Fantasies fulfilled

PANGANIBAN. Double the pleasure, double the fun?

People who wonder why teleseryes have been so phenomenally popular for years posit all sorts of theories to explain their unprecedentedly long reign.

Some views have it that the drama series’ heightened melodrama, convoluted plotting, all-star casts and instant accessibility (they’re available daily—and for free) are major reasons why viewers keep watching them with such “addicted” alacrity.

For our part, however, a key reason is the fact that teleseryes fulfill viewers’ fantasies in different ways:

On “Be Careful With My Heart,” for instance, the fantasy is household help or employees’ dream of marrying their wealthy and handsome employers, and thus achieve a win-win victory over their impoverished past—on all fronts!

That particular fantasy is so pervasive that it’s pretty much the engine that drives a number of other series, like “Kahit Konting Pagtingin,” starring Angeline Quinto, Sam Milby and Paulo Avelino.

Other shows focus on viewers’ subconscious wish to be powerful enough to get back at all of the subjugators in their own lives. Thus, in “Indio” and “Juan dela Cruz,” the heroes are given extraordinary powers to fight colonizers, monsters and just about anybody or anything else that’s evil and vile.

Quite a number of people yearn for closure in their troubled lives, so they relate strongly to TV drama series about adopted kids wanting to know their birth parents, like the glamorously miserable young leads in “Ina, Kapatid, Anak.”

To strengthen its hold on viewers’ primal needs, the series is also about sibling rivalry, as its combative protagonists fight for the affection of their parents, half-parents, surrogate parents—and what-not!

Sibling rivalry is also one of  the major bones of contention in “Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw,” with Kris Aquino and Anne Curtis fighting for supremacy in their wealthy father’s heart of hearts.

To make the competition even more ferocious, the two seething siblings even fight over one man (Robin Padilla), with Anne getting first crack at him, but Kris marrying him.

The conflict is pumped up even more when the series adds yet another seminal bone of contention, the rich-poor dichotomy that has been a basic issue in local melodramas for decades: Robin is a poor but honest cop, while the ladies’ dad (Tirso Cruz III) is rich and evil—so, watch the melodramatic fur fly!

On the relatively new series, “Apoy sa Dagat,” Angelica Panganiban plays twins separated in childhood from each other, one rich and the other dirt-poor, so the rich-poor conflict kicks in again!

This early, we don’t know if, when the separated twins finally meet, it will emerge as a central conflict—but, even if it doesn’t, the new series has enough conflicts and fulfilled fantasies to make it quite a tempestuous viewing treat.

For one thing, the series ups the sensual ante, topbilling sexy Angelica—in twin roles, at that, so that means double the pleasure, double the fun.

For added oomph and spice, the show fields two screen hunks as Angelica’s leading men—Piolo Pascual and Diether Ocampo.

Both gents gamely strip down to their skivvies at a snap of the director’s fingers, so viewers’ fantasticating yearning for hunk and abs is generously rewarded—and fulfilled!