MANILA, Philippines - For Vanessa Grigoriadis, the master profiler who has delivered definitive breakdowns of Justin Bieber, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton for New York and Rolling Stone, the best way to get inside your subject’s head is to hitch a ride with them. “I’m a big believer of getting in a car with someone. I think it’s great to see what kind of driver they are, that’s helpful, and it’s a distraction, so they’re not as focused on telling you the same answers. The best thing with any story is going to someone’s home. People are most comfortable at home, and there’s all this stuff there to ask them about,” she told The Writearound’s Jonah Weiner. This is what essentially TV9 is brewing in its new show Good Company, an intimate conversation following the lives of some of Manila’s best creative minds.
In the celebrity-dominated area of local television, it’s hard to think that there’s a room for a show like Good Company, especially on free TV. Profiling personalities such as Preview’s Pauline Suaco-Juan, artist Leeroy New, restaurateur Erwan Heussaff, and Internet action star Ramon Bautista, Good Company takes us on a hitch in their figurative passenger seats, mapping out their careers, and distilling details into 30 minutes, like no 8,000-word profile could.
Careful with its blending of interview footage (the ensemble of voices that build up a subject’s character such as in Pauline Suaco-Juan’s episode), walk-throughs (such as in Leeroy New’s episode where he treads back to his days as a student in Philippine High School for the Arts, recalling projects, desks, and classroom encounters), Good Company knows the direction where its headed. The show is meticulous in crafting a running narrative without losing its audience’s focus, most of whom have been trained on rapid-fire YouTube clips and viral videos. It’s this toeing of the line that’s most interesting with the show; the attempt to bring back hard-edged storytelling into television in the era of Vine and Twitter.
Good Company’s focus on accomplished individuals, people who have actually contributed to the prevailing cultural winds of the local scene is the perfect antithesis to the ascent of the Me-generation’s self-centered obnoxious bubble. Here is a roster of people — magazine editors, fashion designers, photographers, artists, and entrepreneurs — who have earned their stripes and really know what it’s like to build a reputation without the self-styled nuances of ‘online brand building’ that we see today. More than just a behind-the-scenes or a glamorized peek into the subject’s lives, Good Company serves up a hefty half-hour of journeys, triumphs, and nuggets of wisdom from accomplished people who are considered luminaries in their chosen fields. Why click on a showbiz link for your daily entertainment trash when there’s a commanding voice that can dispense something genuine and worthwhile?
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Good Company premieres Oct. 5, 7 p.m. on TV9. Visit Facebook.com/GoodCompany9TV for more details.