Taiwanese TV series are popular since 2000, and have developed to its peak ten years later. After that, Taiwanese dramas began to explore the path of transformation. In 2019, multiple types of Taiwanese dramas broke out together, and 3 high-scoring dramas were produced in a year: " The Distance between Us and Evil ", " Want to See You ", " Vulgar Girls' Cultivation Records ". 2021 "Handling of Vulgar Girls" and "Handling of " continue to score high. #What Taiwanese TV series do you like the most? #Please leave your opinion in the comment section.
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Author | Xiaoge
"I want to work hard quietly and amazed everyone." It is perfect to use this meme to describe Taiwanese dramas that have been contributing high-quality works in recent years.
Three months ago, another high-scoring Taiwanese drama was released: it was produced by iQiyi International, and its current Douban score is 8.7. However, despite its high evaluation, the TV series is too large and does not hide its crime scenes, so it has not been introduced to the mainland, resulting in its failure to gain the same voice as "The Distance of Us and Evil".
The shock of "Reverse Game" has not yet gone. An LGBT-themed romance film "The Moment of Meeting the Scent of Flowers for the First Time" has come one after another, and it even scored a high score of 9.1 on Douban.
Taiwanese dramas that remove the "idol drama" tag are bringing more and more surprises to the audience.
After the popularity of idol dramas, Taiwanese dramas started the road of full-type transformation
Once upon a time, Taiwanese dramas represented by idol dramas have a wide audience in the mainland, and they have their own highlight moments.
" Meteor Garden ", " Prince turns into a frog ", " Destined to love you ", " Prank Kiss " and other popular TV series have played the "golden signboard" of Taiwanese idol dramas. Then " I May Not Love You " shines at the 47th Golden Bell Awards, blocking 7 grand prizes. I never thought that this would become the last highlight of Taiwanese idol dramas.
2011 Taiwan ended with this, bid farewell to the golden age of nearly 10 years and slipped into a low point.
Taiwanese idol dramas have long made the audience aesthetically tired, and the old-fashioned plots cannot satisfy the audience's appetite. 2000-2010 In the past decade, Taiwan has entered the mainland with its popular culture, but the unchanging idol industry has brought itself the shackles of content. The turning point of
occurred in 2016. It was that year that with the birth of "Planting Theater" , Taiwanese TV series started an attempt to transform "self-rescue".
"Planting Theater" is the main unit drama, led by first-line screenwriters such as Wang Xiaodi, Cai Mingliang, Chen Yuxun, and other first-line screenwriters. They invited Rainie Yang, Lan Zhenglong , Wu Kangren and other Golden Bell actresses to join in person, and vigorously promote 24 powerful new actors. Xu Guanghan is one of the beneficiary actors.
"Planting Theater" series is divided into four major themes: love growth, thriller reasoning, supernatural horror, and original adaptation. A total of 8 dramas have been released in two years. What "Planting Theater" wants to change is not only Taiwanese idol dramas, but also a pioneer in the upgrade of the entire Taiwan TV drama market.
Source: Douban
"Planting Theater" has brought good episodes, but it is very popular but not popular, and it is not popular in the mainland. However, the emergence of "Planting Theater" has accumulated talents and laid the foundation for the subsequent development of Taiwanese dramas, and the internal self-rescue movement has laid the foundation for subsequent capitalized cooperation.
After the cooperation between Taiwan Public Television and HBO Asia in , overseas platforms began to revitalize the deadlock in Taiwan drama production. The co-production work "The Psychic Girl" became the first TV series in Taiwan to be launched on HBO, indicating the first exploration of Taiwanese dramas' foreign market.
When HBO and Netflix entered the Asian market, Taiwanese dramas seized the opportunity and collectively exploded in 2019, truly ushering in a turning point. "The Distance between Us and Evil" (HBO Co-production) "Want to See You" (Fox Co-production) "The Story of the Familiar Girls" is eye-catching.
Taiwan drama overseas cooperation list, picture source: Media No. 1
The previous cooperation model between mainland China and Taiwan dramas is that the mainland provides capital support, and Taiwanese dramas feed back to idol dramas, thus forming a one-stop industrialized service. However, the cooperation model between overseas platforms and Taiwanese dramas is different. The more international streaming platform has put forward stricter requirements for the production of Taiwanese dramas, such as introducing the American drama model into Chinese theme production to improve the standards of audio-visual content.
For international streaming media platforms, the purpose of launching Chinese-language dramas is to continuously expand the platform's user scale by entering overseas markets. For Taiwanese dramas, keeping up with the international platform and production team is the purpose of realizing the restructuring of its own industry.
both hit it off.
The turn of the same destination
From 2011 to 2019, Taiwanese dramas have completed the turn from "dream love" to "social hot spots" in eight years. What exactly has the drama experienced in
?
According to data, from 2004 to 2008, Taiwan introduced mainland dramas to about 25%. By 2012, this proportion rose to 35%.
Taking popular dramas as an example, mainland costume IP dramas are invincible in Taiwan. In 2012, " The Legend of Zhen Huan " broke the ratings record of 8 o'clock in Taiwan's mainstream TV stations. Three years later, Taiwan's 2015 annual ratings champion was "The Legend of Wu Meiniang".
In the face of mainland dramas that cost tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, the costumes and picture quality of Taiwanese idol dramas are beaten up. While idol dramas have accounted for three-quarters of Taiwanese dramas, Taiwan's output has failed, the ratings of mainland dramas in Taiwan have been rising steadily, and the output relationship between Taiwanese dramas and mainland dramas has become the mainstay, and Taiwan dramas have lost the mainland market.
While external blood transfusion is reduced, internal costs are increasing. Although the economic growth rate in Taiwan has slowed down, the actual cost of TV series production has increased instead of falling.
In terms of content, Taiwanese idol dramas have long lost their uniqueness. For the fast-growing mainland film and television industry, idol dramas have become the easiest TV series template to copy, and it is difficult to stimulate the retina of mainland audiences.
The superposition of the three factors of market decline, cost surge, and old-fashioned content has made Taiwanese idol dramas "falling favor". So the "Plant Theater" series began to advance towards a more diverse drama creation direction, and focused on suspense dramas and real dramas.
It is not difficult to find that the transformation path of Taiwanese dramas has a similar path to mainland dramas. Both are moving from a few popular dramas to a comprehensive development of multiple types. However, in terms of content, it presents a completely different writing style:
dramas highlight more realistic expressions, while mainland dramas pay more attention to genre exploration.
For example, the suspense themes in the mainland are the popular " Secret Corner " and " Silent Truth " that were last year, or the "Octagonal Pavilion Mist" and " Fatal Wish " that were trapped in Waterloo this year, they are all typified works under the increasingly complete film and television industrialization system. The suspense themes in Taiwanese dramas, in addition to standard genre works such as "The Counterattack", also include innovative works such as "I Want to See You". .
Whether it is "Reverse" or "I Want to See You", the discussion of reality has been added.
The former focuses on the relationship between news hotspots and investigation and solving cases in suspense dramas, and introduces news practitioners as the fourth "public power". The latter is not only a simple love suspense film, but also points the protagonist to the "vulnerable group" of introverted "patients" in society. The shining points of some taciturn people are worth discovering.
also has such a distinction in the expression of "feminism".
Since " Ode to Joy ", mainland female-themed TV series have become popular, and social hot search issues such as " widowed marriage ", "family favors boys over girls", "female embarrassment in the workplace" have become frequent visitors in film and television dramas.
The typological exploration of the theme of "feminism" instead replaces the discussion of female issues.
Therefore, this seems to be out of the "suspended" drama, but the overall plot has a hot search physique and public opinion trend. Expressing for the sake of expression is far greater than triggering reflection.
In contrast, the female themes of Taiwanese dramas have a more lifelike texture.
The second part of "The Story of the Fresh Girls" continues the glory of the first part, telling the lives and disciplines of girls in a silent way and a female perspective. Although the heroine's living environment is different from ours, this drama always allows girls to see their own shadows.
It can be said that although Taiwanese dramas seem to be undergoing multiple types of transformation, the core of all types is rooted in "realism". The moving part is "details". Only when more details that are deeply rooted in the TV series will the entire series become more realistic and realistic.
We have seen too many "dramas" in recent years, and it is time to return to the aesthetic of "reality". After the transformation of
, is it an opportunity or the next dilemma?
Under the nourishment of the "American drama" production model, Taiwanese dramas are increasingly developing towards the model of high-quality and short dramas. Comments praising the "American drama quality" are overwhelmed. , but benefiting from the mature industrialization model, it will also limit future development space.
Overseas major platforms first consider their own cultural output and consider the movie viewing habits of Western audiences. Fan Beibei, executive general manager of HBO Asia China, also pointed out the difficulties of , Sino-foreign cooperation in : "The sentence "China and foreign countries are integrated and integrated" is said by almost all foreign companies coming to China to expand the market, but it is impossible to truly achieve it." Without a compromise party, future cooperation will be difficult to advance.
If Taiwan dramas compromise, their creative freedom will inevitably be restricted. Because the victory of Taiwanese reality dramas is largely attributed to their cultural nature and is rooted in the culture of southern Fujian.
"The Spiritual Girl" and "Marriage on the Other Side" are internationally unveiled as cultural wonders. For overseas platforms, the coverage and monetization of the works are important. But for Taiwanese producers, it is more important to use images to construct the customs and humanities of Fujian and Taiwan and freely tell the local stories of Taiwan.
From the perspective of the measurement of investment scale, the overseas capital of Korean TV series is far higher than that of Taiwanese TV series. The budget for a single episode of " Li Shi North Korea " is 14 million yuan, while the total budget for domestic TV series on overseas platforms for Taiwan is only 35 million yuan. The scale of investment in
shows to a certain extent the importance of overseas platforms. Although overseas entry brings vitality to Taiwanese dramas, the importance of Taiwanese dramas is far less than that in other regions in Asia. How long can this attention and support last? Taiwanese drama creators also need to have a scale in their hearts.
Capital and the market are the guiding role. Under the high pressure of overseas platform funds, whether Taiwanese dramas can adhere to their own logic of production and creation also needs to be considered. Referring to the new collaboration with HBO in 2021 "Who is by your side ", a real-life drama mixed with suspense drama. The questions I want to discuss are broad and profound, but the final result is that I don't know what I mean.
Excessive pursuit of suspense and curiosity is not a panacea for high-scoring dramas. When suspense is mixed many times to destroy reputation, the "suspense" sign of cooperation with overseas platforms will also be out of stock.
Whether it is relying on mainland TV stations during idol dramas or now overseas platforms, for Taiwanese dramas, not having their own streaming platform is the biggest dilemma. Although there are many local video platforms in Taiwan, it is difficult to form a joint force. What Taiwanese dramas lack is not only funds, but also their own leading platforms.
In contrast, Taiwan’s streaming media subscription rate, the top three are Netflix, iQiyi and Youtube, both of which are not "native" streaming media platforms.
Taiwan streaming media subscription rate ranking
Looking to the future, Taiwan's film and television industry not only needs to build a more process-based, model-based and boutique film and television industry through continuous cooperation with overseas platforms, but whether it can build its own streaming media platform is another key.
1 Conclusion
Judging from the outbreak of Taiwanese dramas in recent years, the progress of Taiwanese dramas is obvious to everyone. Taiwanese dramas slowly "ran away" from idol dramas, tearing off the "label" of idol dramas, and quickly recovering their health in a few years, indicating that Taiwan's film and television industry has strong basic strength. The practitioners' solid basic skills, excellent production teams, and mature technologies all need to be seen by mainland producers. The "revival" of Taiwanese dramas brings inspiration to mainland film and television, and we need to constantly seek innovation and change.
dramas have emerged from the "pink fantasy" of idol dramas, and many mainland dramas are still immersed in "suspended dramas". The floating will not make the film and television dramas drift further and further away, and only by deepening the cultivation can it nourish faster.
It is now time to settle down and take root in the real soil.
