The suspenseful reasoning detective drama "Detective Chinatown 2" created by the original team has been broadcast on iQiyi, starting from the successful adaptation of the first online drama in the series, "Tang Detective Universe" is not just talking on paper, but gradually reflecting reality with the help of solid suspense stories.
The second part of the online drama version of "Tang Detective" continues the protagonist setting with detective Tang Ren's apprentice Lin Mo as the main line, and expands the story line of the ghost horse computer master Kiko in this season. The second season uses four separate units to tell the story of Lin Mo and Kiko as they develop their detective skills in their respective fields and uncover the truth of the brain-burning case. Among the four unit plays, "Angel's Melody" investigates the medical disorder behind the mysterious sanatorium, "The Devil's Breath" ** the boundary between faith and desire in the spiritual world, "Amusement Park" focuses on the psychological dilemma of teenagers in the online world, and "* City" interrogates the greed and hatred of human nature in the drunken gold fan.
Halfway through the broadcast of the series, "Angel's Melody" and "Devil's Breath" focus on the two cases investigated by Lin Mo (played by Qiu Ze), "Angel's Melody" starts with a mysterious sanatorium to expose the human organ trade on the underground dark web, interspersed with different types of mental illness symptoms, and the beginning is full of weird and bizarre suspense. The photography techniques and aesthetic style of the series continue the style of "Tang Detective Universe", with detective shots, mysterious colors, light and shadows, and a narrative style that uses flashbacks and interludes, and the whole unit is fast-paced, and the clues are advanced in a tense and orderly manner. Wang Baoqiang, Liu Haoran, Xiao Yang and other core characters in the movie story also starred in the play, bringing a rare all-star lineup in online dramas.
From movies to online dramas, since the premiere of the first "Detective Chinatown" movie in 2015, the series of IP has successively developed 3 series of movies and 2 series of online dramas, the IP territory has been expanding, and the "Tang Detective Universe" has gradually formed.
Compared with the more concentrated and complex narrative route of the movie version, the online drama version focuses more on mining niche themes and deeply cultivating the psychological suspense track with higher social attributes, because the flexibility of the online drama production cycle and broadcast form can also reflect social dynamics in a timely manner. As early as 2020, the first series of online dramas "The Name of the Rose" put anti-fraud on the screen, several years ahead of the big screen. The seven stories of the two web dramas, with different themes and units, are directed by different directors in Chen Sicheng's production team, which not only matches the type of story, but also enriches the personalization of the image style, and also carries out an effective "rehearsal" for the film version, so that the new director can practice.
At the same time, the online drama version does not weaken the richness of the story because of the form restrictions, and the richness of the content of the drama itself provides enough performance space for the actors. In the first part, Qiu Ze, Zhang Junning and other actors turned over with their outstanding performance in online dramas, and Tony Jia and Xiong Dailin, who had already appeared in the second part, also had wonderful characters. The difference in content duration also brings about a natural narrative difference between the big screen and the small screen, and the online drama version uses a unit of nearly one and a half hours to tell a case, which obviously expands the expression boundary of Tang Tan's universe, so that the series has the possibility of telling the story well and explaining the causes and consequences of the characters.
The shortcomings of genre themes are also unavoidable, and the Tang Tan film version has been criticized for the unqualified logic of the script and the difficulty in justifying the behavior of the characters, and the root cause is that the audience of domestic film and television works has long been nourished by the suspense works of these years. Especially in the suspense-themed track, the audience has already been bombarded by various types of suspense web dramas, and the threshold of audience satisfaction has also been raised a lot. Most of the scripts of the Tang Detective series come from the original, lacking the natural advantages of literary adaptation, and invisibly putting forward higher requirements for content screenwriters. In the "Melody of Angels" unit at the beginning of the second part, some viewers criticized Lin Mo's behavior logic as too abnormal, and his reckless behavior led to his passivity in the early stage of the investigation, and the arrival of powerful reinforcements in the later stage also seemed too capricious. In the face of such an audience who "watches the drama with a microscope", the domestic suspense theme has no other way but to adapt, and whether it can maintain the excellent reputation of this series still needs to be watched after the effect.
According to the Beijing News Network).