", which is regarded as a classic by countless people.

Real props, not just to create a sense of age.

More importantly, every small object constitutes the main material of life.

Being trapped in trivial matters and daily life is the true state of ordinary people.

Deshan’s mother (played by Li Yihua) washed the soap into pieces, put it into stockings, tied a knot, and continued washing clothes.

When she ran out of skin care products, she would use a pin to clean out whatever was (possibly) left in the bottle cap.

Even more detailed are some details that do not affect the main plot line at all.

For example, in the sixth episode, Zhengfeng (played by Ahn Jae Hong) wrote a letter to the radio station and was selected. The host congratulated him on the radio for "getting a Cabbage Muppet."

Later, a rag doll appeared in their home. Normally, how could there be a rag doll wearing a pink skirt in the home of two older boys?

Some attentive netizens found out that the shape of this doll is exactly that of the American imported toy "Cabbage Patch Doll" (also called Cabbage Patch Doll) which was popular in Asia at that time.

And in the first episode, Deshan went to the Olympics to be a placard-bearing lady and got back a white hat given by an Equatorial Guinean athlete.

In the eleventh episode, the Deshan family returned to the countryside to celebrate the New Year, and the father Cheng Dongil was wearing this hat.

These little things were not mentioned deliberately in the play later, and they were not key clues.

However, their occasional appearance adds some "life processes" that are not detailed in the play and is evidence of the flow of life.

The relationship between people and objects in "1988" also always reflects the traces of life.

Just like in the first episode of serving rice, my mother opened the pot and sighed: "This pot of rice is so good~"

The reason why they are so surprised is because their family uses a coal stove whose heat is difficult to control, and not every pot The rice can be cooked just right.

This exclamation allows the audience to get a glimpse of this family's peaceful but poor past in the subtleties of life.

These inconspicuous details can of course be omitted from the main line of the story, but they are a real part of our lives.

This kind of sense of life has also been achieved by the peak Chinese drama " The Long Season " in recent years.

as an example. In the play, taxi driver Gong Biao (played by Qin Hao) has to find a few wooden boards to block the wheels after parking his taxi every day.

Only experienced car owners know that dogs like to pee on tires, which will corrode tires over time.

And this detail reflects not only the character of the veteran driver Gong Biao.

is also outside the scene. Whether it is unqualified dog owners or stray dogs running around, they all realistically present the decay and decay of the surrounding environment where Gong Biao lives.

Similarly, the spare tire of a police car was stolen. Wang Xiang (played by Fan Wei) told the police that he could catch the tire thief in 2 minutes. After that, he turned around and pedaled away on his bicycle.

Pay attention to this unilateral pedaling action.

has a strong atmosphere of life in the 1990s, and also reveals Wang Xiang's mood of 70% confidence and 30% disdain at that time.

Moreover, just pedaling but not riding, it just means that the place he wants to go is not far, and 2 minutes is enough to complete the task.

The behavioral logic of the characters and the storyline are intertwined and corroborated with each other.

For example, when Wang Xiang was hospitalized, he couldn't sit down on the right side of his butt after the injection. He first muttered something to the nurse, and then yelled at his wife. The character's treacherous temperament was fully exposed.

The same goes for the supporting characters. When Sister Xu (played by Ren Suxi) dug out a bone from the sewer of her noodle shop, her first reaction was to curse in the opposite direction.

What she blamed was that the Banggu restaurant opposite dumped food waste into the sewer, causing the blockage.

corresponds to the logic of ordinary people: when ordinary people see bones, they will not first think that they are human bones.

It is also common for competitors in the catering industry to have hidden discord on the same street.

These all illustrate:

It does not mean that if you photograph poor people, you will have a life, but if you photograph rich people, you will definitely be suspended.

Life should refer to whether the filmed content has successfully made the world, character images, plot logic, etc. in the play more real and credible.

So what is the sense of life?

In Sir’s view, the core of the sense of life is “the hands are tied”.

Even if it is a realistic theme, conflicts are not resolved overnight, and decisions are not made by patting the head. After all, money does not come from the wind, resources are limited, and character relationships are not fabricated out of thin air.

instead of Ba Zonghe Shuangwen. The opposite of

is the "cheap finger" that screenwriters like to use:

For example, for the sake of conflict, they arrange dramas such as cheating and having an affair with a mistress;

Then in order to reunite the family, they can reconcile as before and let bygones be bygones.

For example, in order to put the characters into trouble and crisis, they pile up surprises. If one is not enough, come with two. If two are not enough, come with more...

What is better is to deliberately create gimmicks for the sake of spectacle.

For example, in "If Running Is My Life" at the beginning of the year, the "cheesey" and "I see you are really hungry" third child did come out of the circle.

But apart from this hot joke, how much impression do you have of the main story of this drama now? Why did

cheat, why were there conflicts, and what was the final outcome? It has long been lost without any trace left.

Creation is freedom, but life is restriction. Of course, opponents of

can say that there must be similar nonsense in reality.

But the question is, do we really need to lick these bloody pieces repeatedly in domestic works and treat them as delicacies?

03

Are our creators really unable to capture the real life of the moment?

sir doesn’t think so.

The most heartbreaking comment I saw in the comment area of ​​" Retrograde Life " is:

As a delivery rider, it is enough to work hard every day, why should I spend money to go to the cinema to watch myself?

are no different.

In the current creation of realistic themes, another common criticism is "consumption misery".

I am already suffering so much, why do I still go to the cinema to watch suffering?

Bloody, torn, weird, all may indeed exist.

But what we see on TV today is often not to show life, but to escape from life. What does

mean?

We extract something that looks like life to obscure the true observation of reality.

Because we don’t want to see it, in essence, it is a “sense of shame” in life that is spreading. The ones posted by

are all hardcover Moments.

But the rough life cannot be shown to others.

So, we either look up to. seeks tall bosses, cool heroines, and career elites to satisfy their fantasies.

Either you want to watch a cricket fight, lower your head and enjoy it.

All kinds of bloody dramas, best relatives, scumbag men and scumbag women...watching them tear them apart, curiosity, but also contempt and ridicule:

It turns out that there are so many people who live more miserable lives than me.

No matter what kind of "spectacle" it is, it is subconsciously denied:

Our own ordinary life is worthy of respect and should also be seen.

criticized the creative environment and the creators verbally and attributed the problem to "not taking pictures seriously" or "not being able to take pictures".

There is a more heart-wrenching question:

Before the domestic drama was suspended, our confidence in life may have been shattered first.

Isn’t it true that today, the “cool”, “counterattack” and “face-slapping” small workshop-style cuttings are more eye-catching?

From a market perspective, the market size of short dramas in 2024 has exceeded 50 billion, an increase of 30%. However, the scale of traditional film and television will not increase but decline in 2024, showing signs of fatigue.

The creators of domestic film and television have also begun collective learning and turning:

, " The Disappearance of Her ", " All-or-Nothing ", "Hot Search", "Parrot Kill", "Morning Cloud and Muyu", "Hide the Sky", "Silent Kill" " "Rescuing the Suspect" and "The Last Truth"...

realistic topic-led projects.

The result is that the audience has not only lost confidence in domestic films and television, but also, subtly, has become more demanding on the acquisition of emotional value and the rhythm of dopamine secretion:

requires the most direct and powerful stimulation, and for offline and peripheral, A more complex real world, selectively close your eyes.

Everyone’s focus has collectively shifted online. If

suits your "feeling of pleasure", just wave the flag and shout.

If it doesn’t conform to my “knowledge”, I will strike hard.

So you can often see "reversal of verdicts" under past works:

Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't look good?

saw moral guardians traveling through time and space.

And for hot search topics that have nothing to do with themselves, they spend a lot of energy and enthusiasm arguing with netizens they have never met...

However, in the strange array of entries and tags, the specific life is lost. .

Even think about it, how much time do you have in a day to take your eyes away from the mobile phone screen to truly experience everything around you?

In fact, the information we receive from the other side of the screen is not a profound concept or artistic enjoyment.

is still trivial and makes a small profit.

But we believe that this digitally processed and embellished “life” is more attractive than life itself.

produced on domestic screens is nothing more than that.