Summary of Key Points
This summer's TV drama market has moved away from the dominance of traditional romantic dramas, adopting a more diversified approach with multiple concurrent genres—historical realism, lightweight romantic dramas, urban life dramas, and industry documentaries. Almost every platform is experimenting with various categories. The underlying reason is that traditional romantic dramas are no longer profitable (high costs, audience fatigue, and declining commercial success). To reduce risks, platforms are opting for co-airing to spread costs and test different approaches, but they have yet to find a new genre that can replace them. This experimental phase is likely to continue for some time.
Detailed Analysis
1. Traditional Romantic Dramas from Favorites to Troubles
In recent years, traditional romantic dramas were the key to success during the summer season, combining popular actors, big IPs, and high-quality production. However, this formula no longer works:
- High Costs: The costs for talented actors, costumes, special effects, and other aspects remain consistently high.
- Audience Fatigue: Overused storylines such as rebirths, revenge plots, and love stories that develop after marriage have led to a decline in audience engagement.
- Performance Decline: Previously, top-rated dramas could easily reach over 200,000 views on Baidu; now, even S-grade dramas only achieve 30,000 to 50,000 views, resulting in reduced revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and derivative products. Even when two similar dramas compete (e.g., "Qiaochu" and "Moli"), they fail to attract a wider audience, indicating that the issue lies with the content itself.
The only exception is historical realism dramas like "Taiping Nian," which continue to perform well because audiences are not averse to historical settings but tired of formulaic stories.
2. Co-Airing as the New Norm
This summer, there has been an increase in co-airing by multiple platforms (e.g., "This Second Is Overheated"), reflecting the industry's overall financial pressure:
- Poor Industry Performance: Only 30% of 100 dramas are profitable, with 50% resulting in losses, and most TV stations are losing money.
- Risk Sharing through Co-Airing: By distributing the cost of a high-budget drama across multiple platforms, the risk is spread. If a platform is not confident in a drama, it will seek collaboration to mitigate losses.
3. Multiple Genres in Competition
The four current genres are merely revised versions of existing types, indicating that platforms are still exploring new directions:
- Historical Realism: These dramas strive for authenticity (e.g., consulting with historians for costumes and settings) but face long production times and high barriers.
- Lightweight Romantic Dramas: They try to shorten the episode length (around 20 episodes) to speed up the story, but if the plot remains clichéd, they fail to attract audiences.
- Urban Life Dramas: These are cost-effective and relatable to real life, but often struggle to create a believable narrative.
- Industry Documentaries: Based on real cases, they face the challenge of balancing authenticity with drama.
None of these genres have become the new mainstream, so platforms are trying them all out.
4. Platforms Changing Strategies
In the past, platforms relied on a few hit dramas to drive growth; now, they are diversifying their investments:
- Diversified Content: Companies like Tencent are producing a range of dramas in different genres (historical politics, romantic stories, detective stories), while Youku mixes them with light comedy and crime dramas.
- Cost Control: They either reduce the number of episodes or limit the budget per episode to improve cost-effectiveness.
- Risk Allocation: Producers no longer rely on platforms for guaranteed returns; instead, they must manage their own risks.
The core change is that platforms are uncertain about which genres will be successful and thus spread their resources to minimize potential losses.
Conclusion
This summer's shift reflects the industry's reaction to the declining popularity of traditional romantic dramas. It is a passive attempt to mitigate losses rather than an active strategy for improvement. Only when a new, profitable genre emerges will resources be reallocated. Otherwise, this experimental approach will continue.