Season 12 of “Love in the Country” is here.
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account poison eyes (ID: youhaoxifilm) Author Poisonous Eye Editorial Department.
Last week, “Country Love 12” officially landed on Youku, which once again refreshed the historical record of “Longest-lived Putonghua drama series”-from the “rural comedy film” that was considered to be only watched by middle-aged and elderly people, and has become a stream Popular content on the media platform, the “Country Love” series not only continued the content for 12 seasons, but also maintained a high level of heat and topic level.
With so many big IPs in the history of Chinese film and television, why is “Rural Love” the only way to do this?
The “secret” of “Rural Love” and Zhao Jiaban can actually be seen from the publicity strategy before the release of “Rural Love 12”: Since the end of last year, the official Weibo of the episode has continued. Cross-border interaction with popular stars such as Lao Yan, various vibrato, quick creative videos and emoticon viral marketing are even more enjoyable … and at the content level of the episode, materials released in advance from official Weibo See, a big core of “Rural Love 12” will still be “Ivory Village II”-in other words, from content to story, “Rural Love” is constantly approaching young user groups.
As for this, as early as the end of “Rural Love 11” in 2019, Poison Eye has analyzed: “Rural Love” can reach today because it is constantly “updated and iterated”, so Keep it from falling behind.
This is an article published by Poison Eye last March ——
With the last three episodes of the video website officially tonight, another season of “Country Love” is coming to an end. The end of this season has also let the “Country Love” series officially surpass the “Yang Guang’s Happy Life” series (season 10) and become the longest-lived Mandarin series in Chinese history. So far, 11 seasons, A total of 549 episodes.
Poison Eye (Wechat ID: youhaoxifilm) was mentioned in a previous article (click here to read: The sequels of” Unconscious Master “and” The Ode to Joy “have” snapped on the street “, why are domestic sequels not as good as the first season? ), most series in Chinese TV drama history are It ’s definitely a “miracle” to be able to broadcast “Rural Love” in the 11th season, and the Douban scores in the 11th season are around 7 points without much fluctuation.
Although it ’s getting more and more popular, at least until this season, there is still no sign of decline in heat: As of the morning of March 20th, the popularity value of “Rural Love 11″ on Youku was 9449, and nowadays the hit drama ” “It’s All Good” is about the same, even surpassing the popular IP drama “East Palace”, “Skynet Action” starred in popular traffic Zhu Yilong and “This!” It ’s original. ”
People who do n’t watch “Country Love” may find it difficult to believe the authenticity of this data comparison, but the active user portraits provided by Yunhe Data fully explain why such a situation exists: “Country Love 11 “88% of the active users are audiences under the age of 29; the post-90s audience of 20-29 years old accounted for 72.77%, surpassing dramas such as” Golden Pupil “,” All Are Good “and” East Palace “-from the Internet The support of the post-90s consumer of video content has made “Rural Love” the most influential IP series in China, and what attracts them is the relaxed and humorous plot and the large number of Internet cultures derived from it.
This result is somewhat unexpected. More than ten years ago, when Zhao Benshan started making a series of rural works, he thought of the TV series “Face the Chinese peasants’ thinking and living conditions, and try to solve some problems for them” and pay attention to the “three rural issues”; After many years, the ups and downs of Zhao Benshan’s personal fate accidentally pushed this IP to the Internet and young people. In the soil of the Internet, the original rural story was gradually deconstructed and reshaped, and finally formed the status it is today .
“Country Love” can reach this day, it is not because of “rural” feelings.
The birth of an explosive IP
Before “Love in the Country”, Zhao Benshan filmed two well-known TV series in the country, one was “Liu Laogen” which was released in 2002, and the other was “Mr. Ma Shuai” which was released in 2004. Judging from the influence of the single works, the two do not lose “Rural Love”, and “Liu Laogen” has received 13.45% ratings on CCTV; but in terms of continuity, they can not be compared with “Rural Love” Comparing them, there are only two of the former,The latter also only shot three.
Stills of “Liu Laogen”
The “end” of “Liu Lao Gen”, many people attribute it to the death of Gao Xiumin and the writer He Qingkui’s fade out, but in fact, as early as 2004 before Gao Xiumin’s death, Zhao Benshan realized that this story could not be told: ” “Liu Lao Gen” is not good to shoot again because Liu Lao Gen is a peasant entrepreneur. The further you go forward, the bigger and bigger, and the bigger it becomes, the less beautiful it is, and the bigger it will leave the land. “
Zhao Benshan, aware of this, lowered his perspective in “The Great Marshal”, lowered the focus of the story from entrepreneurs to ordinary farmers who wanted to make a day in the city, and “don’t have any intention” He planned the “tragedy life” of Marshal Ma: “Marshal has set up a school, but after that, he has to return to the land, that is, he cannot be made good. You want to make him good but he is not good, then there is a drama.”
However, such a “urban outsider” story, because there are too few core characters (only Ma Shuai and Fan Debiao), when filming the third episode also began to fall into weakness due to the moderation. “Liaoshen Evening News” conducted a survey after the broadcast of “Mada Marshal 3”, and as a result, 80% of the interviewed users thought that “Mada Marshal 4” should not be filmed again. Soon after, the lead actor Fan Wei also told the media that he was worried about the audience ’s aesthetic fatigue. There will be no fourth part of “Muscle Marshal”: “Van Debiao (the role played by Fan Wei) is about to stop his character … the old character, the audience will certainly be tired.”
80% of people oppose the filming of “Marshal 4”
Zhao Benshan’s sense of crisis may have come earlier, because he was already looking for the next story long before he filmed Marshal 3. Perhaps it was the lessons learned from the previous two works. At that time, Zhao Benshan set his sights on a “rural youth film” that has both earthy and diverse character relationships, so there is a “Rural Love in 2006” “.
Before that, there was almost no Chinese TV historyThe emergence of romantic comedies in rural themes, coupled with the popularity of Zhao Jiaban’s previous two works and the “golden signboard” of Zhao Benshan, “Rural Love” quickly became popular as soon as it was broadcast, becoming the most popular people in those years. Topical domestic drama series.
During the broadcast of the first quarter of 2006, the average audience rating of CCTV reached about 11%, and it was strongly overwhelmed by “Wulin Gaiden” which was placed on the altar in the future. When it was broadcast on CCTV in the second quarter of 2007, the average audience The rate reached 8.64%, not only surpassing “Bright Sword”, but even the feat of single episode ratings exceeding “News Broadcast”; although the ratings on CCTV in the third quarter of 2010 dropped to 6.73%, the average viewing share It was as high as 17.23%, and when it was broadcast on local satellite television, the ratings of four provincial satellite televisions including Heilongjiang improved by 5-15 places … The regrets of “Liu Laogen” and “Ma Shuai” were not new The series was staged, and at least the end of the first three seasons, the audience was still buying.
“Country Love 2”
The increasing influence of the drama has also brought a huge benefit to Benshan Media. According to media reports, “Country Love 2” was priced at RMB 100,000-120,000 per episode when CCTV first aired (six times the number of ordinary TV dramas in the same period), and sold to dozens of TV stations during the second round of broadcasting. Therefore, the copyright fee alone is close to 40 million; in addition, there are a large number of patch advertisements at the end of the episode, and brands such as Mengniu are implanted in the drama (implantation fee is about several million yuan); conservative estimates, light This TV series brought in more than 60 million yuan in revenue for Benshan Media more than a decade ago.
The hit of “Love in the Country” not only brought benefits on the bright side, but also magnified the deep value of Zhao Jiaban. At first, in order to do business for two people, Zhao Benshan specially set up the Liaoning Folk Art Troupe and co-founded the Benshan Academy of Art with Liaoning University to train a large number of artists in person. In “Marshal Ma”, many of his apprentices have already had the opportunity to show their faces, and many of the participants have doubled their appearance fees, and they have been able to receive some endorsement invitations. The broadcast of the group portrait of “Country Love” gave his apprentices more room to show.
