The elite’s personalities have “collapsed”, what exactly do the audience want to see?

In TV dramas and variety shows, elite characters seem to have become a standard, but as time goes by, these seemingly perfect images have frequently encountered "turnovers". Has the audience's pursuit of elite characters reached a critical point? While pursuing the elite image, have we ignored the importance of authenticity and down-to-earthness?

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From the hit TV series "Song of a Mortal" to "Signal of Heart 7", the recent discussion about "second-tier colleges" is indeed a bit excessive. And in the context of social networks, the "second-tier colleges" group represents the ordinary majority.

Correspondingly, more and more viewers have noticed that from the male and female protagonists in film and television dramas to the male and female guests in amateur variety shows, they all seem to have similar elite personalities. Under the gaze of the audience, these seemingly perfect elite personalities inevitably collapse one after another.

Although in the context of a society where aesthetics converge, the top stars who are pushed to the center of the entertainment industry are inevitably similar, the similar personalities and the endings of all of them "turning over" inevitably make people wonder: where do all the elite personalities on the screen come from? Why do they turn over? What do the audience want to see?

Behind these issues is a battle for the right to select content.

01 Why is the screen full of elite characters?

The elite characters in film and television dramas actually have a long history. As early as the birth of art categories such as painting and sculpture, artists have expressed their understanding of beauty and their pursuit of perfectionism by creating perfect characters.

For example, Michelangelo depicted the perfect and powerful heroic spirit through the depiction of strong male muscles. Wu Daozi, a painter in the Tang Dynasty, used smooth lines to depict the belts of characters, creating a visual feature of being blown by the wind, as if a god had arrived.

In the field of literature, there are also many perfect symbolic characters such as gods and heroes in folk myths and novels. As visual literary content, film and television dramas are naturally given perfect images in the eyes of screenwriters and directors during the process of literary and artistic creation.

In addition, from the perspective of audience needs, elite personality is also the result of market selection.

In 2017, "My First Half of Life" began with the divorce of the heroine Luo Zijun, focusing on the life transformation of urban women in love and career, telling the story of how a housewife who depends on her husband becomes an independent professional woman.

This plot setting is not only refreshing to the audience, but also provides an in-depth discussion of the lifestyle of professional independent women. The drama also touches on social hot topics such as extramarital affairs, mistresses, and workplace competition, which resonates with the audience.

In the following years, the proportion of realistic themes in domestic dramas has continued to increase, and various modern dramas focusing on urban emotions and the workplace have become big hits in the market.

Including "Nothing But Thirty" in 2020, "Ideal City" in 2021, "Wind Blows in Half Summer" in 2022 and "Apocalypse of Pretense" in 2023, all of which are set against the background of urban life and explore the career growth and emotional life of urban women.

In order to match the role setting of independent women in the later part of the story, the professions of the protagonists in urban-themed dramas have also become elitist, ranging from doctors, lawyers, translators to senior white-collar workers and corporate executives, covering almost all middle-income professions.

At the same time, the "elite personality" also began to extend beyond the screen.

"Academic master", "old cadre" and "rich second generation" have replaced the monotonous handsome and beautiful and become more and more keywords used to describe the public image of celebrities. The reasons why fans like idols have also changed from evaluations reflecting professional ability such as good singing, acting skills and good looks to "hard-working and excellent", "high emotional intelligence", "strong career and willingness to make progress" and "having plans for their future".

With the prevalence of celebrity personas, the public is often given a pre-evaluation condition when evaluating the various works completed by celebrities based on their job duties, as if the fundamental reason why singers sing and actors act is not because they are engaged in this profession, but because "rich second-generations pursue their dreams of becoming actors" and "lead the Chinese music scene to the world."

With such a noble employment motivation, the stars are wrapped in all kinds of dazzling elite halos, and any negative comments become intolerable, as if they are not only top stars, but also should be worshipped by everyone. As a result, elite personas have become a content production method to attract audiences, and have also become a common means for "big Cs" to grab traffic.

02 Why did the elites collectively fail?

As the saying goes, true gold is not afraid of fire, but elite characters are bound to fail. The reason for this is that elite characters are made up, so there is a clear gap between them and reality. This is reflected in film and television dramas, resulting in a "suspension" in the characters and plots.

For example, in the recently popular urban drama "The Song of Ordinary People", the main characters are almost all equipped with elite personalities, such as corporate executives, HR directors, financial white-collar workers, and Beijing civil servants. These career settings cannot be said to have nothing to do with the "ordinary people" in the title, but they can be said to be completely unrelated.

Putting aside the discussion of whether the characters with elite personalities can interpret the troubles of ordinary people, several plots in "Song of Ordinary People" are also seriously out of touch with reality. The heroine Shen Lin, played by Yin Tao, lives in poverty and has to set up a stall to sell braised meat for a living. But some sharp-eyed viewers discovered that Shen Lin actually wore a Bosideng extreme cold down jacket worth thousands of yuan to buy vegetables and sell braised meat.

Li Xiaoyue, played by Zhang Ruonan, also has clothing configuration that exceeds the standard of ordinary people. As a graduate of a second-tier university who has just started working, Li Xiaoyue lives in a shared house and buys cheap sweaters at a small market, but she often appears in front of the camera wearing clothes that cost more than a thousand yuan. Although her family is not well off, she can resign without hesitation, and she is not in a hurry to find a job after resigning, saying that she wants to have fun for a while.

These "mistakes" in costumes and props, as well as plots that are contrary to real life, not only cause the collapse of character setting for the workers in front of the screen, but also make people feel like "watching rich people filming the lives of poor people and then making the poor cry."

In comparison, the elite personalities of the overseas returnees in "Signal of Love 7" collapsed more abruptly.

In order to strictly implement the authentic expressions of returnees that mix Chinese and English (it may also be required by the program team), although they could directly say the Chinese names of the cities, and even the Chinese words were on the tip of their tongues, they had to urgently withdraw them and immediately change them to English, replacing Southampton with Southampton and Manchester with Manchester.

Originally, the audience had never questioned the guests' overseas returnee status from the beginning, but this deliberate "pretending to be strong" behavior inevitably makes people doubt the true value of their overseas study experience.

In fact, from the perspective of content production, it is easy to understand why the elite personalities have collectively failed.

First of all, because film and television dramas need to cater to a wider range of audiences as much as possible, it is safer to choose professions that most people have heard of in the context of urban themes. In addition, "unknown" content can arouse the curiosity of the audience and attract people to continue watching, so it is more reasonable to choose higher-level job settings over popular professions.

However, after the career setting of the elite characters is determined, the plot often wants to tell about the contradictions or conflicts that exist in real life, such as worrying about income, being excluded at work, or encountering unexpected changes in career development.

Later, in order to push the plot forward and create a twist in which the protagonist finally succeeds, the screenwriters, who are reluctant to let the protagonist "trade time for growth", rely on the plot of "a boss falling from the sky" to force the protagonist onto the "right track" of career success. As the plot develops, the audience can indeed resonate with the workplace encounters, but "a boss falling from the sky" can only happen in film and television dramas after all.

In real life, workers who choose to endure hardships can neither empathize with the "cool" plots in movies and TV dramas nor drink the chicken soup handed over by screenwriters and directors. Therefore, the plots that are out of touch with reality have become the stone that destroys the elite personality, and have also hit the almost dry hearts of the workplace cows and horses one by one, without causing a ripple.

03 What does the audience really want?

In fact, the core reason why elite personalities are more popular in the market is, on the one hand, because people hope to feel the beauty from literary and artistic creations; on the other hand, the audience who are squeezed by real life are eager to use the wonderful content experience to achieve the purpose of mental relaxation and healing themselves.

However, in the eyes of content creators, the market's positive feedback on elite personalities is interpreted as simple content preference, or even as a content standard and production tool without roots.

The protagonist's growth into an elite should be shown through a realistic storyline, but the protagonist always falls in love for no apparent reason. The most representative contradictory plot is that the heroine, who is beautiful, strong and miserable, is in love. This kind of plot, which focuses on personal growth on the surface but actually falls in love under various masks, is particularly evident in realistic professional dramas.

Last year's controversial "Camp of Love" tells the love story between a domineering president and a financial reporter. However, apart from the rigid "boss setting", the female financial reporter played by Bai Lu rarely shows due professional qualities. For example, she uses her job to get close to the male protagonist through interviews, but because of unexpected physical contact, her heart is beating fast and she forgets the content of the interview.

The overly formulaic plots and outrageous character settings were even publicly criticized by "People's Entertainment": "In order to create a certain sweetness, some kind of bitterness is forced to be written, and in the end it's all a routine." As for the phenomenon that workplace descriptions in film and television works are criticized by the audience for being out of touch with reality, "People's Entertainment" bluntly stated that the fundamental reason is that the creators have not observed and studied the industry, reality, and life enough.

In fact, the audience's preference for elite characters has changed, especially in modern society. The pressure from work and life forces more and more people to pay more attention to the suffering part and be wary of mindless inspirational characters and plots that deviate from reality.

In the film "Reverse Life" directed by Xu Zheng, programmer Gao Zhilei, who was unemployed in middle age, chose to be a food delivery man. In the end, he not only achieved a high income, but also found a new meaning and value in life. However, in real life, food delivery men often have to work harder to get a high income.

In September this year, a 55-year-old delivery man in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, fell asleep on his electric bike after receiving an order and was found dead. According to media reports, the delivery man "sometimes worked until 3 a.m. and got up at 6 a.m. to receive orders. He often slept only three or four hours a day. When he was tired, he would sleep on the electric bike and go out to work again when there was an order."

Compared with news reports, the movie "Reverse Life" obviously downplays the difficulty of food delivery work in real life. Moreover, in the discussion around the plot, many viewers pointed out that the movie was suspected of beautifying the real life of food delivery workers, selectively showing details such as customers making things difficult for food delivery workers due to overtime delivery, while avoiding the real problems such as the general lack of social insurance for food delivery workers.

From the controversy surrounding "Reverse Life", it can be seen that the audience's preference for content has risen to a new dimension. The elite character setting can certainly arouse the audience's curiosity, but reality is more important than elites. Even flawed "elites" are more likely to be recognized than fake characters.

Returning to the commercial logic of the content market, the so-called elites that appear in film and television dramas and variety shows are nothing more than products of the market economy. They are the result of content creators actively catering to the public's value orientation and cultural taste in order to seek market value.

To give a simple example, the variety show clip where the returnees urgently withdrew the Chinese expressions and replaced them with English place names was edited by the program team. In other words, the image of the program guests in the public eye cannot be separated from the deep involvement of the program team, but is the image of the guests that the audience sees necessarily the real person?

The fact is that the public's content consumption preferences are also affecting the production trends in the content market. The collapse of the elite personality that is happening now is precisely a warning given to the market by the general audience. There are many contents that the audience wants to watch, but the right to decide what to watch is more important than what is available.