2. Birth - "I Love My Family"
In 1992, the craze caused by "The Story of the Editorial Department" had not yet passed, and Yingda, who had returned from studying in the United States, was already planning It's time to make a real situation comedy in China. He teamed up with writer Wang Shuo, one of the screenwriters of "The Story of the Editorial Department", and Liang Zuo, the crosstalk author famous for his crosstalk "Escape from the Tiger's Mouth" and "Thieves, Inc." The first creative idea produced by this platinum group was a situation comedy about ordinary Chinese families, named "I Love My Family". The following year, filming of the first 40 episodes of the film began. The show received a good response overseas. A Hong Kong TV station purchased the first broadcast rights for US$140,000. Subsequently, some provincial and municipal TV stations purchased the broadcast rights successively, and the next 80 episodes were filmed in 1994 and 1995.
The creation of "I Love My Family" was deeply influenced by the classic American sitcom "All in the Family". In fact, many of Yingda's situation comedies can be modeled in American sitcoms. Directly borrowing from outstanding American works of the same type is an important method for Yingda's sitcom creation. "I Love My Family" not only adopts the same strategy of reflecting the changing times and concepts through a family, but also creates a character who is similar to Archie Banko, the conservative and argumentative father in "All in the Family". The image of Lao Fu. Like Archie, Lao Fu is extremely dissatisfied with various phenomena and concepts in real life. He also likes to make inappropriate comments. He is also complacent and complacent about being always right. He also needs to learn to make peace with his children in life* **, and equally lovable and unforgettable. It is almost universally recognized that the image of Lao Fu is the most successful image portrayed in the drama "I Love My Family" and is also the key to the success of this drama. In terms of the setting of the character relationship, "I Love My Family" initially directly borrowed from "All in the Family" and set Zhiguo as Lao Fu's son-in-law. Later, it was only out of consideration of increasing the heroine's role that the relationship between the two was adjusted to The relationship between Weng and son-in-law.
Although the plot of "I Love My Family" is based on a Chinese-style three-generation family, in fact, the overall family atmosphere is not that of a traditional Chinese family. The independence of the characters in the play is very obvious. The dialogue between the characters and the humor of the language are essentially a challenge to the serious, rigid, elder-younger order of Chinese families in the past. What we feel is a free, active, and An ideal family filled with humor and fun. Just as the ending song of "I Love My Family" is sung in a hymn-style tune: "My family is so lovely, clean, beautiful and peaceful, my brothers and sisters are very harmonious, and both adults and children are healthy." What it expresses is exactly what ordinary Chinese people Dreams and expectations for family life.
The comedy effect of "I Love My Family" is mostly achieved through chatty speech, which often subtly derails the discourse from the customary context and unexpectedly allows people to escape from the prison of conventional discourse. , falling into an absurd and absurd context.
In this play, the surface semantics and deep semantics of language often form an "ironic" relationship. Nobility and insignificance, beauty and ugliness, seriousness and joking, elegance and vulgarity, sadness and joy, etc. are mixed together. When they are pulled together When they are on the same plane, the meaning of traditional values ??is eliminated. This state of worthlessness is in line with the little people's pleasure in transgressing the existing discourse order, and constitutes a certain possibility of subversion for the orthodox discourse characterized by central authority and hierarchy. In addition to creating humorous effects through the characters' language, creating humor through the weaknesses of the characters themselves is also an important method in "I Love My Family". For example, in the episode "The Time That Destroyed My Dad", the old man was hit and injured. The three perpetrators sang praises to the old man. This praise immediately made the old man happy. The old man who was originally seriously injured Fu immediately said to the perpetrator: "I'm fine, you can go." But when he got home, he felt ouch.
There is a very interesting situation: when the first 40 episodes of "I Love My Family" began to be broadcast on some local stations in 1993, public opinion was not very high, or even quite low. . In a 1994 mass selection event for the worst TV series organized by the Chengdu Evening News, "I Love My Family" was unfortunately selected, even though it performed well in both ratings and audience attention at the time. But in the following years, people's evaluation of this drama has become higher and higher. It is rebroadcast on various TV stations almost every year. It has now become recognized as the number one classic of Chinese situation comedies, and it is also a reference for evaluating other situation comedies in the future. standard. It can be said that as soon as situation comedy debuted in China, it produced a work that represents the highest artistic achievement of China's situation comedy, and it is still difficult to be surpassed by latecomers.
3. Exploration - "Chinese Restaurant"
The success of "I Love My Family" has strengthened Yingda and his colleagues' confidence in continuing to create sitcoms. In 1995, Yingda established "Yingshi Film and Television Art Company" with his family as the main body. The newly established Yingshi Company also successively launched a series of new works, such as "Waiting Hall" (1997, 40 episodes), "New Seven" "Twelve Tenants" (1997, 40 episodes), "Psychological Clinic" (1998, 20 episodes), "Chinese Restaurant" (1999, 80 episodes), etc. In this series of sitcoms, Yingda has made a lot of explorations into the themes and styles of sitcoms, especially "Chinese Restaurant" produced in 1999. This work is the second situation comedy with a live audience after "I Love My Family".
The American model "Chinese Restaurant" draws on is the smash hit "Cheers" in the 1980s. For the first time, the story takes place abroad and tells the story of a group of Chinese people studying abroad. A story that took place in a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. In the first episode of "Getting Started", a Chinese restaurant called "Sichuan Garden" located in Los Angeles, USA, encountered a crisis. Due to poor management and long-term losses, the restaurant was on the verge of bankruptcy. In order to change the poor operating conditions of the restaurant, the board of directors decided to change the manager, and the story unfolded from there.
Unlike previous TV dramas that reflected the lives of overseas students, this drama broadens its horizons to all aspects of overseas Chinese life. Taking a Chinese restaurant as the stage, various people appeared on this stage. These Chinese people from Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as those born and raised in the United States, as well as foreigners who love Chinese food, staged hilarious comedies in this Chinese restaurant. Among them are the restaurant's coaching turmoil and the misunderstanding of AIDS, the ridiculousness of the wealthy group, the embarrassment of the old couple and the young couple, the splendor of the casino and the hardship of the restaurant.
This series brought together the most powerful situation comedy team in China at the time, written by Liang Zuo and Liang Huan, directed by Yingda, and starring Yang Lixin, Wang Ji, Liu Jinshan, He Bing, and Li Qi. Moreover, after "I Love My Family", this is also the situation comedy that Yingda has invested the most and crafted in the most detail, which can be seen from the production method of the play. Both the audience, the media and Yingda himself had high expectations for this drama. However, after it was aired, it did not achieve the expected success, but instead received constant criticism.
Yingda himself concluded that one of the reasons for its failure was that it was too far away from the lives of ordinary Chinese people. Indeed, for the Chinese comedy audience at that time, this kind of life on the other side of the ocean and the white language alternated with foreign and Chinese were too far away from them, and it was difficult to arouse excitement, and it was missing the original "Beijing Man in New York" Of course, I am not very interested in the exotic and tense atmosphere.
But there is another very important reason, that is, the film was cut too much during the review, and many exciting parts were cut off, so that some episodes simply could not be connected into one chapter. There's something particularly dramatic about what happened in "Chinese Restaurant." When this drama was first reviewed, the Beijing Radio, Film and Television Bureau had a very good overall impression and thought it was an outstanding comedy since the founding of the People's Republic of China. But when it was about to start broadcasting in 1999, a major incident occurred on May 7, when NATO, led by the United States, bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. Under this circumstance, the content and language in "Chinese Restaurant" that express a lot of positive aspects of American society, such as things related to the prosperity of society and the development of civilization, suddenly become very sensitive and may cause dissatisfaction among the Chinese public. Therefore, Yahuan Company (not Yingshi Company), which is responsible for arranging the broadcast of "630 Theater", can only make another major deletion before broadcasting. Almost every episode has been deleted for about 5 minutes, and it has been delayed until 6 It will only start broadcasting on the 30th of March. Of course, the "Chinese Restaurant" that meets the audience has changed beyond recognition.
4. Turning point - "Sister Ma, the Idle Man"
In the Chinese situation comedy market in the new century, Ying's family is no longer the only one, and it has begun to show a trend of hundreds of schools of thought contending. In November 2000, Guangdong TV launched its own Cantonese sitcom "A Foreign Wife, a Local Man", pioneering the creation of a sitcom entirely in dialect. In 2002, "The Story of the Cooking Class" co-produced by the Air Force Television Art Center and the CCTV Film and Television Department was broadcast on CCTV Channel 8. As my country's first military-themed sitcom, the play received unanimous praise from audiences and critics after it was broadcast. "The Foreign Wife, a Local Man" and "The Story of the Cooking Class" have added two bright colors to the development of situation comedy in China. At the same time, another situation comedy that has attracted widespread attention and received wide acclaim has quietly appeared on the screen. , this is "The Idle Person Ma Sister" which was launched in 2002. The play won the "Best Series Award" at the National Television Feitian Awards, making it the first sitcom to win a national government award.
"Idle Man Sister Ma" is a program specially produced by Ying Company at the request of Yahuan Film and Television Company for its nationally sold TV series "630 Theater". The original creative staff is still director Yingda Together with the screenwriter Liang Zuo, and Cai Ming, who has become very popular in comedies in recent years, as the starring role, it is a quite strong combination. But given that the content was generally about family affairs and mothers-in-law, Yingda was not particularly optimistic about the drama at first. Unexpectedly, after it was broadcast on dozens of TV stations across the country, the response was quite enthusiastic. Not only Beijing and the vast number of northern audiences expressed their love for it, but even southern audiences who had never been interested in Yingda's Beijing-style situation comedies also responded well. Soon after it started airing, the ratings of this drama reached around 7, and at its peak it exceeded 10. Unintentionally, "Sister Ma", which was not taken seriously at the beginning, has become the most successful work in recent years, with a total of 280 episodes broadcast for three consecutive years.
"The Idle Man Sister Ma" selects the daily life of an ordinary laid-off female worker, Sister Ma, and her family and neighbors as the material. Sister Ma, who was only in her 50s, had retired and returned home. She lived an ordinary life with her husband, who worked as a gatekeeper at a government agency, and their daughter, who was in high school (and later joined the workforce). They lived in a narrow apartment building with a public kitchen. It is a typical lower-class family in Beijing. But Sister Ma has a busy mind and is very enthusiastic about relatives, friends and neighbors. She also causes trouble at home from time to time. Plus there are several neighbors who love to make trouble but care about each other. Especially, she has no serious job but likes to brag and pretend to be rich. Pan Daqing formed a colorful picture of urban life.
Even the titles of each episode are borrowed from the style of Zhanghui novels, such as "Old Xing joined a beggar gang and lost his official position, and was promoted to the chief arrester Xiaoliu and became an official."
Situation comedies in the past were all about laughter from the audience, whether it was live recorded audience laughter or "canned laughter." Yingda even believes that whether the audience laughs or not is the most important criterion for judging whether a TV series is a situation comedy. There were 20 audiences at the recording site of "Wulin Gaiden". The lines, plot and actors' performances were adjusted at any time according to the audience's reaction. However, unlike ordinary situation comedies, this drama did not bring laughter from the audience from beginning to end. Instead, it is replaced by vivid music with national instrumental elements. This is a bold move for Chinese sitcoms, which have always borrowed lessons from foreign sitcoms.
"Wulin Gaiden" chooses China's unique martial arts as its theme, which is unique in the development history of Chinese sitcoms. Although it is a situation comedy with a martial arts theme, in fact it just uses the shell of martial arts to look at society. Although Tongfu Inn is full of martial arts, including the legendary "Thief Saint", the leader of the Hengshan Sect, and the Guanzhong heroes, they are actually just ordinary people like you and me. In the final analysis, Tongfu Inn is even more important today. A microcosm of Chinese society, the many stories in Tongfu Inn are actually projections of real problems in contemporary China. Here there are not only the education problems of minors, the pressure to take exams, but also domestic violence problems, and even vicious business competition. reflected.
The nonsensical lines are an important feature that distinguishes this sitcom from foreign sitcoms and previous Chinese sitcoms. In the past, situation comedies drew nourishment from the traditional art of cross talk. This drama goes in the opposite direction and boldly follows the development pulse of contemporary Chinese pop culture. In fact, this is also the case for many young people who grew up watching Stephen Chow movies. The most important reason why the audience loves it so much. For example, Lu Xiucai's classic lines "Zi once said", Tong Xiangyu's "Edi Shen" (my god) with a Shaanxi accent, "I'll put on makeup first", and Guo Furong's "sure and sure" ”, all of which created a strong sense of intimacy among young Chinese audiences who are familiar with popular terms. In addition, the strong sense of collage is also an important factor in achieving this postmodern style situation comedy. In this play, tradition and modernity, East and West, humor and warmth, deconstruction of postmodern style and teaching of realism, irony of martial arts and promotion of chivalrous spirit are all wonderfully mixed together, and mixed with Internet language, pop songs, advertising paragraphs, variety shows, current affairs news, fashion information, etc., all these elements are integrated into this "Chinese-style situation comedy".
It has been more than ten years since the introduction of Chinese situation comedies. In these ten years, China's situation comedies have experienced the glory of their birth, the mediocrity of the exploration period, and their re-emergence in recent years. . With the increase of broadcast platforms, some outstanding creative talents have gradually joined the creative team of situation comedies. Situation comedies are no longer unique to Ying, and the overall level of works is also on the rise.