Author/Xiao Bu
Without a drama king to be crowned, the opening drama of 2026 seems to be more intriguing than in previous years.
"Strong female characters" are still popular. After "Jade Tea Bone", Mango TV launched the atypical workplace drama "The Goddess Blindfolded". Youku and iQiyi no longer indulge in the sadomasochism of fairy tales, but chose to use "The Strange Case of the Tang Palace" and "What Kind of Body", two female-oriented ancient puppets to fight head-on;
Comedy is an invincible tool. Tencent Video's "Promising Young Man" has made people yearn for "Tengda". Youku's "Country Love" series has been enduring for 20 years, accompanying Lucy in the city and Cuihua in the small town as they grow up;
Realistic themes have encountered controversy. "Small Town" continued to increase its ratings despite negative voices. "Tree of Life" was released after being long-awaited, but it fell off a cliff because it was too heavy.
Liveliness is the appearance, division is the essence.
This melee of dramas at the beginning of 2026 has become a bellwether for the shift in the narrative logic of long-form dramas.
Realistic themes pick up steam
It's not reincarnation, it's evolution
When you look at "Big Things in a Small Town" and "The Tree of Life" together, you will find that it is a very interesting thing.
"Small Town Events" is adapted from the Lu Xun Literature Award winner's reportage "Chinese Peasant City", which tells the true miracle of Wenzhou Longgang farmers raising funds to build a city on the tidal flat; "The Tree of Life" went deep into the Hoh Xil no-man's land and filmed 188 days of "life-defying" posture in real scenes on the plateau to record the thirty-year persistence of the anti-poaching patrol team.
The two dramas did not follow the old path of sensationalizing suffering, but they parted ways in terms of reputation.
The popularity of "Small Town" peaked at 27,000 on Tencent. The details of the female mayor Li Qiuping played by Zhao Liying who was afraid of injections were talked about by the audience. Huang Xiaoming's messy curly hair and stubble on his face even gave rise to the Internet buzzword "Inside Gate".
However, the ratings of "The Tree of Life" plummeted, and Douban received one star, and was even forced to lock out reviews due to abnormal ratings.
Why is it the same realistic subject matter, but the situation is as different as ice and fire?
The key to the problem is not whether it is real, but where the real incision is.
"Tree of Life" is of course a work made with great effort. Duojie, the mountain patrol captain played by Hu Ge, and Yang Zi braved the plateau red to complete high-intensity action scenes in a snowstorm of minus 20 degrees Celsius. The crew stayed at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters for half a year.
But what this almost tragic creative sincerity conveys to the audience is an overwhelming sense of "grievance" – the poachers can always escape, the young mountain rangers sacrifice when they say they will, and the supporting character who was knocked off the line didn't even have a decent last word.
The screenwriter tried to use the team members' quarrels and the male and female protagonists' secret feelings to relieve the heaviness, but the fact that "there are more knives than sugar" ultimately dissuaded a large number of ordinary viewers who wanted to follow the drama to relieve stress.
To put it simply, it is a group of reliable production team, team and actors accompanying an unreliable screenwriter to fool around!
On the other hand, "Small Town" also talks about obstacles, but the narrative tone is much lighter.
It breaks down the grand narrative of "building a city" into specific and subtle problems: What should I do if I don't have money? Mobilize farmers to raise funds. What to do if you don’t have technology? Introduce overseas talents. What should we do if there are differences among cadres? After banging the table and quarreling, we went on to work as a team.
Li Qiuping, played by Zhao Liying, is not a bitter and resentful reformer. She frowns and dodges when getting injections, and her eyes light up when she sees progress. She has a hopeful vitality that spans forty years of time and space.
This is the real background of the revival of realistic themes in 2026: not a simple return to difficult themes, but an in-depth focus on "how ordinary people solve specific problems."
Now the audience is no longer satisfied with being moved by the grand narrative, but how the dilemma is dismantled step by step, how the contradictions are reconciled bit by bit, and the moment at which ordinary people suddenly become extraordinary.
Where does "Tree of Life" fail? It is too eager to become a work, too obsessed with carving the solemnity of suffering, but forgets that the essence of the story is to make people watch it. This may also be an expensive trial and error for Noon Sunshine.
When the 46-episode script was actively compressed to 40 episodes, and when "no water injection" became the industry benchmark, "The Tree of Life" still failed to cross the invisible threshold from "good drama" to "hit".
The revival of realistic themes is by no means to increase the intensity of the audience, but to let the audience look at the trivial, warm, and even humorous daily life.
"The Year of Peace", which was broadcast at the same time, confirmed this narrative shift from another dimension.
This epic drama, which fills the gaps in the film and television of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, was complained by the audience when it first aired, "You have to look up Baidu to watch one episode, and you have to look up history books to watch five episodes." After the broadcast, the Douban score was 7.9, the ratings steadily exceeded 2, and the online broadcast also occupied the top spot. It did not sacrifice historical quality in order to lower the threshold for watching the drama, but chose to trust the audience's intelligence. This respect itself is the most powerful disenchantment for the "levitation era".
Strong women have changed from slogans to skeletons;
It happened exactly in Gu Ouli
If the revival of realistic themes is expected, then the changes in the ancient puppet track are somewhat unexpected.
Youku's "The Strange Case of the Tang Palace" and iQiyi's "What a Body" are now online. The former's popularity on the site exceeded 10,000 on the fourth day of its launch, while the latter's popularity soared from 7,000+ to 9,000+ on the first day even though there was not much publicity in the early stage, both of which set off an Internet craze.
What’s interesting is that neither of these two dramas followed the traditional puppet route of “the domineering boss’s spoiled wife”.
The banner of "The Strange Case of the Tang Palace" is ancient costume suspense from a female perspective. Li Peiyi, a female official of the Internal Affairs Bureau played by Bai Lu, is responsible for the murder of her family. In order to investigate the case, she will not hesitate to join the bureau and risk her life. In the case of "The Guest Star Appears as a Wu Nu" in the opening chapter, the princess planned to fake her own death to escape from marriage, but was betrayed by her lover, and eventually jumped from a high platform. The end point of this scene is not the disillusionment of love, but the last resistance of the women in the palace to royal power and patriarchy.
The "Flower on the Wall" case always focused the camera on the face of the perpetrator, which was "a life-or-death victory" for the girls.
"What's the Style" even turns "anti-routine" into a methodology. Cuihua, the animal king of modern society, traveled through time and became the demon concubine who brought trouble to the country. She used the English code words "How are you?" and "Fine, thank you" to recognize the tyrant Xiahou Dan who also came through the book. The two formed an alliance in the triple nesting of the "book in the book" to survive.
Under the shell of light joy, there is a serious core of human glory in the paper man. As the lowest-dimensional character, King Duan showed no fear in the face of three higher-dimensional travelers, and was dubbed the Top Awakening of Paper Man by netizens.
If these two dramas were placed on the market in the past few years, they would probably be classified as "big heroines". But over the years, the audience has already developed antibodies to this discourse.
The heroines of the past were essentially the "chosen" ones. They are either extremely talented, have a blood feud, or are attracted by the top combat powers in the three realms. The so-called "growth" is nothing more than changing the object of attachment from father to husband, from master to emperor – changing the soup without changing the medicine.
This wave of ancient puppets in 2026 is quietly rewriting this formula. Li Peiyi in "The Strange Case of Tang Palace" is not the chosen daughter, she is just a survivor who wants to find out the truth. Her focus when surveying the scene, her calmness when dissecting a corpse, and her uncompromising attitude when facing powerful people all made "strong woman" no longer a slogan hanging on a poster, but actually turned into an engine for advancing the plot.
The original novel "What a Style" was written five years ago. At that time, the "book reading" was still at the stage where people knew the plot well so they cheated on it. However, the adaptation of the drama version keenly captures the emotional changes of the times: the golden finger of the heroine Yu Wanyin is no longer a prophetic thing, but the communication and emotional management skills of modern workplace people. She doesn't know martial arts or tactics, but she can review, empathize, and mobilize resources. These soft powers that have been ignored by traditional ancient dolls for a long time have become her real armor to survive in this cruel world.
If this set of words were used in a TV series from a few years ago, there is a high probability that it would be criticized as "suspended" and "inconsistent with the historical background." But in 2026, it received real money votes from the market.
This is no accident. When women in real life increasingly rely on their own abilities to gain economic independence and social respect, the narrative template of "being saved" will naturally lose its effectiveness. The audience no longer needs a vicarious Mary Sue fantasy. What they need is a mirror to see the workplace dilemmas, emotional choices and self-games they are experiencing.
In addition, Tang Yingying, played by Xin Zhilei in "The Goddess Blindfolded", started out as a cold-blooded lawyer who believed in "evidence first" and used a barrage of questioning in court to force the victim to collapse in court. But in the scene of jumping into the river to save others, she jumped wearing a life jacket, not because of her conscience, but because she always believed that "human life precedes the truth."
What makes this character so resonant is her imperfection. She will make mistakes in judgment, be deceived by illusions, and repeatedly touch the bottom line of morality and law. But she never pities herself for this. She corrects her mistakes when she is wrong and finds out when she doesn't see clearly. This indomitable counterattack is far more convincing than a female war goddess who is always right.
The intersection of two clues,
It’s because the audience doesn’t want to be “cheated” anymore
If you look at the "narrative noise reduction" of realistic themes and the "subject awakening" of female video dramas together, you will find that they point in the same direction: the audience is abandoning all false things at an alarming rate.
False suffering, false golden fingers, false love myths, false counterattacks in life.
The ratings of "The Tree of Life" fell not because of the indifference of the audience, but because it turned suffering into a monument that needs to be looked up to; "The Strange Case of Tang Palace" became popular, not because of the strong appeal of Bai Lu, but because it allowed the audience to see how a woman is like How can one rely on professional skills to gain a foothold in a patriarchal society? "The Goddess Blindfolded" received critical acclaim not because Xin Zhilei won the Best Actress award, but because it dared to present the dark and ambiguous gray area between "imperfect victims" and "imperfect perpetrators."
This disenchantment is comprehensive. Once upon a time, audiences were willing to pay for fairy tales about "the boss fell in love with me" because it provided a short-term emotional sugar substitute.
Nowadays, eating too much sugar will make you sick, and the audience began to ask: What next? What about after being saved?
The drama market in the opening year of 2026 will appear to be a flourishing of genres and themes, but in essence, a new contract will be signed between the audience and the creators. The name of this contract is "truth", which is not truth in the sense of documentary literature, but truth in emotional logic, truth in character motivations, and truth in the solution to dilemmas.
The reality of "A Little Town" is that the grassroots cadres bang the table and then go to the cafeteria to eat together after quarreling; the reality of "The Peaceful Year" is that the greatest ideal of people in troubled times is to "rather be a peace dog than a person in troubled times"; the reality of "The Goddess Blindfolded" is that victims will also lie, defense lawyers will also doubt themselves, and justice must sometimes arrive in an imperfect way.
When the audience has experienced enough bad endings and character collapse, and when the market has witnessed enough high-start, low-turn and fraudulent marketing, the shortcut that once worked so well has come to an end.
Only more than a month has passed in 2026, and it is too early to predict the direction of the series throughout the year. However, the collective debut of this new wave of works in the new year has already outlined a clear outline of the narrative logic of Chinese dramas:
Those suspended, false, routine works that sell anxiety as well as fantasy are losing their market at a speed visible to the naked eye. And creators who dare to look at the audience at eye level, who dare to admit the complexity and ambiguity of life itself, and who dare to let female characters become self-realizing subjects are receiving the applause they deserve.
This applause does not only belong to a certain drama or a certain actor, but to an era that finally began to respect the audience's intelligence.
Vision|Egg
Operation | Xiaoman, Dudu
