Why Do Big IP Dramas Get Slammed So Easily? Because Young Viewers' Basic Test for a Good Show Is "Does It Respect My Intelligence?"

The QDaily Research Lab has 37 findings about how young people watch TV.

Sitting down in front of the television to watch whatever the channel is broadcasting has become a retro act. Today, whether it's a phone, a tablet, or a smart TV, the medium people think of when they think of drama is the internet.

In a report summing up online video in 2016, EntGroup called film and TV drama the "cornerstone" of paid online video: compared with the year before, paid drama content grew sevenfold, and web series accounted for half of it. Another report found that young people are the main buyers of paid video — internet users under 35 make up more than 70% of them. At the end of 2015, China's major video sites had 22 million paying users between them, and only 1% of those were over 35.

Young people have not only become more important customers for dramas and everything spun off from them. The way they watch, and the place watching occupies in their lives, has also changed:

People are used to watching on mobile devices, with more freedom over when they watch and what. Watching has become part of socializing, too: the bullet comments (danmu) scrolling across the screen during an episode, the reviews on social networks and independent media accounts people read before and after. At any moment a viewer can say something, and be swayed by what someone else said.

A while back, for instance, packed into a subway car, you may have learned the faces of the actresses in Ode to Joy in glimpses off a stranger's phone, or found out who "Qi Tongwei" was from Weibo's trending topics without ever caring about In the Name of the People.

Watching drama has taken on meanings in daily life and social life that it didn't have before. Not watching a hit show can create social pressure (the only cure may be a "watch drama X in 5 minutes" recap video). Alongside sharing shopping carts, pushing a show on a friend has become a standard move in conversation (though it's best not to circle back later and ask whether they actually watched it). And according to a Netflix survey, watching a new episode ahead of your partner behind their back — never mind spoiling it — can be enough to end a relationship.

With the core audience and the way people watch both changed, production companies now have to think about more than how the show itself gets made. They probably also have to watch details like the conversations a show spins off and the habits of the people watching.

In an earlier story we wrote about the chase for "IP" in the film and TV business. Hit content labeled as IP shapes what advertisers buy, to a considerable degree, because "it has become a new way for brands to find and filter large numbers of target consumers." So film and TV companies and production teams have moved the energy they once spent writing original scripts into buying IP rights.

But as you've seen, buying IP may bring revenue; it does not necessarily bring good word of mouth. "IP" is now a word people tend to steer clear of when deciding what to watch, and a fixation on IP can sink producers and investors alike. The best-known recent example is the Chinese remake of Midnight Diner.

So how do young people judge whether a show is good, and what small habits do they have while watching? Drawing on the responses to its surveys on film and TV, the QDaily Research Lab found the following truths about watching drama:

What to watch: there's a yardstick for the drama pecking order, and the main measure is "does it take my intelligence seriously"

People have been talking about a drama "pecking order" for a long time. As most people picture it today, the order runs along lines of national origin — British, American, Japanese, TVB (Hong Kong), mainland Chinese, and Korean drama, ranked against each other. No two people will rank them the same way, but you can get the gist from remarks you hear all the time: "this Korean drama doesn't look like the other soaps," "this Chinese show is actually great."

For American drama, which young people still tend to like, the QDaily Research Lab earlier ran a survey called "Why Do You Love Watching American Shows." Putting those answers together, we think the yardstick for the pecking order has less to do with where a show is made, or how few people watch it, than with the following. (By the way, a show that sits at the bottom of the traditional pecking order can earn a higher rating if it does well on these.)

1. The story moves fast and is exciting enough to swallow in one satisfying gulp — at the very least it isn't padded or long-winded. More concretely: you don't idly drag the progress bar, and when your food delivery arrives mid-episode you hit pause and go to the door instead of letting it play on in the background;

2. It has a distinct character — as long as it serves the story, impressive effects when the story calls for science fiction, or "stripping down without a hint of coyness" when the story calls for that, either one can be a draw;

3. The plot has no holes — when it's over you may find yourself reaching for pen and paper to sketch a timeline or a chart of who's related to whom, rather than deciding that nothing about it adds up;

4. The subject matter isn't stale — if you aren't absolutely sure of your storytelling, don't build the main plot on themes audiences are already sick of, like "coming and going from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou," "a marriage between unequal families," or "a poor family's struggle to get ahead";

5. The characters aren't formulaic — instead of the standard-issue types ("the warm-hearted second male lead and the nasty second female lead in romances, the insufferable mother-in-law in family dramas"), viewers want characters who feel like their own friends, or like the person they'd want to become;

6. The acting is genuinely good — not anger done by shouting, hurt done by crying, crying done with eye drops and a whole face scrunched up, so that whatever the role, it looks like nothing but the hammy actor;

7. It goes past the surface — beyond who's sleeping with whom and who's killing whom, there's something that keeps moving you or making you think;

8. If there's product placement, it isn't stupidly shoved in and spotted by viewers in a second, but subtle enough that people go looking for the product themselves;

9. Being "brain-burning" doesn't require a tangled timeline, cosmic settings, or dreams within dreams within dreams — it means that when you finish, you're thinking about questions you wouldn't have thought about before, and you know things you didn't know before;

10. Across one country's or one studio's output, the genres are varied enough — for people who like following each new season, every quarter brings something they actually want to watch, rather than everyone rushing out costume time-travel dramas at once.

How to judge a show: social networks let people sense quality in more and more detail

The tools for judging drama keep evolving. Douban, for one, has opened a short-review section and a discussion board for every single episode. When you finish an episode, or have a question or a thought about some detail in it, there's a dedicated place to talk about it. There's also a half-joking rule that after each episode of an American show you have to go search Zhihu for "how should we read episode XX of season X of such-and-such." So more and more details have become measures of how good a show is — and shows now face harsher scrutiny, from plot to costumes, on social networks that are everywhere and awash in information. At the same time, people sort drama more finely than they used to. Categories like "best score," "best costume design," and "best cinematography" were built into film and TV awards long ago and may once have felt remote to ordinary viewers; with social networks, alongside an overall rating, "exquisite visuals," "gorgeous music," even "changed how I see the world" can become the title of a heavily bookmarked list of shows.

Which parts of a show do young viewers actually care about? Drawing on our survey "What Details Make You Sense a Show's Quality," and setting aside subject matter and plot, which we've covered, we found the following. With bad shows coming out one after another, any single one of these can already work as a selling point.

1. Unless you're a fan, a "traffic idol" (a young star famous mostly for online buzz) is now a warning sign when you're picking something to watch. Actors who are "not famous but good" have become relatively popular lately;

2. Even if you never paid attention to "acting" before, the entertainment accounts have already taught you a baseline with JPGs and GIFs of different actors at work: is the anger done entirely by pouting? And all the explaining about voice actors has made "the actors' own voices" a point in a show's favor;

3. Whether it's a Chinese remake or an adaptation of a novel, our survey found that people worry most about the actors (can this person get across the feel of the original character?). Casting largely decides whether people will watch at all; only after that does it matter what happens to the script. As for a benchmark in adapting novels for the screen, the best known is probably Harry Potter;

1. What kind of bad localization pulls you out of a story? Across a wide range of options, the most-voted complaints clustered in film and TV: "Mandarin dubbing already ruins an imported film, and now they sing the songs in Chinese too," and "lifting the characters, settings, and plot straight from the original so that nothing makes sense — it gives you goosebumps";

2. When there's too much to choose from, one look at the overall color palette is sometimes enough to decide whether to follow a show;

3. Music can set expectations too — a show with an opening theme too good to skip usually rewards sticking around;

4. Viewers notice how many "quotable lines" a show has and how clumsy they are. If more than half an episode is stuffed with the sort of aphorism people post on Qzone, that's trying too hard, and it breeds resentment;

5. Costumes that make no sense are easy to pick apart: a "white-collar" character who wears a flower crown to the office is likelier to end up in a meme than to be taken seriously.

What warns people off a show: the boasts in the marketing, the sloppiness, and the trying too hard

In a survey on "why do you like Japanese drama," run on June 25 this year by the Weibo account "Subao Riyu," one popular answer was "probably because they teach you how to be a person without making you resent it." Most dramas that try to reflect real life, by contrast, run into the twin problems of being unrealistic and lecturing you crudely about how to be a person.

1. Which genres, in fact, keep breaking the spell by straying too far from reality? Medical and historical drama make their professional errors more obvious, but what people can stand even less are the genres that ought to be closest to ordinary life — an urban romance in which "a CEO who spends 100% of his time chasing women somehow hasn't been removed by the board," or a workplace drama where "it's always some pillar industry, and one white-collar woman in a suit is holding the whole company up";

2. A down-to-earth genre gets into trouble when it insists on telling stories no one has ever lived through. In workplace drama, the biggest difference from an actual workplace is that if you curse out the boss in a job interview, the boss will not say "excellent, you've successfully gotten my attention" and hire you on the spot;

3. Every action gets picked over for its motive on review sites, so "a rich kid who's horrible to everyone for no reason and survives on pure luck" and "a heroine who absorbs everyone's misunderstanding and just keeps enduring until you want to smash the screen" — with no explanation, even at the end, of why they behave that way — are obvious demerits;

4. "Coincidences too coincidental to believe" run against the way people instinctively reason. Why does the drama always have to start with babies switched at birth, or with the discovery that a friend is secretly your half-sibling? Real life is full of genuinely dramatic material;

5. According to an analysis by the American dating app Sapio, this is where romantic comedy is furthest from real life: loving someone who doesn't love you back, or a one-sided love that never gets returned, shows up in only 6% of romantic comedies, while 78% of people say they've been through something like it. Slowly turning from friends into lovers has happened to 72% of people in real life, but occurs in only 7% of romantic comedies;

6. If you could know the plot in advance, one of the most appealing things to pick a show for is "the villain wins";

7. The claim people ignore most easily is the one meant to prove a huge budget, like "made for 300 million yuan," followed by "adapted" from a classic or a major IP — because having watched countless shows has taught them that neither claim proves anything;

8. Selling a show on a traffic star, or playing the nostalgia card with a remake, youth, or sentiment, can put people off too.

Beyond the shows themselves, here is what we found about the platforms and habits people watch with, and how watching shapes their lives:

Plenty of small but certain complaints about the platforms — and people put up with them for the shows they want

1. The only sites you could say have "bullet-comment etiquette" are AcFun and Bilibili. On the other video sites the comments are unwatchable, and people leave them switched off by default;

2. Loathing ads is part of why people like Bilibili and YouTube. If an ad is well made, viewers won't press skip even when they can, since watching shows is mostly a way to unwind anyway;

3. There are many complaints about video sites, but the main ones remain "the ads are too long" and "the ads are cut into the middle of the video";

4. Even so, people choose a platform for the shows, and put up with as much advertising as they can. (In EntGroup's data, what decides where young people watch is still what's on there);

5. Hit TV and web series drive a lot of growth for the video sites. Set against skipping ads, young people are quite willing to buy a membership if it only means seeing later episodes sooner.

How has watching changed daily life? Mostly around eating

1. In our survey "What New Habits Have Movies and TV Shows Given You?," the main finding was "eating while watching, and learning how to eat while watching." It's no longer strange for the time spent picking a show before a meal, plus the time spent unable to stop watching after it, to run longer than the meal. Perhaps this is because of humanity's perennial interest in food and all the meanings loaded onto it, and because the easiest thing to copy from a show is something to eat, or a way of eating;

2. Cooking shows have changed what people want from food, too — for instance, "caring more and more about how the ingredients themselves taste";

3. Rather than food brands, what people like to copy is the way of eating — "what's best to eat when" — the classic example being "beer and fried chicken on a snowy day";

4. For "shows to watch over a meal," people want two things: the right length, and episodes self-contained enough not to be too tightly linked, so they don't get hooked and keep going.

As for the businesses built around watching, the ones people buy into are tied to "the life you want"

1. Which businesses built around watching do you think could work? Put another way: when a show ends, what further reading or further shopping interests people? Set against behind-the-scenes stories about the show itself, the top two answers in our survey were "a guide to what the characters wear" and "a guide to decorating the rooms in the show." Beyond that, "the same stationery the characters use" is merchandise people would want.

2. Compared with the product placements that wreck the viewing, people are more easily sold on lifestyle goods that turn up in a show — "when the 'Ge You slouch' was everywhere, it felt like you had to buy the same T-shirt to slouch properly."

Cover image and in-text images: Lin Xiaoyao