The high-quality development of variety shows faces opportunities and challenges
2024-08-18
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Stills and pictures of "Singer 2024"
Stills from "Flowers and Youth: Silk Road Season". File photo
【Art and Literature Trends】
In the 2024 national variety show planning and filing, about half of the programs belong to the "Nth Generation Variety Show", that is, variety shows that have been produced and broadcast for many seasons, have a large number of audience attention or have a certain topic popularity. In the first half of the year, 4 of the top 5 variety shows with the highest market share of feature film broadcasts on the entire network were "Nth Generation Variety Shows". Among the top ten TV and online variety shows in terms of broadcast volume in 2023, "Nth Generation Variety Shows" accounted for 80%. In recent years, "Nth Generation Variety Shows" have become the main force in the variety show market, playing a leading role in major TV stations and long video platforms. High-quality "Nth Generation Variety Shows" not only have a stable audience base and a good reputation, but also have relatively strong business resources and a mature content iteration mechanism. However, despite the strong performance of the "Nth Generation Variety Show" program market, it faces the dilemma of increasing difficulty in innovation. How can variety shows maintain high-quality development? This puts higher and higher demands on creators.
Changes in audience tastes force "Nth generation of variety shows" to speed up their iterations
Generally, when the first season of "Variety N Generation" programs is broadcast, they stand out from the massive variety shows with their strong innovation ability and excellent artistic expression, gain wide attention, obtain high scores, and win widespread praise from a large number of audiences, thus forming a certain brand effect. This kind of traffic popularity and audience reputation can reduce the trial and error costs of video platforms and program creation teams, while quickly mobilizing the attention of the audience, and quickly seize the market opportunity to realize the content value and commercial value of the program itself. The increasingly powerful content value and commercial value attract further capital investment, and the main creative team further follows up, so that variety shows can be made season after season. After several consecutive seasons of fermentation, "Variety N Generation" has formed a relatively mature and stable production model, which is easier to maintain the audience's stickiness, and gradually formed the Matthew effect of "the strong get stronger" in the variety show market.
At present, many "variety shows of the Nth generation" have entered a stable development period, and have found a relatively fixed development model in the external form and internal theme of the program. Many old "variety shows of the Nth generation" continue to exert their strength and innovate to maintain their market position, successfully extending their life cycle. "Go Fighting" has always been based on outdoor challenge sports as its main content, focusing on establishing sincere connections between people, and has shown strong vitality after ten seasons. "China's New Rap" uses rap as a medium to tell the customs and habits of different regions, further expanding the boundaries and influence of rap culture, and allowing rap to take root and grow in the soil of Chinese culture. At the same time, many new "variety shows of the Nth generation" also show vitality, injecting fresh blood into the variety show field. "Summer of the Band" explores the style and music culture of various styles of bands, and presents the audience with a number of art feasts covering various music types. "Mao Xue Wang", which has gone through two years of development, uses "Mao Xue Wang's House" as its main shooting scene, telling the real and interesting stories between young friends who gather here every week in a relaxed chat atmosphere, showing the rich daily life and spiritual world of young people today, and recording real growth. "Dad is in Charge", which is now in its third season, has also broken through the previous creative model focusing on "stars-children", introducing parent-child combinations from ordinary families, showing the important role of men in family education, and is committed to conveying positive family education concepts.
However, it is impossible for the "Nth Generation of Variety Shows" to have one trick to win all the battles. In today's new media environment, from short videos on social media to original dramas on streaming platforms to highly interactive live shows, various forms of entertainment content provide audiences with diverse and immediate choices. The audience's needs, tastes, media literacy, and film and television literacy are also changing at an unprecedented rate in this process. They prefer to see content that resonates with their preferences, values, and lifestyles. These situations have posed greater challenges to the creation of "Nth Generation of Variety Shows". According to Yunhe data, the overall traffic of variety shows showed a downward trend in the first quarter of 2024, with a total of 5.7 billion effective broadcasts of feature films, a year-on-year decline of 5%. Even the variety show methods that have worked well in the past will cause aesthetic fatigue among the audience, and the once amazing program model will become commonplace. If the "Nth Generation of Variety Shows" want to extend their life cycle and maintain their market position, they must speed up the upgrade and iteration process.
Facing many difficulties such as homogeneity and standardization
Homogeneity and patternization cause audience aesthetic fatigue, leading to market weakness, which is the core dilemma that "Zong N Generation" must face. Taking reasoning variety shows as an example, in recent years, "Zong N Generation" reasoning variety shows have used "small games, talent shows, and nostalgic sensations" as the three tricks for a fixed route, and there has been almost no substantial innovation in the rules of several seasons. The same situation also exists in music variety shows. Many programs not only have similar competition modes, but also highly overlap in song selection and guest lineups. There are also observation variety shows that once made people shine with the innovative model of "first-site reality show + second-site studio observer commentary". But now the creators of "Zong N Generation" have widely applied this model to many fields such as workplace experience, love and marriage, and daily life, but there has been no obvious originality in link design and narrative methods. Repetitive processes are still used, gradually wearing away the enthusiasm and expectations of the audience.
At the same time, weak ideological and knowledge content is also a typical problem of some specific types of "Variety N Generation" programs. For example, the topic setting of some talk shows does not keep up with the culture of the times and social hot spots, resulting in too much gossip in the content, lack of ideological depth and positive value. Some performance and sports "Variety N Generation" programs are overly dependent on the star effect, which weakens the essence of the program's focus on performing arts and promoting sportsmanship. Some programs chase stars and attract audiences with gossip and private topics. In addition, the development of "Variety N Generation" needs to be vigilant against the rise of pan-idol training programs. In recent years, some "Variety N Generation" like to adopt a competitive performance model. This model can introduce fresh faces to the program and bring new highlights and popularity to the variety show market. However, some creators simply pursue the high topic and high appearance of the contestants, but do not focus on discovering the actual talents of the contestants, resulting in the program being too dramatic and suspended above reality.
It is particularly important to improve the quality of programs and expand their vision
In the current variety show market, only content that deeply meets user needs, has unique aesthetic value, is creative, well-made, has a broad vision, and stands high can stand out from the fierce competition. In the innovative way of "Zong N Generation", model innovation and style adjustment are commonly used means. Because this can break through the audience's inherent imagination, open up a broader dramatic space, and bring freshness and participation to the audience. "2024 China Poetry Conference" improves the "big waves wash away the sand" competition link, turning the original random contestants into a competition for people of matching age and strength, such as children and children, young people and young people, two contestants from the Baixing Group, and two contestants from the relatives and friends group, which is more fair. "Flowers and Youth", which has gone through 10 years, has been improved and upgraded from the style. From the beginning, it emphasized interpersonal conflicts and simply showed interpersonal frictions, and turned to pay more attention to travel experience and humanistic exploration, and explored the emotional relationship between people in a larger pattern. The friendly atmosphere brought about by sincere dialogue, mutual encouragement and care for each other not only allows the audience to feel the true and warm side of the guests, but also allows them to appreciate the vastness of the world and the beauty of culture.
Innovation in program presentation and dissemination methods is also an important support for creativity and production upgrades. In particular, with the continuous advancement of technology, coupled with the demonstration effect of high-investment and large-scale hit programs, the audience's expectations for audio-visual experience continue to increase. Therefore, the creators of "Nth Generation Variety Shows" should pay more attention to how to enhance the audience's sense of participation and immersion through technical means such as VR, AR, and AI. "Singer 2024" introduced the world's latest "immersive sound art" L-ISA sound system for the first time in a music variety show, allowing the audience to clearly hear the performance details of every instrument and every singer in the music. It also added a bilingual live broadcast room to support interactive modes such as cloud voting and member predictions. These changes made the audience shine, making the program dominate the hot search lists of major platforms for many days after it was launched.
The producers should also pay attention to improving the program's position, focusing on the main theme, and strive to attract the audience's attention through the transmission of positive emotional values and mainstream values. For example, the popular "Let's Farm" in the past two years has opened up a "new track for rural variety shows". The program creatively allows young people to deeply experience the daily life in rural areas, not only allowing contemporary audiences to understand food production and field work from a more immersive perspective, but also to more realistically feel the modern face of the new countryside, showing the beauty of labor and the values of perseverance and struggle. Many young audiences project their expectations for an ideal life onto the participants of such variety shows, hoping to experience different life states through their stories and gain the motivation to keep moving forward. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the joint construction of the "Belt and Road" initiative, "Flowers and Youth: Silk Road Season" went to the countries that jointly built the "Belt and Road" to see China's "circle of friends in the world" in the form of a study tour experience, and deeply feel the beautiful new life brought to the local area by the "Belt and Road". "Running Man: Yellow River" uses innovative game settings, live streaming to sell goods to help alleviate poverty and other new forms to showcase the important position of the Yellow River Basin as an ecological barrier, economic development, and key area for poverty alleviation, and depicts the beauty of urban culture in the Yellow River Ecological Economic Belt.
As the main force in the variety show market, "Variety Show Generation N" also needs multiple incentives such as policy support and market regulation. Policy support can stimulate creative output and attract creative talents to participate in program production by providing policy and financial support, innovative reward mechanisms and other measures. Market regulation can encourage program producers to explore and try different content and forms, and form a good competitive atmosphere. In short, we should ensure the diversity of program content while ensuring the quality of the program, avoiding problems such as homogeneity, vulgarity, and suspension, and creating a healthy and sustainable film and television development environment with more and more high-quality "Variety Show Generation N".
(Authors: Liu Jun and Zhang Chi, respectively professor at Communication University of China and research assistant at the Center for Media Arts and Culture Research at Communication University of China)
(Source: Guangming Daily)
