How to harness popular TV soaps for social, developmental transformation
“100 DAYS TO HEAVEN.” One of the few teleseryes that teach lessons that help viewers get insights into their own lives.
Last Wednesday, an important seminar on ways to harness popular TV soap operas for social and developmental transformation was held by the Yuchengco Center and the Political Science Dept. at De La Salle University, where we were among the main speakers. The notes we shared:
Teleseryes, or extended daily or nightly drama series, have in the past decade become the new kid on the block—and the king of the hill—that is Philippine television—which in the same period has become the most popular and influential medium of communication and entertainment in the country.
It is instructive to note the correlation in terms of time lines between the two phenomena, and a tentative conclusion can be made to the effect that TV has become unusually popular and influential because of the rise of teleseryes in the past decade.
Phenomenon
To view the phenomenon in clarifying context, it is relevant to note that TV soap operas have always been with us—ever since the ’70s and ’80s, at least, when longrunning TV soaps like “Flordeluna” and “Mula sa Puso” were among the most popular shows in town.
Later, there was a dip in viewership, perhaps due to eventual satiation and boredom due to the series’ predictable plots and stereotypical characters. But, the slack was soon taken up by teleseryes from Latin America, and later from other countries in Asia.
Incidentally, the “imported” soap operas did us the great service of speeding up their storytelling, and teaching their local counterparts not to lazily stretch their scenes by playing entire songs as their characters romantically or melodramatically brooded over their problems. But, the situation being dramatized remained pretty much as predictable as ever.
These days, however, greater variety in terms of subject matter and presentational styles have been infused, to give televiewers a variety of viewing options. Melodrama and fantasy remain the most prevalent types in terms of material and treatment, but we now also have action-drama series, a show about the lives of TV dancers, some “sexier” dramas about young marrieds, a series partly about rebels and activists, an “ethnic” drama series, and even a show about the country’s most newly popular sport, football.
The variety is welcome, but it must be observed that fantasy and melodrama still hold sway. For this reason, this seminar’s laudable goal to find ways to harness the popularity of teleseryes toward moral and social transformation is bound to be a protracted, uphill struggle.
The mere fact that fantasy and melodrama are the most popular storytelling types indicates that more viewers want to escape from reality rather than to confront it in what they prefer to watch on television. Both melodrama and fantasy are escapist, because they don’t depict what really happens in life, only a desirable and altered facsimile of the same.
Imagination
This is easy to see in fantasy, which is by definition about the fantasticating unreality of fairy tale characters, spirits, sprites, superheroes, and practically anything that the creative imagination can conjure up.
On the other hand, the escapist nature of “melodrama” is less apparent. Some people mistake it for drama, which is the purportedly realistic depiction of believable characters in conflict, but the definition is deceptive. This is because local TV’s preferred version of drama is melodrama.
What’s the key difference? Genuine drama is about real conflict involving believable characters, depicted in order to effect an emotion-driven insight and character change in those protagonists and antagonists. The emotions involved are purposively used to drive home that insight and to make it acutely real, not for its own sake.
By point of contrast, in melodramas, emotions are indulged in for their own sake, with both protagonists and antagonists “feeling” them to extended excess, crying or screaming much longer and louder than needed, to “milk” those emotions’ empathetic effect on viewers.
This focus on emotions or emotional displays for their own sake makes melodramas unreal because, in real life, people in dire straits simply say “Huwag po”—not “Huwag, huwag po, para niyo nang awa, utang na loob, kawawa po kami, wala pong trabaho ang tatay namin, may sakit si Inay, wala po kami pambayad sa operasyon—!” —You get the picture.
Genuine empathy
This extreme and extended focus on emotionalizing for its own sake discourages rather than encourages genuine empathy, because it reminds viewers that they’re watching a performance, rather than life believably unfolding.
This is counterproductive, because real change in viewers’ feelings and view of life comes only at the subconscious level, when viewers have been made to “forget” that they are watching a production, and believe, even if only momentarily, that they are profoundly witnessing and experiencing life itself.
Since most of the “drama” we see on local TV series is actually melodrama, this subconscious and subliminal transformation happens only very rarely, so this seminar’s admirable mission to find ways to use teleseryes to effect genuine attitudinal change and social transformation will remain a pipe dream—unless local TV weans itself away from its inordinate focus on fantasy and melodrama.
Can it be persuaded to do this? Some TV people don’t welcome the prospect, because in their view, teaching is the job of parents and teachers, while the media’s role is simply to inform and entertain.
Still, we should remind them that, when a TV outfit gets a franchise to operate from the government, it agrees to serve the viewing public in many more ways than just entertaining it by any and all means possible.
This is especially true when it comes to young and impressionable viewers, whom the franchise holders pledge to protect from TV content that’s too mature for them to handle, and to provide programs specifically for them that will help them develop well in all of the areas of their lives. (To be concluded)
