An Insult to Intelligence

I don't watch local shows, minus the occasional evening news and anime shown on local stations. But other than that, I skip local channels. Frankly, the shows are often repetitive, shallow, cheaply-made, and have drama/soap opera plots recycled too many times (or just plain stupid).

The cable we have hardly has any channels worth watching. There are less than ten channels that I actually enjoy, as the rest are pure crap. If there is hardly anything worth watching in cable, I can only imagine how horribly painful it is to sit in front of the television with an even limited number of channels. Ugh.

Local telenovelas, in all honesty, are utterly stupid. It's an insult to intelligence really. I wonder how most Filipinos could stomach the unbelievable and absurd plot lines, the cheaply made costumes, and annoying characters who must probably suffer from dehydration with all the crying they do on a daily basis.

When Ging was around to take care of Inay temporarily (my grandmum has Alzheimer's), I was exposed to one week of local telenovela. She hogged the television during her stay. Me and my family just watched along, and she probably thought we watched and enjoyed the same brand of entertainment she did. During that time, I spent half the evening rolling my eyes and drinking so much water to drown the sarcasm yearning to escape my lips. I wanted to yell how stupid the shows were. That the plots were so mundane and pathetic I wouldn't be surprised if the viewers' brain neurons fizzled after long exposures to these shows.

But the show that truly annoyed me was ABS-CBN's rehashed TV version of "Princess Sarah." The child actresses who played Sarah and Becky (I think that was the other girl's name...or was it Betty?) were no where near as cute or endearing as Camille and Angelica were in the movie version. That obviously fake curled up mustached of one of the actors annoyed me to no end. And his pathetic excuse for an Italian accent only made me want to hurl knives at him. The set was clearly not set in the 1800s even if they had carriages. Come on, 19th century houses were not designed like that, nor had that kind of furniture. And the costumes were horrid. Who in their right mind would actually wear a bright, shiny orange dress in the Victorian era? Eww. The costumes seemed mismatched. My guess is they were probably assembled together simply because they looked like the clothes of yesteryear, be damned that they don't actually belong to the same period. As long as they look like what people would wear a century or two ago, then it's good enough. Pft. As if that was what people from that time actually wear.

Come on. ABS-CBN earns billions of pesos every year and yet the props and sets on "Sarah" seemed so cheaply budgeted. Just slap on some peasant looking dresses, market place that a three year old could tell is fake, and some little children to endear the audience and you're all set. What happened to quality? Heck, they didn't even research the time period when "Sarah" was set. Ah, but I guess when you're concerned with profits, everything else can be thrown out the window. Quality be damned. Filipinos could not even tell how everything in the show is grossly inaccurate. As long as there are cute children, humor, a bit of teen romance on the side, and a saintly protagonist who gets bullied and pushed around by mean people for no apparent reason, Filipinos will watch. Big companies like ABS-CBN know this and use it to their advantage.

This is why Filipinos get dumber. They are exposed to shows that do not even spend time getting facts right. It is an insult to Filipino intelligence, but the sad thing is that I think most Filipinos don't really mind at all.