Fed up with Pinoy telenovelas?

Call it Teleserye, Telenovela, or whatever. In the eyes of many these are all just the same — a fast-paced drama with enough twists and turns to make a rollercoaster ride seem like a walk in the park. There’s the muchaha turned señora, with her love interest of a hunk in tow, though he doesn’t have to have an Amazon jungle for chest hair like Sergio in Marimar. (At least that is something I’m glad they didn’t copy.) But before that could happen, the show must leave the audience hanging, meaning you must stay tuned for the next episode the next evening to see what comes next.

Perhaps it all started with the Thalia phenomenon back in the mid-’90s. Every afternoon at 6:30, you’d stop whatever you are doing, you hung up on whoever you were talking to and tuned in to channel 9 while you heard the familiar, Marimar!!! Oww!!! of Thalia’s song. Yes, those were the days when those shows were pretty hot. They took the islands by storm, but I wish I could say the same thing now.

I even remember writing about Thalia in one of my first columns. And now, Pinoy television has finally mastered the formula, making dramas with fast-paced scenes, complete with the elaborate "Latina-inspired" wardrobe and the highfalutin, Spanish-sounding surnames that could rival those Latin shows; in other words, a clone of their Latin counterparts. But as they say, "Too much of something could be bad."

Every time I need to use the computer after dinner on a weekday, with clockwork regularity I put my headphones on when the clock strikes 7:30 and turn the musica volume to high. Because that’s the time my cousin turns on the TV next to the computer in the den and tunes in to his daily dose of telenovela. You know how much of a telenovela junkie he is? Every time his favorite show comes on, as if by some drastic transformation, he suddenly crawls into this "world" where it’s only him and the TV that exist.

One time, when the volume of the TV was set to high, I couldn’t anymore bear to listen to what was coming out of the TV speakers: people fighting, shouting, crying, saying clichéd, cheesy lines, and doing their darndest best to act. I have a low tolerance for mushy melodramas, and here’s my cousin who can never get enough of soap. One must not talk to him when he watches those things; it’s useless trying to. What you say is likely to fall on deaf ears; I doubt if he even notices whether you’re breathing or not. I think that even if you threw the heavy dictionary at him, he wouldn’t feel it. And I know that he’s not unique. So many are hooked on daily soap.

I tried asking him, "Hey would this be a cool subject to write about?" As expected he didn’t hear me, even if I was within whispering distance from him. It’s as if he was in a trance: his eyes fixed on the TV set and his face looking very serious. A thought once crossed my mind — what if I threw my cell phone at him; would the impact make him snap out of his telenovela? I tried making my voice a little louder but still to no avail. You give up after a time.

Fortunately my addiction to telanovelas ended with Thalia. Her last series I watched was Maria del Barrio, and that’s it, and I never looked back since. That was back in my teenybopper days in high school. That was the phase I’m glad I already "phased out" of. I don’t even know who "Amor Powers" is. And besides, life in our house already looks like one big teleserye. Nothing beats the realism of "real life drama."

To the untrained eye, it seems that these shows popping out lately look all the same. Well, for starters, the titles are all so generic; you can’t distinguish which is which. Although these shows are meant to be serious in the eyes of the audience, way too serious to be in fact. But to me the effect is the opposite — just seeing how they become oh so melodramatic is enough to make you laugh real hard. It’s only in Philippine television that you could still find something funny in even the most serious shows, so you get two for the price of one. While my cousin is very serious, I could not help laughing at his addiction to soap and the soap itself.

It’s quite funny that people’s lives are full of drama already and yet they still can’t get enough of it. They want to escape from their own dramas I guess, into other people’s dramas for a change — even if those people are only fabricated.

I’ll quote a friend who watched an episode of Points of View on Studio 23 with Pinoy telenovelas as its topic. "Moral of the story — the ugly-witch-of-a-mother-in-law should die first before the rich hunk and the poor beautiful girl could live happily ever after."

Ah, such is life, before the couch and beyond it.

* * *

E-mail me at ketsupluis@hotmail.com.