How to harness popular TV soaps for social, developmental transformation

(Conclusion)

The fact that the pledge to provide resonsible and balanced programing is being practiced more in the breach than in the responsible observance doesn’t negate its binding validity and importance. So, if the government’s licensing and supervisory bodies will finally get their act together and truly serve the viewing public, great transformative initiatives can be launched. —If not, not.

Connections

So, if the organizers of this seminar really want to use popular teleseryes to effect the social transformation they desire, they should do two things: First, use all of their clout, contacts and connections to remind the TV industry of its avowed duty to genuinely serve the public, especially the country’s youth. And second, to use all of their clout, contacts and connections to remind government agencies to more proactively do their job to make sure that the franchise grantees’ commitments are actually met and complied with.

One cannot succeed without the other. If government backing is weak or nonexistent, no real transformation can happen. On the other hand, if the TV industry has to be forced to comply, the resulting programs will most likely be uncreative and produced in a knee-jerk fashion, just to comply with the government’s basic requirements, so they won’t do any good, either.

Can the TV industry be persuaded to voluntarily do its share in nation-building, without the boring use of official government slogans that don’t impinge dynamically on viewers’ consciousness, anyway? The prospects are generally dodgy, but past experience has occasionally shown that it can happen. Let’s recall those few happy outcomes from a more enlightened past, and see how they can be replicated today:

Decades ago, at the very height of martial law, a few satirical TV shows dared to poke pointed fun at the regime and got away with it—at least for a while. They included “Mr. Minister,” “Sic O’Clock News” and “Hanggang sa Susunod na Kabanata.”

Later, some shows for children responsibly and creatively helped young viewers with their in-school and supplemental needs—like the instructional programs produced by the Ateneo Educational TV Center, as well as “enrichment” shows like “Batibot,” “Hirayamanawari” and “Pahina.”

In the arts, “Ryan, Ryan Musikahan” developed the musical  taste of an entire generation of viewers, making learning not just easy and painless, but downright fun.

Adaptations

More specific to TV drama, the anthology program, “Balintataw,” televised video adaptations of stage and literary works by Filipino masters.

Even more specifically, some  teleseryes have tried to dramatically teach life lessons that help viewers get insights into their own lives, like the inspirational series, “May Bukas Pa,” three seasons ago, and its current counterpart, “100 Days to Heaven.”

Granted, some of these productions may be occasionally flawed examples, but at least they have made the effort to go beyond sheer mindless diversion, to use the TV medium to confront rather than run away from reality.

This more engaged and participatory viewing attitude is sorely needed by our nation, if we want to transform Filipinos into a nation that confronts its problems rather than escapes from them—or leaves it up to “government” to solve them.

That’s a very essential task that needs to be accomplished if the Philippines is to truly come into its own as a nation. But, that can only happen if both government and the TV industry realize the television medium’s great importance in genuine nation-building.

More escapist

Much too often, government people think that the mere expression of official platitudes on TV will transform the country. Actually, it could achieve the opposite—it could bore and turn off viewers so much that they would become more escapist than ever.

Real change can result only from potent and relevant themes dynamically dramatized (not “melo-dramatized”), so that viewers can emotionally respond to and empathize with them, and gain insights that affect the way they live their own lives. Good intentions are fine—but that’s the bottom line.

In terms of program content and presentational styles, teleseryes can do a lot to improve on their moral and social influence. They have generally been criticized for focusing too much on vengeance; physical, emotional and psychological violence; personal grudges and clan enmities that go back for several or many generations; conspicuous consumption; lavish display of wealth and power; one-upmanship in business; discrimination; sinister plots and schemes; superstitious beliefs; corruption, etc.

To be sure, some of those conflicts and themes are needed in storytelling, otherwise excessive blandness, sweetness and thus stultifying boredom would be the result.

Relevance

But, they’re reprehensible when they’re carried to excess and for sheer shock or melodramatic value, instead of being dramatized for their relevance to the lives we live in the real world, and the insights they can provide us about life and living.

The most negatively iconic example of this is the unusually and unnaturally key role that arch-villains or kontrabidas play in our teleseryes. Some of them have been built up into such colorful and compellingly attractive totems of pure evil that they end up upstaging the protagonists, who are supposed to be the main focus of the drama and conflict being dramatized.

Our teleserye villains have been made so neurotically attractive and compelling that viewers “enjoy” their monstrous antics more than the predictable niceness and helplessness of the bidas whose existence they make a living hell.

Both bidas and kontrabidas in many teleseryes have a negative influence on viewers because they are, in different ways, antithetical to the strong, self-aware and proactive Filipinos needed for our collective moral and social development.

The weak and eternally suffering bida and the powerfully vicious and vengeful kontrabida are precisely the characters we don’t need to develop into a dynamic people and nation.

We need better and more enlightening role models in our TV dramas for us, especially the country’s youth, to rise above our colonial, self-defeating past, and truly come into our own as a proud, engaged and self-empowered nation.