The state of Philippine TV
What has happened to local television?
These last few weeks, it feels I’ve been stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. With the recent
The program choices of this season range from a rehashed Spanish soap opera that had its heyday in the ‘90s, an overstretched comic book series we’ve seen 10 times in the box office, a half-assed attempt to rekindle an old Japanese superhero policeman from outer space (only with a new name because they couldn’t even secure the rights to the original), and a fabricated celebrity spectacle stuffed into a house with 24-hour surveillance. Thank God they already sent that little brown alien into space, or else we’d have another problem.
This is what passes for entertainment these days. And sadly, it will probably pass for entertainment for years to come. Have we run out of ideas? Is this the best we’ve got? Or is this just the most convenient, least labor-intensive means of grabbing ratings? After all, in a ratings war that is this tight, networks will do anything for people to watch. If it means playing to people’s nostalgia of the good ol’ days by bringing back the stories they already saw a hundred times a decade ago, then why not? Why do something different?
The reason why networks, in my opinion, continue to milk these popular concepts dry is because they realize that they only have a set roster of celebrities and one year’s worth of programming to fill. Coming up with fresh ideas will take too much time and marketing new faces will be too expensive. So instead they roll out their stable of stars and mix and match them like a deck of cards and play them round by round, show by show. Sometimes one network’s flush beats the other network’s straight, but all they do is shuffle up and deal again. So what we get is a constant rollout of the same celebrities in a gallery of cookie-cutter storylines. There simply isn’t time or money for anything else. (To digress a bit, this is the reason why I love sports and why sports is the best thing on TV right now. Games can be bad and games can be good, but each game is different, and each game brings its own unique storyline.)
So while for the past few months the public has gone through about a dozen of these rehashed, reconfigured and recycled storylines and characters, I’m willing to bet that there are a dozen more in the making. Our old comic book writers still have works that have yet to be tapped dry. Same goes for the Spanish telenovelas. And the Japanese superheroes. And the American game shows. I’m sure more people will want to enter the most popular house in the country and earn a talent contract to be the next card to get lost in the shuffle. Originality, it seems, can wait. Ratings cannot.
The most obvious defense of this lame situation is that people still watch the shows, so why change? People still like watching tear-jerking love stories they’ve seen before only with different faces and dubbed voices, so why mess it up? The simple answer is that we are better than that. We cannot let creativity ride shotgun while profitability is at the wheel. This revolving-door system of television programming only promulgates laziness and plagiarism. Filipinos are too talented as storytellers and too gifted as artists to waste away in unoriginality.
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For questions, comments or correc-tions, please e-mail me at carlfrancisramirez @gmail.com.
