Torture, sheer emotional torture
Why do we put up with it?
Because reading is not prescribed and other forms of strenuous effort is disallowed (including sex, hehe), my choices of recreation and diversion has been limited to sitting up in bed (or in a couch) in front of the television set. Believe me it is difficult to spend more than 12 hours a day sleeping. I used to think that being able to catch up on my 40-year backlog in sleep would be bliss. But after more than a week of forced rest, sleeping has become such a bore.
Anyway. Back to television. We do have cable TV at home, but I like to surf channels and sometimes curiousity just gets the better of me - I like finding out what our local creative people are up to lately. I am afraid there's really bad news.
In the last week, I have been following some local teleseryes and boy, oh boy, are they just so.... stupid. Watching them is pure, unadultered torture.
Since last week, I tried (yes, that is the operative term - tried, as in unsuccessfully) to watch the last week of Maging Sino Ka Man. I know it is a soap opera, or to be more accurate, a Pinoy soap opera and therefore expectations of a believable or at least logical storyline is unreasonable. Hey, in our soap operas people die, there is a wake, and a funeral shows the person inside a coffin... but that doesnt stop them from resurrecting the character later in the soap.
But that has got to be the worst way to end a soap.
Instead of providing cliff hangers and exciting scenes that would keep people's pulses racing and sending the hopelessly romantics into orbit... we had looonnnngg ponderous, pretentious, boring, and quite frankly, awfully-written homilies disguised as reflections on life, love, the other world, sacrifice, etc. I couldnt stand it. I just checked on the soap every five minutes and it would be as if nothing happened. It was still the same scene. Either someone was crying buckets, or trying to put on a morose face, or someone was reciting some awful lines.
The reaction of my yaya, who has been an avid fan of the soap, pretty much summed it up. "Kaylan ka pa ba mamamatay, Elie?" And when the few people left in the Philippines who were still interested in the last few minutes of the soap were ready to click the remote control, they finally killed the main character (there was this whole metaphor about his soul jumping off into a waterfall..hahaha)..and then promptly resurrected him! The people in the house, instead of erupting into applause, groaned "di ba patay na sha!"
Talk about eliciting sympathy for your main character.
Tomorrow: the insanity that is Pinoy Big Brother 2. It is absolute madness.
Because reading is not prescribed and other forms of strenuous effort is disallowed (including sex, hehe), my choices of recreation and diversion has been limited to sitting up in bed (or in a couch) in front of the television set. Believe me it is difficult to spend more than 12 hours a day sleeping. I used to think that being able to catch up on my 40-year backlog in sleep would be bliss. But after more than a week of forced rest, sleeping has become such a bore.
Anyway. Back to television. We do have cable TV at home, but I like to surf channels and sometimes curiousity just gets the better of me - I like finding out what our local creative people are up to lately. I am afraid there's really bad news.
In the last week, I have been following some local teleseryes and boy, oh boy, are they just so.... stupid. Watching them is pure, unadultered torture.
Since last week, I tried (yes, that is the operative term - tried, as in unsuccessfully) to watch the last week of Maging Sino Ka Man. I know it is a soap opera, or to be more accurate, a Pinoy soap opera and therefore expectations of a believable or at least logical storyline is unreasonable. Hey, in our soap operas people die, there is a wake, and a funeral shows the person inside a coffin... but that doesnt stop them from resurrecting the character later in the soap.
But that has got to be the worst way to end a soap.
Instead of providing cliff hangers and exciting scenes that would keep people's pulses racing and sending the hopelessly romantics into orbit... we had looonnnngg ponderous, pretentious, boring, and quite frankly, awfully-written homilies disguised as reflections on life, love, the other world, sacrifice, etc. I couldnt stand it. I just checked on the soap every five minutes and it would be as if nothing happened. It was still the same scene. Either someone was crying buckets, or trying to put on a morose face, or someone was reciting some awful lines.
The reaction of my yaya, who has been an avid fan of the soap, pretty much summed it up. "Kaylan ka pa ba mamamatay, Elie?" And when the few people left in the Philippines who were still interested in the last few minutes of the soap were ready to click the remote control, they finally killed the main character (there was this whole metaphor about his soul jumping off into a waterfall..hahaha)..and then promptly resurrected him! The people in the house, instead of erupting into applause, groaned "di ba patay na sha!"
Talk about eliciting sympathy for your main character.
Tomorrow: the insanity that is Pinoy Big Brother 2. It is absolute madness.
Comments
My experience with local TV, usually, is when the missus or the sister-in-law is watching while I'm surfing the net a distance away, where I can see nothing, but hear everything.
I therefore conclude that there's just too much dialogue going on in local dramas.
Boy Abunda yells a lot in his weekend TV show.
And there's just too much child abuse going on in pinoy soap operas. Always with the evil titas and the oppressed little girls!
2per, I don't see your point. Are you suggesting we employ different standards in assessing local content vis-a-vis content from any other country?