Too many kids!
In show business, success is often followed by excess. No sooner had we observed that 2012 would be the year of the child star and the kid-oriented series on TV than the incipient trend has suddenly become an excessive and intrusive fact of life on the tube.
Motivated by the promise of high ratings, many of the major channels’ teleseryes now feature kids in important or even principal roles, to wit:
On “Biritera,” the central conflicts revolve around the competition among child singers, as well as their adult handlers or “mom-agers.”
On “E-boy,” the two juvenile headliners have been beefed up by three more kids in supporting roles, the better to keep the feisty proceedings on a sassy, screaming high.
On the fantaserye, “Wako-wako,” the main star is new sensation Yogo Singh who has become, in only a couple of years, a young arrival ready to move up to the ranks of certified pint-sized stars such as Xyriel Manabat and Zaijan Jaranilla.
On “Alice Bungisngis,” the resident young star interacts with even younger coactors.
On the debuting show “BFF,” child star Jillian Ward and Mona Louise Rey share top billing.
As we have noted before, young talents should definitely be encouraged to shine—as long as they perform naturally and don’t lose their all-important sense of wonder. Trouble is, many of the child performers currently on the tube have been wrongly trained to be too loud, sassy, maporma, “cutely” combative, “too clever by half,” and “pint-sized adult” in projection.
Now that some series feature so many child talents in the same episode or even in the same scene, the result has become one big mess, as all these kids compete for viewers’ attention by flailing and screaming as loudly and frenetically as they can.
The shows are supposed to have directors, but they appear to be unable to keep the young “competitors” in line, so that the point of a scene can clearly come through, and not be completely lost in the upheaval created by the attention-grabbing and self-serving antics of these child performers.
To make things worse, one series has muddled up the picture further by introducing the “crush” factor into its young actors’ competition, with two of them feuding and fighting (and screaming) constantly, because they both have a crush on a juvenile female character. Hold your horses and tone it down, directors! The characters involved are not even adolescents!
It really is time for cooler and more judicious heads to intervene, before the kiddie talent trend confounds and compromises itself with its shocking excesses. Cut those kiddie casts down to a manageable size, keep the action focused and natural, eliminate all the self-serving gimmicks, and stop shouting—please!
