Face to Face with Pinoy Reality TV
Face to Face (image courtesy of Inquirer.net)
I don’t need to watch TV5′s Face to Face everyday to know what the show is all about. It’s obviously the Filipino version of The Jerry Springer Show. Amy Perez is the host or referee of the popular daily talk show also referred as the only “talakserye” in Philippine television. As expected, everything that made The Jerry Springer Show a US hit is also on its Pinoy counterpart: guests vents their ire on each other, punching, hair-pulling and throwing bleeped invectives, slippers and sometime chairs at each other- a “palengkerafest” (minus Annabelle Rama) or Barangay hall on TV.
It features real life drama of real Filipinos (mostly from poor communities) who put the most intimate or most vulnerable details of their lives in front of the camera. Face to Face purport to show real people and real-life drama as they really are. But I wonder how much of their real lives have been edited or sensationalized to fit the show’s guidelines to attract more audience.
Why does Face to Face click? Entertainment columnist Ricky Lo had a simple answer: Because it has a cathartic/therapeutic effect on us, what with the protagonists doing exactly what we want to but cannot do because we feel that we belong to a “more polite” (even if “more suppressed”) society. Face to Face serves as an outlet for our own pent-up emotions.
I think the reason goes deeper than Lo’s analysis. Part of the appeal of Face to Face, and other voyeuristic TV show is that audience are given some sense of superiority over those featured on these shows. There’s a reason why we slow down or look back at “car wrecks” on the side of the highway, earning us the term “usisero”. Because we somehow see ourselves as a bit better than the characters we see on these shows. We easily pass judgments and even unintentionally limit our capacity to empathize to these people, which is a sad reality.
To be fair, Face to Face features a “Trio Tagapayo” team who give experts advice and even sits down one-on-one with guests to resolve their conflicts through legal, psychological and spiritual counsel. In almost every episode I saw online, the show concludes with the three professional counsel guiding the guests make on-air reconciliation and forgiveness with each other. That alone sets Face to Face apart from Jerry Springer and other trashy reality talk shows.
There are many reasons Face to Face is popular and I expect similar shows will be developed to copy its success and more outrageous drama and “pushing the envelope” situations to attract more viewers. In doing so, we (myself included) need to be careful about watching them and not allow them to trivialize our view of other people’s lives and not harden our own spirit toward others. The real story that everyone should come face to face is, the real people we see on Face to Face are no less than us.
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