How much the audience likes Zhang Songwen can be seen by watching the data of "Ice Hunting". In the cold market environment since 2024, in some data levels, "Ice Hunting" can even be regarded as the best performing drama after "Flowers". The popularity of the station exceeded 28,000 on the second day of the broadcast, and it has even maintained 29,000 for many days; On the Douyin hot list, it ranks in the top two of the total drama list. As the first drama starring Zhang Songwen broadcast after "Hurricane", from the perspective of production level, if there is no Zhang Songwen, "Ice Hunting" will never have such attention; On the other hand, if there was no Zhang Songwen, the show would not have been pushed to such a cusp. 
Zhang Songwen's concept drama "This earth-pouring wealth has brought a kind of violent imbalance and twisting to "Ice Hunting". If there is no Zhang Songwen for a small production of "Fantasy Drifting", what would the trajectory of "Ice Hunting" be? In terms of experience, this is an outdated and rough second-rate crime drama, relying on the IP adapted from the real events of the big drug lord Liu Zhaohua, and the gimmick of "Huawei's second princess" Yao Anna, you may be able to find broadcast opportunities on local stations, and then do account sharing on several platforms to try to recover costs. The reason why it is outdated is because the play, whether it is produced or aesthetic, shows the roughness of crime documentaries at the beginning of the century, and this is the comfort zone of director Gao Qunshu, and his "**Thirteen Sects", "Truth" and "Conquest" were also quite representative works at that time. Stills from "Conquest".
At that time, the story was based on the case file, and the scenes were all true, except for the villains who needed acting skills to take the lead (such as Ding Yongdai in "China Criminal Investigation No. 1 Case" and Sun Honglei in "Conquest"), the actors were all found in the filming location, even such as "121 Shooting Murder Case", once directly pulled the entire crime-solving team over to play himself, and the fierceness of the beginning of the century can be seen. Gao Qunshu said that he chose Yao Anna because he "likes to use non-professional actors who have not received any acting training", which is indeed in line with this production logic. However, this set of production and aesthetic system is too unfriendly to today's mature drama market and high-definition 4K large screens. And at the drama level, "Ice Hunting" is far inferior to the previous documentaries, and crime dramas are precisely the most demanding script quality. 
Because of this, after the first day of launch, the comments complained about the plot, editing, character portrayal, art, etc. of the show, saying that it was a "social law popularization drama" or "1818**eye". To this day, why would you make such an obviously outdated drama? Previously, Director Gao Qunshu's own response was actually very clear, the problem is that there is no money. Because the script is "not good enough" and has not received investment from the platform, the production cost is only 40 million, and the current production style is based on insufficient costs. And the reason why I didn't continue to change the script was that "if I changed it again, I could only change the screenwriter, and that would be another amount of money", which logically became a vicious circle. 
Perhaps for Gao Qunshu, the foundation of such a story, there are indeed not too many highlights worth investing in, so he bluntly said that "the original intention is to help young directors". At this point, it is completely understandable that "Ice Hunting", which was made with the logic of low-cost account-sharing dramas, did not have much ambition in itself. Choosing Yao Anna doesn't need any "big red envelopes", after all, with the limited cast expenditure of the crew, Yao Anna's popularity can be called very cost-effective. In the field of domestic dramas, there are not a few such dramas every year, which disappear from the public eye after being hurriedly launched, leaving an embarrassing rating and a regret of "good IP, not made". But who would have thought that Zhang Songwen would be on fire? Both "up" and "down" In January 2023, "Hurricane" will be broadcast. According to the Weibo of "Weibo Deep Player" Zhang Songwen, he had already joined the group "Lonely Boat" in Hengdian at that time. And "Ice Hunting" will start filming in late October 2022, according to the "55-day" filming cycle mentioned by director Gao Qunshu, it has basically ended at that time, and there may be some make-up shoots until the official completion in February. So when Zhang Songwen became popular, the low-cost small production background of the work itself had become a reality. The current finished film, it can be seen that on the premise of not large-scale and no reshoots, by retaining a large number of Zhang Songwen shots of the whole paragraph, the advantages of the play have been amplified as much as possible, including many of the "X-minute long shots" that are currently praised, and even retain a lot of on-the-spot play under the "accident" on the spot. 
It is undeniable that Zhang Songwen has indeed shown strong personal ability in portraying characters. It should be said that there is a huge difference in the script level of "Ice Hunting" and "Hurricane", compared with Gao Qiqiang's experience and strong emotions, Huang Zongwei is very thin at the drama level, and the most supportable realistic motive for embarking on the road of crime seems to be to raise three sons. This is also why many people feel that Zhang Songwen's characters this time seem to be less colorful, because the main narrative purpose of the script is to talk about the bizarre escape of the character archetype, and almost completely ignores the construction of the character itself. Zhang Songwen injected the soul of the character as much as possible, such as designing small movements with snapping fingers, so that the audience could see the arrogance and arrogance under his humble appearance. The final presentation can be said to be a satisfying personal show, which makes the audience curious about the fate of the characters, and many people "go up" to follow the drama because of this. But the rest of the whole play is basically "down". The biggest problem is that "Ice Hunting" lacks an image of confrontation from the front camp like "An Xin", and the narrative is completely unbalanced. For various reasons, a large number of controversies in this part of the controversy are focused on actor Yao Anna, and there are also hot stalks such as "chicken-eating acting" and "Huawei's second princess chasing Xiaomi's spokesperson". 
And even if she is a blank slate in her performance, it should be pointed out that the story does not draw anything on a blank sheet of paper. The character's design itself is weak and does not stand up to scrutiny, whether it is the intuitive reasoning of the "séance" or the undisciplined individual heroism of being a veteran, making the character itself seem instrumental and ungrounded. Coupled with the problems in the script, shooting, editing and other links, the whole play shows an extremely twisted look: Zhang Songwen's personal performance has achieved a high amount of information output, which can be said to have made a filter blessing for the scenes with him, and even the actors in the rival scenes seem natural; And the rest of the parts will make people want to skip it. 
Zhang Songwen's concept drama "This "splashing wealth", "Ice Hunting" can't catch it. The value of actors Regarding the relationship between actors and works, the industry has always had the saying of "people's protection play" and "drama protection", according to this logic, "Ice Hunting" obviously belongs to "people's protection play", and the effect is phenomenal. 
This also raises a question: the logic of the so-called "actors carrying the drama" seems to be changing. In the past ten years, this is actually a traffic concept, that is, how many fans the main actors have, then the audience of the show can be calculated as a collection of "deep drama fans + fans", which has nothing to do with the quality of the drama itself. Even later, after the audience gradually generalized, fans would take on word-of-mouth maintenance. The problem is that this Internet-based development logic ignores the particularity of the content industry. Especially after the snatching of users' time has become white-hot, the loss of the basic disk of the long-term audience, coupled with the peak of the total fan audience, makes the original traffic logic unsustainable. As a result, the whole industry has entered the content upgrade, that is, it focuses on "drama" rather than just "people", in order to recover the basic disk that the industry is gradually losing. In the era of focus, it is much more difficult to create a "person" who can break the circle than to create a "play" that breaks the circle. Zhang Songwen will therefore show scarcity. has works, freshness, and a good public image, from these levels, he is actually closer to a "star actor" in the traditional sense, and this kind of actor should theoretically be more capable of carrying dramas. 
The fact seems to be the same, Zhang Songwen has raised such a low-cost crime drama to an unacceptable height, which is really a small probability event in the era of lack of national-level stars. Purely in terms of ROI, "Ice Hunting" can of course be said to be a big victory, but it is inevitable that it is a pity, if the script is better, if the shooting is a little more detailed, this first "Zhang Songwen Concept Drama" can be regarded as a hit with a handle, and it will not be stuck on the line of 29000 popularity in the station for so long. And this is almost the limit of the "people's protection play". On the other hand, except for the platform and Zhang Songwen, who can be regarded as winners, this drama only brings consumption to all other creators. This has been very obvious from the discussion since the start of the broadcast. The mature market needs really good content, and "Zhang Songwen Concept Drama" needs more than just Zhang Songwen himself. 
For Zhang Songwen himself, the performance of the next few dramas is also a hurdle that he must pass to become a "corner". Fortunately, Zhang Songwen's follow-up "Lonely Boat", including the large-scale production "Qingming Riverside Map Password" with him as the leading actor, can be regarded as the head production of the platform, at least there will be no more financial problems. It should be considered that an actor like Zhang Songwen can gain public recognition and have such high commercial value, which still proves the maturity of the market and shows that the industry tends to be rational in the process of returning to content. And "Ice Hunting" can only be said to be a not beautiful accident in this process.