Television, man's second best friend, enable us to watch any kind of entertainment right in our home. For decades, televisions provided us with awesome TV series, unforgettable news coverages and enticing documentaries, even way before we were given with Discovery, AXN, Jack TV and National Geographic channels.
Now, almost everyone has access to television and everyone has its own favorites and hated shows. Looking at the local channels though, I think they are degrading in quality and they focus more on star power itself and not giving high-caliber entertainment and information. Take a look on some current shows, I think most of them only survive in less than 6 months, you are lucky if you have a show managed to continue in six months even if the content and the stature sucks. I think the writers and producers has capabilities to concoct quality shows but hey, Philippine masses are the priorities, thus, we need to have shows that will fit to the major market.
On the other hand, I want to ramble things about our local television networks always show on our decades old SDTV, yes my old standard definition television is kicking ass and still the best TV ever.
Filipino time on Philippine television
In a nutshell, Filipino time means being delayed for at least 30 minutes up to 2 hours, yet the scheduled or planned event still push through. For example, lets say the meeting, scheduled to start in 2:00PM, the attendees will arrive around 2:30PM and the meeting will start around 2:45PM after the last guy arrived. Same applies in some Philippine TV shows especially on prime time. Each shows starts and ends in different times, every single day.
Pictured: Scientific (with complex geometry) visualization of Filipino Time
They can push some shows a little late if there is more important matter that eats air time like a big ass breaking news or something. Whenever they show the schedule line up on-screen, they did not bother to include the time, just the order of shows.
Isn't hard to come up and follow a real linear schedule? If the problem was a lengthy run time of a single show then why not optimized it? like removing all the unnecessary scenes and managing the length of each episode.
SIMILAR SHOWS BETWEEN NETWORKS
This plaque ravages our airwaves for many years now. Instead of creating original concepts, they try to make a cheat sheet based from other shows, high-fiving each other in delight, wash their hands thoroughly with holy water and voilà, a show similar to the other network.
The hell is this (censored)?
They try to outdo each other, toss them with pies that has "we are better than you" notes to each other and rampaging loyal fans will emerge from deep pits of hell somewhere in Manila and try to flame each other with badly written arguments in local message boards.
Competition is a healthy thing, yessirree, but at least the similar aspects of each competing show is subtle and the slice of originality should prevail.
OVER RELIANCE ON REMAKES OR RE-IMAGINED SHOWS
Count all the local shows that are remake of a very old series or a Korean soap operas (why is it always from Korea) or a hint of being re-imagined of an existing show. There are tons of them, not counting all the existing foreign soap operas shown locally.
Yess!!! A melodramatic remake with lots of snow and oriental looking actors on TV!
Why not focus to write original ones? maybe create a little homage to such shows but not completely recreate it and stapled it with a modern-day setting and masses obsessed Philippine culture. Why not we just ditch those writers and hire those foreign writers instead. Though if we manage to get them they will probably get mad and left us because when it is already scheduled, the meeting that is, their Filipino counterparts will always be late due to inherent following of the Filipino time.
One of the reasons why a lot of Filipino love remakes is they already imparted their lives to the original version. If you welcomed and hugged the original version really tight back then, why not welcome and hug a new original show?
TOO MUCH REALITY TALENT SHOWS
I like watching deserving people does their stuff. Dancing, singing even doing artsy stuff with sands I love watching and getting mesmerized with their skills.
Not including this one
Talent shows greatly showcases these people, but having many talent shows on each network is kinda redundant. If there is no immediate and major difference on all talent shows, just showing your talent by yourself or in group, why do you have tons of talent shows in different time and different days. Why not have one talent show on that channel and bam, throw all your freshly found talents on that show.
This way, that single talent show, crowned with prestige and everyone wants to join that show to boast their talent, no matter what it is, even if it is stupid like replicating the great Yoyoy Villame' antics which resulted in horrible way, to the world.
LEANING ON FRANCHISED FOREIGN REALITY SHOWS
The reason some foreign reality shows are popular because they created it from scratch, maybe getting some tidbits from other shows. If they can conceptualized mind-blowing reality shows why can't we?
You are doing it wrong sir
You will say they already throw every possible reality show idea but we can still think of something that can fit to our country. Maybe get a very little 1/3 of concept from an existing show, blend it in your blender inside your cranium and spit out a great reality show idea.
We can still franchise some shows though but not rely on it completely, we can still throw our own reality show concept there and maybe, the viewers will bite and follow it religiously.
LOW-GRADE QUALITY OF SOME SHOWS
Well, like what I mentioned before, the Philippine masses is the priority, that is why we have brain farting ads everywhere even if the target market has low buying power. The proverbial different strokes for different folks strikes again.
Send in the NAVY SEALS! eradicate those shows
Sadly, we always rely on foreign shows and cable channels just to quench our thirst for entertaining shows. Like in some Filipino movies, 75% of time, it will be crap. There are still some gems here and there but a lot of Filipino produced series are... rubbish.
Aside from TV series, a number of news show relies more on sensationalize a piece of news than delivering facts and conveying it to the audience, of course, presented with professionalism. Some of them speak in heavy tone as if a microphone is in places sun does not shine. Even one of them will have a heart attack in any moment once they start speaking and throwing saliva in their mics.
Don't get me started with local showbiz shows with their insane obsession of absorbing celebrities private lives and orgasming in delight when a celebrity is going to a hard time like a break up or a relative who recently deceased.
We can't do anything to improve the quality content of our local shows unless the networks knows how to combine all the things loved by all classes and slap it to our faces silly and we enjoy every single second of it.
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