Sun.Star Essay: Filipino drama

Saturday, January 14, 2012

YEARS ago I’d come across scenes from the American soap opera “Sunset Beach” as I tinkered with the remote control gadget without much thought. But I was never attracted to the American teledrama. Neither to any soap operas in our local media.

That was almost two decades ago when America sat fixed before the television watching this Sunset Beach soap opera almost every day from 1997 to 1999, also when 70 more countries worldwide sat on the drama, transfixed as much.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

But there’s an interesting thing to note, now that we have our own soap productions on local television, teleseries (teleseryes and teledramas), and also on radio where such media productions started, in the first place.

These days, I catch my house helper watching “Amaya” episodes on GMA Network in the early evening, one of her favorite teleseryes and a Philippine historical fiction which is shown just after she sets the dining table for supper in the early evening. It’s one of her favorite shows, her siblings in Balamban also watch it, she tells me. It’s best to be updated on it than just keep quiet and be left out. On the mobile free calls, she should be able to react to discussions of the teleserye and be counted.

A short while from the time when GMA and ABS started with new vigor the recent television productions that earn, I found myself coming home from office to be on time to see the “Amaya” series in my room.

The patience for soap operas which I didn’t have, I now keep so I can connect with the young house girl and with the rest of the teleserye citizens in the country. Anyway, I keep my cool when a character gets trapped or becomes a victim of evil beings in the story. When another character is introduced to prevent the character from flourishing, I’m unruffled.

But somehow, one does get carried away, I find myself running up the stairs to be in the house on time for the drum beat, the show of colors in native costumes, the sound of characters talking in Tagalog mixed with the Visayan, even Malay, dialects in “Amaya.”

There are now many local television (as much as on the radio) soap box operas with familiar story lines, and open to everyone interested in life.

Soap opera got its name from the advertisers who backed up radio dramas seen as successful in catching attention of users of body care items, such as soap, oils and scents in 19th century America. It was the press who used the word “soap” in the 1940s. In American media, 50 hours each week are spent on daytime television dramas by ABC, NBC and CBN.

In local media and markets, when the melodrama sells fast, then the storyline lingers, stays a bit longer, even if it’s time to end it. New characters appear and threaten the peace in the story world, which lures more viewers. The advertisers cheer, expectations rise.

When the villains emerge, the chest grows tighter, before his eyes is the teleserye story on the verge of a blast.

If the story is attractive (until a more seductive work comes along) to viewers, the producers will do anything to the story line to keep it where it is and move it, but slowly, into another thrilling conflict.

In the fight for advertisers, the tendency of the teleseryes is to copy characters, such as in local media where children are suffering characters, like two or three looking for their parents, in two or more teleseryes produced by more than one TV stations shown almost at the same time. Then similarly, they grow up to stand or break during the moment of truth.

Once a teleserye starts to lose viewers, the teledrama storyline kills characters or solves the problem for a quick conclusion, sometimes too soon and fast, because one of the main actors would be too busy somewhere else filming the next drama.

In the producers’ choice of storylines and characters, I recognize the Filipino—avid and dramatic.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)