Laying it on really thick

VALDEZ AND VASQUEZ. Budding romance in Malacañang?

THE START of the new televiewing year brings with it the fervent hope that we will have better shows to watch in 2016, the improved programs that we deserve.

Much too often last season, we had to make-do with shallow, callow and hollow productions without much rhyme or reason going for them. Let’s pray for more responsible TV people who make better programs—knock on should and would!

Hope still springs eternal despite some unwelcome evidence to the contrary, like the examples we witnessed last week:

On the otherwise eminently viewable “Ningning,” a recent telecast played its soggily melodramatic card too much, and inundated viewers in an excessively tearful scene in which its now medically challenged title character was made to “practice” going totally blind—“memorizing” the facial features of the people she loved, by touching their faces with her little fingers.

There were so many people separately involved in the heavingly emotional scene that it took forever to finish—and too many of the actors involved took advantage of the emotional occasion to “achieve” their big thespic “moment”—indulging in one “breakdown” after another to “prove” they were emotionally “deep and sensitive” performers.

To their everlasting credit, a few of the show’s principal cast members resisted the temptation to go weepy, sob-by, teary and “hagulgul-y” on us poor viewers, and just reacted “internally.” —May their thespically judicious and disciplined tribe increase!

Unnerving waltz

Another noontime drama, “Princess in the Palace,” unnerved viewers in a different way, by getting its lead adult character, the country’s female president played by Eula Valdez, all dolled up and waltzing while dressed in a sequined, red ball gown, with her new security chief, portrayed by Christian Vasquez, for partner—and potential romantic interest?

To top it all even more fantasticatingly, as the couples danced in the overblown number, ersatz “snowflakes” wafted down all around them—making them look for all the world like they had gotten lost in a talahib field at the end of summer!

Since we’ve had two female presidents, we tried to visualize Cory Aquino and Gloria Arroyo dressed as and doing what Eula was made to do—and the mind boggled!

Another hopefully relevant note: We’ve observed in the past, few weeks (yes, we keep regular tabs on many TV shows, so we’re entitled to our informed opinion), that juvenile lead Ryzza Mae Dizon has been figuring less prominently in the drama series.

Has the production concluded that she really doesn’t have it in her to go memorably and intensely dramatic, so it’s giving her lighter and fewer thespic chores to do? Just asking.