Category Archive for: TV

kultura

Legit bulaga: TVJ gets its groove back

It was difficult not to be brought to tears by that last moment of Tito Sotto, Vic Sotto, and Joey de Leon on Eat Bulaga! at once looking defeated and trying to contain their anger, as they said goodbye to their audience on GMA 7. It really was about the unceremonious ending and how these three men—icons and institutions all—weren’t even allowed to say goodbye to a time slot and an audience it has had for decades. For some of us, we grew up only knowing of noontimes with this show, our childhoods filled with memories of segments and jokes and moments that had it as backdrop, as subject, as familiar viewing habit.

That I cared at all was a surprise in itself. I had stopped watching Eat Bulaga! a long time ago. It could’ve been at some point in the Aldub phenomenon when admittedly, I couldn’t understand what the fascination was about. It is more clearly about Tito Sotto, when he took a strong anti-Reproductive Health Bill stance. Either way for over a decade or so, Eat Bulaga was ever only in my peripheral vision, a fixture in one’s popular consciousness.

Which might be why that goodbye, happening after the abrupt and disrespectful act of taking the show off the air, might have been emotional for viewers. It didn’t matter if you liked TVJ or not, or were watching Eat Bulaga! or not in recent years. To me, what was clear was that an injustice had been done to the people whose cultural labor went into that show. It didn’t matter what was happening behind the scenes, or whether we think they are the bane of pop culture (—to be clear, they are not). To have cut this team’s access to their audience, disallowing them a proper goodbye from a show that they had built for over three decades—that speaks to issues bigger than our beef with the show’s humour or hosts or mishaps. (more…)

kultura

Icing on the cake: MTRCB, censorship, conservatism #CulturalCrisis

While it’s easy to jump in on the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) decision to issue a summons to the producers of “It’s Showtime” for the purported “indecent acts” of real-life couple Ion and Vice Ganda, it is as easy to start finding even more offensive TV content that we imagine the MTRCB should find just as indecent.  But the more difficult conversation that needs to be had is this one: why does the MTRCB continue to exist in a purported democracy whose Constitution completely disallows censorship?

Maybe we can start with easier questions: how can one thing that happened on “It’s Showtime” be offensive, but the same thing happening on E.A.T. not be offensive at all? We could extend that to other shows that continue to use skimpily clad women dancing provocatively to sell products, or to function as counterpoints to macho show hosts and their punchlines.

Contrary to what the dominant mob on Twitter and Facebook (group-)think, it has nothing to do with homophobia, at least not on the part of Lala Sotto or the MTRCB.

Rather, it has everything to do with the way in which the MTRCB was imagined as a government agency that is supposed to “protect” our children and audiences from inappropriate TV and film content through the exercise of regulation-and-classification. It has everything to do with a government agency that is built on deliberately ambiguous notions of morals and public good. It has everything to do with an agency that is nothing more but an outdated vestige of the Martial Law regime, but strengthened and empowered during the Aquino admin that deliberately refused to engage with the cultural sector as a response to the Marcoses’ use of culture to further its oppressive regime.

It has everything to do with us — a public that cares little about cultural regulatory institutions like the MTRCB until it does something that’s “controversial” enough for our social media feeds. (more…)

kultura

Growing up with Joey*

No, not Tribbiani, but de Leon. The Joey de Leon of Tito Vic & Joey fame. Anyone born in the 70s would’ve grown up with noontime show Eat Bulaga over lunch, and therefore would remember the Vic Sotto and Coney Reyes relationship, would know of how Aiza Seguerra was the cutest thing on Little Miss Philippines, would watch as Tito Sotto disappeared to run for and win a seat in the Senate. We would see the barkada growing to include late Master Rapper Francis Magalona and Joey’s son Keempee, the name being shortened to EB, and the show creating a family, that might include us who have grown up with them after all.  We would see countless rival noontime shows being born and dying in the face of Eat Bulaga.

To the joy of Tito Vic & Joey  (TVJ), but most obviously to the pride of Joey, who will defend the show to his last breath, get into fights about decency and kabastusan with Willie Revillame from the rival show – the one that has survived Eat Bulaga the longest. Joey, who delivers jokes cum sexual innuendoes daily, would be calling the kettle black, except that really, Revillame is not just bastos, he’s also … crass.

Which does allow Joey an amount of class, one that shines through whenever he’s forced to explain himself and his kind of humor, as he proves that he knows what he’s doing, he is not just a dirty-minded guy.  In fact, Joey educated comedy knows that when he disrespects a belief or a kind of conservatism, it is with a sense of what he’s up against, and what he deems a mature enough audience who will take that joke and think, ah, that is funny because it’s so true. (more…)

komentaryo

The propaganda war: Lessons from the ABS-CBN closure

It’s been a year since the ABS-CBN leadership decided to sign off. This was probably it’s only power move throughout the four years that Duterte had vilified them every chance he got, even when he had Gina Lopez as DENR Secretary, and even when ABS had paid up whatever it owed in taxes, and returned the cash the President insisted they owed him for an advertisement that didn’t air during the 2016 presidential campaign. And yes, this was an important power move, considering that all of us were witness to how its main commentators tried their hardest to bite their tongues on live free radio, and how news coverage was less about delivering the news as it was also about making sure not to step on too many toes.

To be fair, this wasn’t just the state of ABS-CBN news and public affairs under Duterte, as it is the state of mainstream media that has the widest coverage across social classes. In a country where a majority are not reading anything written in English, and a majority of those online are on free data, it should be pretty clear by now that for all the hashtags we can get to trend, and all the “unities” we think we’re doing here, we are in an echo chamber like no other. And no, we’re not winning anything in these echo chambers.

Just like we couldn’t win the battle to keep ABS-CBN on air.

(more…)

komentaryo

Damage control, the Tulfos, and returning the P60M pesos

Will it matter at all that the Tulfos are returning the P60 million pesos that it received from the Department of Tourism’s (DOT’s) advertising fund placed with PTV4?

The answer is no. Because while that’s P60M in taxpayers’ money that changed hands from DOT to PTV4 to the Tulfos’ production outfit Bitag Media, and of course we want it returned, there is little here that tells us it won’t happen again. Neither is there any indication that more of it isn’t happening. See, there are just too many other questions about this triumvirate of two government agencies and one private company, bound together by the Tulfo name. There are too many questions that demand answers.  (more…)