Wag The Dog

It's been that way for a long time. In fact, it's an "unwritten rule". The Philippine Cinema makes movies for the masses.

I have a hard time determining what exactly "the masses" are.

Economically speaking, it's that big chunk of the pie chart that's well below the poverty line, with a small slither of the lower middle. They represent about 60 to 75 percent of the population: the underfed, underpaid, and under-educated.

Survey says that they also like to watch a lot of television and even, on occassion, spring some of that hard earned money for a movie or two.

So it makes a lot of sense that huge portion of the industry caters to them.

What doesn't make sense is this beliefe that the industry has that they are stupid, because here's the thing: they're not.

Yep, here ye comes the new generation of masses. The public school kids who grew up with camera phones, the internet and the Knowledge Channel in their classrooms. Somewhere along the way, they got smarter. Too bad The Powers That Be got stuck in the upgrade, because we are still batting out the same tired plot-lines to pacify the people.

I once got locked into a debate at my union office about what exactly the masses wanted.

Technically, we couldn't make a TV show like The Practice because no one would watch it. You're Honor came out and it flopped. It's too brainy, and the upperclass is already busy watching...well, The Practice.

Damn.

You have to give Richard Gomez some credit for pitching something new, and maybe ABS-CBN for actually letting him do it.

Now here's the deconstruction: You're Honor flopped because it spent most of it's time focusing on the courtroom drama. It's aim was to show passionate lawyers and titillating cross examinations. Judges aghast at clients' hysterias...

The thing is...there is no such thing as courtroom drama. It's all bullshit. Lawyers stutter, clients rattle off answers like robots, and some judges sleep if they're not fining the lawyers for excessive dialectics.

In real life, court cases are boring, that's why the lawyers from The Practice only spend about 5% of their time there. And even then, it's always in a direct one minute closing argument/speech.

Poetic license be damned, there's only so much that you can make up.

The real drama happens behind the scenes, with the clients and among the lawyers. It's not the court cases that make the story, it's the people that make the story. A case is a piece of drafted paper, it's the people mentioned in it that bring the conflict.

And for a country that usually handles it's cases by settling out of court, it would have made for a lot more interesting stories, not to mention shed light on the process.

The writers of the show should have made it more episodic than serial, writing each one like a stand-alone movie with a snippets of courtroom drama.

That doesn't mean though, that the show and the format couldn't have worked. I think the network dropped the ball too early, way before the writers could've re-tooled and improved.

Writers are dynamic, they would have re-worked it. Writers aren't stupid and neither is the audience. The only people dysfunctional in this system are the people who make the decisions.

I understand that network TV is scared to lose their money, we're not like Hollywood that can afford to pop out pilots the way they do Vicodin pills.

But for Kahless sake, grow some balls dammit. Try and match the growing independent movement done by cinema.

Yes, we get the fact that soaps work, but do they all have to be soaps? Take a risk and stop coddling your audience! They aren't monkeys in bars, they've long ago started thinking.

A great example of this are the Hong Kong OFWs. Karen recently marketed our TV show there and it was--surprisingly--well accepted. We had hoped they would love it, but we never actually thought that they really would, especially that much. Their reason?

"We're sick of watching movies with the same stories over and over. We'd like to see something new, and even see some documentaries in there."

We're a country that has a basic literacy rate of 96%, but a functional literacy rate of 86%. That's a sad number.

So dog darn it people, we already know we can bite, now give us something that we can actually chew.