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Editor’s Note: This article comes from WeChat public account “Poison Eye” (ID: youhaoxifilm), 36 krypton released with permission.
Author | Wu Zhechao
Edit | He Runxuan
“I feel like I haven’t seen this wave of people’s attention and expectations before the broadcast of” The King “for a long time,” a television drama blogger on the day of the first broadcast of “The King: Forever” (in forward “” the king “”) Tweets with excitement.
“The King” is a fantasy love song broadcast by SBS television station in South Korea. He is served by Kim Eun-suk, who became a screenwriter for “Top Stream” in Korea with “Heirs,” “Descendants of the Sun” and “Splendid, Solitary God: Ghost.” Screenwriter, the lead lineup is a strong union of “Heirs” male lead Li Minhao and “Ghost” female lead Jin Gaoyin.
Such a gold medal team has undoubtedly amassed a host of tracks for the first broadcast. From local to overseas, it is as follows: Poisonous Eye (WeChat ID: youhaoxifilm) discovered that on opening day on April 17, NAVER’s largest search engine on the South Korean portal was “The Murder List of” The King “, the first episode of Korean drama television live online exceeded 300,000 Chinese viewers. On the Netflix platform,” The King “aired for the first time in 7 countries, and the second in Taiwan and the seventh in Japan.
Source: Weibo @Minoz_ pick pick Xiaohuier
But after the two episodes aired, Hanwang’s public opinion was disappointed with the plot and criticized the actors’ acting skills. South Korea’s national ratings are also declining. Douban scored 8.3, and gradually fell to 7.7. The popular short review wrote: “The same is the gold series (Jin Enshu’s script), how the gap is so big,” “After watching all four episodes, the pace is really a disaster, compared to the gate of next to “Couple ‘s” World “is really a big gap.”
Ratings for “the king” fell from breaking 11% in the first week to 9.7% in the second week
In fact, “The World of Couples” next door is the real blast for Korean dramas recently.
The tenth episode of “The World of Couples” aired on the 25th became the highest rated drama in JTBC history with a national rating of 22.9%. In episode 8, an instant rating of 32.61% also appeared, which was dubbed “three-thirds” A Korean is Angry Online. “
The play was remade from the British drama “Dr. Foster”. The lovely 53-year-old mature woman, Kim, loves fighting the derailed husband. The plot affects the emotions of the audience. In addition to angry Koreans, the Chinese audience is also angry on April 20, #couple 的 世界 气 人 #Search for the top five on Weibo.
The popularity of a television series on the street is perhaps the most intuitive: Taiwanese media randomly interview passers-by’s views on the derailment of Luo Zhixiang. Passers-by commented: “Is he playing” The world of couples? “” World “to describe the Luo Zhixiang incident, the play has almost become synonymous with cheating.
“Couple’s World” follows a completely different creative path from “the King”: Cable TV JTBC has repeatedly created miracles with the American drama style, dark theme “Mist” and “Sky City” in recent years. The episode “The world of couples” has also become a topical work.
Perhaps Korean drama is undergoing a change of old and new forces. Without a trial and error formula, no one can become an “everlasting monarch.”
Changes in the themes of Korean dramas: sadism-comedy-fantasy
Before 2005, the explosive formula for Korean dramas was “bitter and sadistic.” Produced by KBS TV since 2000, the four-part series “Blue Life and Death” is filled with a tone of sadness and has won the tears of countless audiences: the terminal root of “Autumn Fairy Tale,” the root of the accident. Car Show for “Winter Love Song”, “Summer Day” Heart Transplant and Substitute Lover Terrier “Aroma” have become the classic bridge to idol drama. The bitterness superimposed on exoticism is even more of a visualization miracle: The final lead in “The Story of Bali,” starring He Zhiyuan and Zhao Yincheng, is ruined and tragic, but the highest rating is over 40%.
Around 2005, the romantic love comedy themes represented by “Romantic House” and “My Name is Jin Sanshun” replaced bitterness and sadism as audience favorites. Later, “Palace” and “My Girl” appeared. Hot episode The national media also noticed this turn signal carefully. The Information Times reported in 2016: “On the occasion of vintage light comedies such as” Palace “and” I am Jin Sanshun, “the” Korean Man of the Dead Drama Formula “has started to malfunction. In the future, Korean dramas for sale tears will be rare and rare. A lot of comedy was created and Korean dramas have been seen working hard to transform. “
But despite the fact that the plot moves from abuse to sweetness, the core of the Korean drama creation is very stable, that is, creating a “fairy tale for adults” and becoming a placebo to satisfy the love fantasy Women’s. Sadomasochism meets East Asian women’s longing for everlasting love, while romantic comedies start primarily with the love model of the ordinary heroine and her child. “Romantic House” is a hobbyist who lives with a big star, and “Palace” is a high school student. Married to the royal family, Jin Sanshun is the romantic story of the chubby and handsome chaebol …
This romantic comedy theme reached a certain limit in the Korean version of “The Boys Over Flowers” in early 2009: it seems difficult to make a more luxurious idol drama than this. The location of the program spanned three countries and regions, mobilizing helicopters and luxury sports cars, F4 is equipped with more than 200 sets of renowned clothing, 25 episodes of idol dramas took 5 months.
Li Minhao, your noble son in “The Flower Man”
“The Boys Over Flowers” became the most influential Korean drama of the year, but the ratings were no match for the crime-themed love drama “IRIS” and the family ethic love drama “Brilliant Legacy.” In the same year, the most popular romantic comedy was “Miss Please” starring Yin Enhui and “Originally a Beautiful Man” starring Zhang Genshuo. The first slightly reversed the routine of “rich men and poor women” and told the love story of rich women and poor housewives; The latter is an ordinary girl in love with a great star. Such episodes may remain popular on the Internet and in foreign markets, but local ratings are not outstanding.
Based on the fact that the core of dream making remains unchanged, Korean dramas urgently need a breakthrough on the themes. Since the 1920s, fantasy elements have injected new vitality into Korean drama-making dreams. Representative works are “My Girlfriend is Nine-Tailed Fox” and “Secret Garden” released in 2010. The latter played many soul swaps, and all achieved good ratings.
“Secret Garden” is also a major node on screenwriter Jin Enshu’s path to the gods: “Secret Garden” is rated at 35.2% maximum, making Jin Enshu win the Best Art Award again after six years after “Paris Lovers” The screenwriter award and the gloomy Xuan Bin advanced to the national male god, as the frontline of Korean actors hastened to cooperate with Jin Enshu.
Korean drama “Secret Garden”
More than Kim Eun-suk, Korean drama writers have made great masterpieces of fantasy themes: 2012 “The Prince of the Tower House” and “Queen Renxian’s Man” are pierced; in 2013, the top three male leads in the Korean drama “You from the Stars” are all aliens Min Jun; “Hearing your voice,” as the name implies, male lead Li Zhongshuo can hear everyone’s inner thoughts; “Xiaojun Sun” heroine Kong Xiaozhen has the super ability to communicate with the undead. However, some media outlets bluntly said that, despite the apparent novelty, “The Master’s Sun” is still a variant of “Cinderella Drama.”
Star writers similar to Jin Enshu also have Park Ji-eun. After “You from the Stars”, “Legend of the Blue Sea” and “The Forced Fall of Love” have been released in succession. The protagonists of the two writers are “Tiantian”. From chaebols, kings, aliens, mermaids to special operations force captains and North Korean cadres, the themes written are true love that can transcend class, hatred, time and space, and dimensions.
At the same time, as ace writers, Jin Enshu did have the capital to create fantasy dramas that burned money. This great and dreamy scene is also a powerful killer of cultural production: the audience for Korean dramas around the world, even more popular than the K-pop audience that is primarily targeting the youth market.
In recent years, these Korean dramas have also carried out increased cultural production and public diplomacy: “Descendants of the Sun” has been rated “the leading melodic drama from the homes of others”, and “Forced Fall of Love” it is a romantic “United Front”; The scene in “You from the Stars” was the most popular tourist route to Korea. In the first episode of “The King”, Lee Min-ho crossed Gwanghwamun Square in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace on a white horse. In front of King Sejong’s statue, he completed a fateful meeting with Jin Gaoyin. It can almost be viewed directly as a Seoul tourist video.
In the first episode of “The King”, Lee Min-ho crossed Gwanghwamun Square on a white horse.
Fairy tale “failure”
At the inaugural “King” conference, the host asked Li Minhao and Jin Gaoyin to praise the screenwriter for Jin Enshu. Li Minhao said that Jin Enshu’s work is like a beautiful fairy tale, the script is solid and makes people feel warm; Jin Gaoyin said the characters are portrayed as Charismatic, the two did not mention the large configuration of parallel space-time travel in the play.
After the broadcast, the mystery that Li Minho and Jin Gaoyin praised Jin Enshu for such restraint was finally revealed: Jin Enshu had no new moves, and even the level of lines that had been praised was disappointing.
In the first episode, a political report was made between Lee Min Ho, the king of the Korean empire in parallel time and space, and the prime minister of the empire. The image was as funny as the wine from the rich woman’s house. The two flirted and exchanged: “The country is very stable. The people are very happy.” This is no longer a “fairy tale for adults,” and elementary school students are hard to fool.
The first episode of the king.
Jin Enshu created a Korean empire, but he didn’t seem to know what an emperor was. This emperor lived like a traffic star with no commercial capacity, and was loved by people without having to burn his head. The most important job of the royal family was to urge the emperor to marry. In the second episode, Li Minhao saw the heroine Jin Gaoyin through time and space, and instead of revealing the secret behind the passage, she immediately asked the heroine to marry the other party as the queen.
Looking back on the 2006 classic Korean drama “Palace,” the Korean royal family set under the constitutional monarchy has no royal power, but Prince Li Xin’s style of performing royal duties and always remembering to maintain the public image is much more dedicated. than Li Minhao’s, and the real background is The protagonist’s love has increased a bit “unintentionally”. In “the king”, the magnificent imperial background and the parallel space-time frame of the suspense brain constitute a feeling of separation between the protagonist of the love brain.
After the low ratings for the third episode, a discussion thread appeared on the Hanwang forum, commenting: “The script, the director, and the male actors are very common,” “Li Minho and Kim Eunsuk do not match,” Heir to ” that moment is also Jin Yubin’s “hottest” and “drama abandonment”.
The anti-Heaven man’s formula established dream love to declare failure this time, in fact, the hidden concerns have already been buried. Although the 2016 “Ghost” has created cute ghosts, messengers from hell, and other characters, and has also made the love line extremely beautiful, but the empty plot is also criticized. A Douban netizen commented, “The screenwriter can borrow such a rare topic to discuss the life and death proposition with different deceased people, but the result is in love.”
But this is not that the creative power of a screenwriter goes downhill as he says goodbye to the best years, but rather that the routine of the entire genre drama has caused aesthetic fatigue in South Korea.
In 2016, Song Zaizheng, the writer of Queen Renxian’s man, created the brain-suspending romantic drama “W Two Worlds”. Actor Li Zhongshuo is a “man who breaks reality” in the comics; In 2017, “Hear Your Voice” “The script Park Hyelin created the romantic suspense drama” When You’re Sleeping. “The heroine played by Xiu Zhi can predict the future in her dream. These two major production episodes are classified into a recession. about 10%, their quality is not bad, but they seem to be new.
Romantic suspense drama “When You Sleep”
When a song becomes an “explosive formula,” it is not really far from the public’s aesthetic fatigue. The new worldview setup and human setup may capture audience attention for the first time and provide some hot topics in the early stage, but they cannot guarantee that each episode will turn out to be phenomenal work.
Additionally, there is a situation where fantasy themes deviate into low-cost short dramas: With the popularity of smart mobile devices and mobile video becoming a trend, the production of low-cost miniseries in South Korea has increased since 2015, which is greater than the start of large-scale production and high-level card companies. Fantasy romantic dramas, low-cost dramas, online dramas, and short dramas are best suited to become experimental fields for novel scenarios.
For example, the 2019 theme, the day of accidental discovery adapted from web comics, tells the story of the self-awakening of the secondary characters in the comics. The novelty of perspective does not require any magnificent special effects. New actors Jin Huiyun and Jin Luyun are used to doing it. Protagonist, the cost is not high, but the return is excellent: Not only is it a popular drama in South Korea, but it has also become one of the top ten episodes on the B-station movie and television list in 2019, with a large number of second generation videos.
Say goodbye to dreams, to deep human nature
Compared to the silly fire of “the king”, the vigorous advancement of “the world of couples” represents the emergence of a new love of strength-dream that is still necessary, but the exploration of deep human nature is also welcome .
Since 2017, the Korean cable station JTBC, known for its credibility in the news, has risen in the field of television drama content production and released “Tasteful She”, “Mist”, “Sky City” to the beat of a year of explosive drama. And “The World of Couples,” which triggered the song and also updated JTBC ratings.
In 2017, JTBC reunited attractive actresses Jin Xishan and Jin Xuan’er (played by “Jin Sanshun”) to star in “Tasteful She.” Behind the double heroine struggle of the upper-class full-time wife and intriguing babysitter, it reflects the state of the different classes in Korean society. The show’s maximum ratings exceeded 12%, setting a JTBC rating record, and the director of the play also won Best Director of the Baixiang Art Awards.
The police thriller drama “Mist” aired in early 2018 is one of JTBC’s most influential plays abroad. Although the collapse of the tail caused Douban’s score to drop from 9.3 to 7.3, the role of Gao Huilan played by Jin Nanzhu was deeply rooted in people’s hearts and became a classic mature woman role. Douban Fever commented that she was “full firepower, enough confidence and dominance, clothing and temperament is handsome.”
Jin Nanzhu as the heroine of “Mist” Gao Huilan
In the second half of 2018, Netflix, which accelerated its entry into the Korean market, cooperated with TVN and JTBC television stations “Mr. Sunshine” and “City of Sky”. The first was written by Jin Enshu, who continued the style of gold production, and the cost of production was as high as 43 billion yuan. KRW (approximately 250 million yuan), of which Netflix invested 28 billion won (approximately 160 million yuan); The latter used JTBC’s black humor style to the extreme, representing the anxiety of children from Korean families to go to school and exaggerating points of social pain.
Both episodes responded well: the premiere of “Mr. Sunshine” surpassed the premiere of “Ghost”; “City of Sky” is a dark horse with a first attempt rating of only 1.72%, and finally hit 22.3%. He won the title to watch the television drama of the toll station. At the Baixiang Art Awards, “Sky City” won four awards.
Korean drama “Sky City”
In 2020, JTBC returned with its dark theme and charming lead character, and released “The World of Couples”. This drama is rated 19 forbidden as “Mist”, but the ratings are not affected at all. It only took 10 episodes. The record for “Sky City” was broken.
Dream JTBC seems to have mastered the formula for the explosion of Korean dramas in the new era: reality + women.
Even the problem of “glamorous mature women without dramas” that has troubled the Chinese television drama industry has been solved by JTBC: from Jin Nanzhu and Lian Jingya, 40, to Jin’s favorites, 53, are all very popular. On the other hand, Netflix’s entry into the Korean market has also had certain influences, such as giving “Mr. Sunshine” a “Hollywood texture” and allowing the production of Korean dramas like “Sky City” to the rhythm of the American drama.
This change of subject from “Goodbye to Dreams to Deep Humanity” is the result of the local Korean audience’s choice and a sign of the Korean television drama industry’s most mature industry. Not only local, but now it seems that foreign audiences for Korean dramas have finally entered the period of fatigue: Korean dermabrasion, Korean lighting, and Korean filters have gradually changed from commendable terms to derogatory terms; “The King” may trigger 300,000 people watched the premiere online, but they will also lose their Douban scores after airing two episodes.
Current popular Korean dramas with TVN and JTBC as the main production have deeper cores, but there are still some traces of “established formula”: like TVN’s “Please Answer” and “Witty Life” series, JTBC’s dark paintings Wind + points of social pain. As long as there is a formula, there will be aesthetic fatigue.
However, the issue of aesthetic fatigue in Korean dramas may not be the time for Chinese audiences to worry: Looking back on the past 20 years, the Korean television drama industry has always been able to innovate and change themes. quickly. Ancient themes are about to become obsolete, and new explosions have already arisen or have even arisen. .
Perhaps this is: As long as the self repeats quickly enough, the audience’s aesthetic can’t get rid of you.
