Shown

I’ve been noticing a trend in our local dramas recently, especially Mediacorp’s soaps. Whenever there’s a major sponsor financing the show, you get all sorts of stupid inputs into the story line – most probably at the request of the sponsors themselves. Script writers will have no choice but to weave the request into the story or onto the set itself.

Now most of the time they don’t do too much harm as in product placement. Well, on one is gonna notice suddenly your house is stacked to the brim with a certain brand of food products, or never mind that your table has bak kwa neatly arranged right in the centre with display boxes portraying the name so clearly, or suddenly the main lead in the show breaks out into a full product demonstration of a vacuum cleaner. This is just the tip of the ice berg.

It gets better when insurance or charitable organizations join the fray, we have entire episodes or stories devoted to policies, the great work the “charitable org is doing” or even scripted events to introduce GOVERNMENT policies…yes u heard it, even our soaps have political agendas…such is the fate of television. Look who cares about it? These companies not only screw up the plot but effectively turn the artistes into walking celebrity sales-personnel.

I question the ethics of the show’s producers and directors, are you going to allow a company to run your show? Letting them dictate the pace and storyline? As a result a lot of our shows tend to become very slow and methodical. So generic it hurts.