Many times, we seem to rely on variety shows to confirm that each other lives in the same reality.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “North Park NorthPark” (ID: northpark2018) , Author: Yating,Editor: Kimura Takushu.
Wait for Maotao to throw the slippers to the music fans, PeopleSoft put the trophy into a red plastic bag with the word “five people” and finished the three-hour finals. The second season of “Summer of the Band” was last week. It’s officially over. However, the remaining heat of the topic of the show is still there, and the various controversies caused by this radiate a wide range, from band culture, freedom of expression, and rock spirit to aesthetic hegemony, urban and rural development, and population migration.
Indie music has a broad cultural interpretation, but in the past “variety season”, “Le Xia” is not the only program that enjoys this kind of treatment. This is more like the normal state of the “post-epidemic era”. We use “Sister Riding the Wind and Waves” to talk about female independence, age anxiety and patriarchal society, and we use “Talk Show” to talk about gender discrimination, labor relations and the gap between rich and poor.
In the past six months, variety shows have become one of the most important topic-making machines in the public opinion field, and it has also supported the common sense of most peopleSame talk question. Many times, we seem to rely on variety shows to confirm that each other lives in the same reality.
DenseAt the time of the week, there will be three rap shows, two band shows, two idol stage shows, one talk show, etc., plus their respective “derivative shows” (probably more than the total number of features), Thousands of arrows are coming towards you, and there is no way to avoid it.
In addition to the increase in number, the duration has also been significantly lengthened. Now you don’t see too many variety shows under 150 minutes in a single period. A perceivable fuzzy node is probably the “Youth with You 2” broadcast in May. Even if the previous program was divided into two episodes, the total duration is still about 100 minutes. After that, whether it was “Son of Tomorrow”, “Sister Riding the Wind and Waves”, and even “Talk Show”, it almost started in 3 hours, which is not considered exclusive content for members.
If we say that when the epidemic first hit, most people would not have expected that variety shows could occupy our daily lives with the current density. When the variety show season comes to an end, it is time to breathe a sigh of relief in all aspects. Faced with this familiar and unfamiliar variety show, it may be time to ask questions-how did this happen?
Variety show more and more like a TV show
One of the backgrounds for the lengthening of variety shows is that film and television dramas are becoming shorter and denser.
Several TV dramas that have been highly discussed this year are the short dramas represented by “The Silent Truth”, “The Hidden Corner” and “Skyscrapers”. The length of 15 episodes has significantly accelerated its update speed. Compared with the update time of variety shows that often last two or three months, the short drama can be broadcast within half a month, even if it is 70 episodes of “Qing Ping Le “It took only one month to complete.
It has been a long time since domestic film and television dramas have been criticized for water injection, repeated routines, unreasonable plots, and divorced from real life. Once upon a time, we had a time when we generally cared about the private emotional realm by relying on film and television dramas. The prime time meant that a family sat in front of the TV and watched “I Love My Family”, “Family Has Children” and “The Happy Life of Poor Zhang Damin” “How does such a series clarify the relationship between people? Rely on the way of conveying emotions to convey a more stable value concept, so as to care for the audience’s daily life.
Later, the film and television industry tasted the sweetness of capitalization, creating “big IP”, “big scene” and explosive formula formulas for traffic stars, and highly homogenized drama series appeared. After seeing more and more non-realistic film and television works such as sweet pets, sadomasochism, and pure love, many viewers are no longer used to finding the mapping of personal emotional care in film and television dramas.
After being criticized for a long time, the film and television industry has made some self-regulation. So in the past year or two, we have seen more dramas with high reputation like these short dramas this year. The freshman’s creative power tried to break through the outdated expression atmosphere by accelerating the narrative rhythm, strengthening reasonable suspense, and focusing on production quality and acting skills, and achieved visible results.
But this type of drama can’t fill the viewIn the past, people have experienced many personal emotions in the process of “chasing drama”. An emotional vacancy still exists.
“The Heartbeat” Season 1 stills
The popularity of reality shows is not unrelated to this “pit” to be filled. Delicate friendships, ambiguous relationships, and intergenerational conflicts, these emotional experiences that everyone can have, have been frequently seen in observational variety shows such as “Signs of Heart”, “Daughters’ Love” and “Romantic Travel of Wife”. , In this year when everyone is fascinated by Zhang Yuqi’s life growth outside the stage, we found that reality shows can provide material for the projection of private emotions.
The function of TV dramas that allows viewers to project emotions has been gradually replaced by reality show variety shows; later, the variety shows that originally featured works, competitions, and stage also added a lot of reality show content. Thus, “chasing variety show” has become a new “chasing drama.”
The podcast program “Start Talk” was on As mentioned in “Summer of Variety Shows: The Unbearable Weight Behind the Explosions”, as far as the action of “chasing” is concerned, variety shows can indeed provide a stronger sense of immersion. On the one hand, a three-hour variety show every week can provide longer companionship, making it easier to develop the so-called “watching habit.” On the other hand, considering the creation and review process of domestic TV series shooting, the production format of variety show recording and broadcasting undoubtedly has a relatively large space for expression, and can adjust the content of the program in real time during the broadcast process in response to audience comments. There must be a more flexible interactive space.
And this flexible space gives variety shows the ability to continuously supply topics. This means that after the three-hour program is broadcast, viewers still have to actively or passively engage in online discussions. Coupled with the constraints of the epidemic and subject matter restrictions on the film and television industry, Variety Show took the torch this year and assumed the position of the center of the storm.
The general feeling is that while film and television dramas are becoming more and more like movies, emphasizing suspense, depth, and conflict between concentrated dramas, TVOriginally common in the play, about personal emotional relationshipsThe light part of portraying has gradually moved to variety shows. Even “Talk Show”, a variety show that has no daily routines and purely displays stage works, has to create space for the “Snow Country Train” to come in.
Tired Competition
We cannot stop the content of reality shows in variety shows today. Another reason is that the performance of works and competitions in variety shows can no longer easily attract our attention.
Before and after 2017, with the appearance of programs such as “Rip-Hop in China”, using competition to promote subculture seems to be a good methodology for successful variety shows. The early “subculture variety show” did gain considerable attention and influence either because of new ideas, or because of curiosity, or because of the charm of the cultural category itself.
But in just a few years, their presence in the public opinion field has inevitably decreased after two or three seasons. Relying on novelty and curiosity can’t keep a program prosperous, not to mention that there may be two or three friend stations competing with you in the same category.
This forces variety shows to work hard in two directions. One is to put more pen and ink on the reality show in addition to works, stages and competitions. For example, tracking the establishment of friendship between some players or the outbreak of conflict; let those who seem to have a partner form a CP; take the players to a suburban castle to live together, watch their daily chemical reactions, and so on.
“Snow Country Train” getting along with it
The other direction is to constantly update the competition rules, use stricter rules and a higher intensity competition system to put creators under an extreme situation, so as to bring new content to the audience.And sensory stimulation.
With that, the audience was also taken into this cruel competition for no reason. Behind the magnificent stage and the moving narrative of growth are the purchase of milk, rankings, and voting at the end of the year to ensure that the audience’s hearts are good for debut, promotion and resurrection. In the setting of the competition system of some programs, there will be a debut after the debut, and the top up is required after the recharge. In this year of global economic decline, the audience will inevitably feel tired of such competition and participation.
Do we need such a competition?
You can try to put the competition elements in variety shows into the framework of the game. As an almost instinctive need, games existed before we could define them. Reference to the explanation given by the Dutch historian John Heizinha from the perspective of cultural participation of the term “game” may be more illustrative of this feeling. “Games are unfolded in a specific time and space, and in a prescribed space-time context, Creative and orderly imitation practices are carried out in the real world, and the game presents an obvious order, following widely accepted rules, without the necessity of current affairs and material utility.”
In layman’s terms, we need games because they can imitate a real world. When we are in the game world, we can get rid of all the imprints of identity, class and gender that imprison ourselves in reality. And because games can’t help us really improve our reality, the labor, practice, and creation we participate in in games are done purely for fun, and the resulting meaning can just make up for or even replace the frustration, fatigue and weakness in reality. .
However, it is obviously difficult for current variety shows to simulate the real world to create the value of entertainment, games and competition from the perspectives of “cure”, “compensate” and “relief”. More often, it simulates a world that is too real, and it often makes you feel that you have been hit by reality, but you still have to get hit again in variety shows.
Pangbo said in this year’s “Talk Show Conference” that “As long as you switch careers fast enough, young people can’t catch up with you”, saying that old talk show actors are a little bit ineffective in front of creative young people. On the strength. In addition to being funny, this is basically the epitome of the “old” talk show actor “the hero” on this year’s show. The annual brutal competition has made Jianguo, Cheng Lu, Rock and other actors express the feeling of being “emptied” in front of the camera.
Such a situation can certainly be explained as “survival of the fittest” and as creativity after being forced out of desperation. But you still have to face the “world of meaning” constructed by these explanations, entertainment, games, and competitions that might have been used to heal real frustrations, Finally pointed to the real world of the weak. The so-called “old man” in various subcultural variety shows may have just participated in this art for five years, or even two or three years, and have already faced the problem of being eliminated. Ordinary people like you and I think of the approaching 35 years old (according to this year’s The wind direction may be 30 years old.) The node is scrapped, or I can’t help but sigh, what about looking at a variety show?
The trapped variety show, and us trapped in the variety show
But the contest cannot be abandoned. It’s hard to imagine that a show like “Romantic Journey of the Band” or “The Rapper’s Heartbeat” can have the same influence on the public opinion field; and then a high-quality talk show special long video will be placed on the Internet It is certainly not as attractive as “Talk Show”.
The competition is still the most powerful weapon for this batch of variety shows to grab the audience’s attention and promote the cultural product itself. Regardless of whether you stand in the position of a variety show producer or a participant in the cultural industry, you still have to abide by the game rules of selling attention. After all, rap, band and talk show variety shows are broadcast every year, corresponding to offline performances. The box office will burst.
“Surveillance Capitalism: Smart Trap” stills
As for the fact that attention has become a commodity, the recent documentary “Surveillance Capitalism: Smart Trap”, which has received much attention, gave a detailed discussion: social media developed in the capitalist system and its profitable business The model mainly relies on advertisements. To obtain as many advertisements as possible means that social media must provide enough “good-looking” user data. In order to attract more users to use their products for a longer period of time, social media will introduce mechanisms such as “algorithms” to continuously push users what they want to see, and make them in a way that they can watch another after watching one. Look at the data better.
However, if this design is designed to make more money, if it is not restricted from the perspective of laws and systems, or from the perspective of protecting ordinary people and not protecting large companies, such algorithms will also affect society and specific people. It will have negative effects. For example, we will become narrower because we “can only” see repetitive and homogeneous information, which is also related to the emergence of extreme views and behaviors of depression and anxiety. From this perspective, our attention is really important, and as a commodity that can be sold by the platform to advertisers, we can easily be seen as a resource, relying on the simplicity of being moved and grown.The narrative is just resold. At least it still looks like this for now.
The Hedgehog Commune is in the “How to Help? Longer than the movie? 》 An analysis was given from the industry perspective. A senior variety show producer told Hedgehog Commune, “The longer ones are often S+-level variety shows. But I don’t think the show party wants to be long, but Afraid to view “2” href=”https://36kr.com/projectDetails/53908″ target=”_blank”>People said I didn’t see what I wanted to see, so it became longer. There are more versions, and the feature film is over There is also a pure membership, the purpose is to pull new. At the same time, for advertisers, the length of variety shows becomes longer, and this transaction seems to be a little more cost-effective.
There is a hot word this year called “Neijuan”, which has a similar meaning to the anthropologist Xiang Biao’s metaphor for the Chinese portrait of a hummingbird. Hummingbirds are the birds with the fastest wing flapping frequency, which can flap their wings 50 times per second. Because their staple food is nectar, there are often scenes of “wing flapping and grounding” in flowers. But hummingbirds are easily trapped by fences, mainly because they will only habitually fly upwards when encountering danger. Once trapped in the fences, they will find it difficult to fly out again. Eventually, they will be very short when they are exhausted. Death within time.
The reason why variety shows have become longer is that in this era, people are constantly being simplified into resources and used as the epitome of tools. Our attention is more important than our emotional needs. Our actions to express opinions are more important than the opinions themselves. Our value as a commodity is more important than our value as an autonomous person. The reason why the variety show has changed isBecause it wants to change, it can change, it can ignore your opinions, or it can pretend to care about your opinions, as long as you are willing to be sold as a commodity.
Up to this point, this makes the question of “what’s wrong with variety show” become a commonplace question, but the process of answering this question is still necessary. We are often aware of new questions of this or that kind, and often feel that there is no need to answer, or that we can’t change our situation even if we answer it. But I still think of the hummingbird metaphor, if it can realize the existence of the fence? What if it could know the possibility of escaping from the fence or breaking the fence? Does it still have a chance?