Taking the bad with the good

It’s instructive to see how some productions combine both plus and minus points to an extreme and even contradictory degree. Take one of our favorite shows, “Walang Pasaway Kay Mareng Winnie.” Host and resident analyst, Winnie Monsod, does a great job doing research and interviewing key resource persons and newsmakers on the issues and seminal societal concerns of the day.

Even better, she takes all of that information and makes it easy to understand and relevant to the lives of the show’s grateful viewers.

Aside from having her head and heart in the right place, Monsod comes with a lot of experience and credentials that give added weight to her opinions, conclusions and recommendations for action. And her no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is way of expressing herself is such a relief to listen to, after all the pompous, pseudo-populist, pedantic and “pretend-intelligent” hoo-hah we get from some telegenic “talking heads” (but not necessarily brains) on the tube.

Content

On the other hand, “Pasaway” tries too hard to “balance” its serious content and intent with the allegedly “funny” street interviews and “surveys” conducted by Love Añover. The intent is understandable, because the show’s producers may fret that the masa will find the program too much of a mental stretch for its reputedly “limited” attention span and intellectual “capacity.”

We feel, however, that this fear of viewers’ “limitations” is an unfair indictment. Some viewers may not be as “educated” as others, but when an issue is relevant to their daily lives, they have the “native intelligence” and “practical logic” to get connected with and involved in its discussion, enough to see it through to its logical and practical conclusion. So, with Mareng Winnie at the helm, there really is no need to rely on “comic relief” to make viewers enjoy watching her “Pasaway” show.

In any case, Añover’s broad, loud and hectic “comedy” interviewing style doesn’t really help the show and is sometimes a liability, because it’s often not very funny, and thus ends up as a distraction and irritant that could tick less allegedly ga-ga (we didn’t say gago) viewers off.

Comments

Añover can serve the show better if she strives to come across as much less hectic, broad and loud than is her usual wont. If she can’t do really funny ad-libs on her own, she should more productively rely on scripted comments that are genuinely funny.

To be sure, Añover has been on TV for years and has gotten by with her usual kind of humor, which has gained her quite a following. We submit, however, that “Pasaway” is a more significant and relevant program than some or most of her past TV outings, so it requires her to do her best work, and stop getting by with her usual shtick.

After all, Mareng Winnie gives the show her level best, so Añover needs to keep up with her, and thus show to us that there really is a lot of her to genuinely appreciate – and Love.