Manila Standard Today:

By Isah V. Red

*snipped*

Back to soap

GMA’s Asian Treasures may be ranking in the big chunk of the early evening audience, but ABS-CBN’s two new soap opera—Sana Maulit Muli and Maging Sino Ka Man—are proving to be formidable competitors in the late-night drama block.
The unexpected popularity of the two shows, vis-á-vis the effects laden shows on GMA, seems to prove a point that late-night viewers have reached a saturation point in fantasy-based series. Now, they could be longing for a drama series that hits the heart rather than just the eyes.
While special effects enhance the visual appeal of a show, exposure to them for a long period of time can also make them inure to them. (In medicine, when a patient doesn’t respond to a certain drug, he is referred to as drug resistant.)

The young love team of Kim Chui and Gerald Anderson is proving to be more a headache for GMA executives than they imagined. Now, Bakekang, which at the beginning showed a lot of promise, is plodding rather miserably in the ratings. What went wrong? Again, this is the problem of the writers working with Wilma Galvante who heads the network’s production group. They come up with bright ideas at the beginning, but they get lost along the way. While muddling through interesting plot points to keep the story moving, the writers at ABS-CBN have already found more interesting situations, better staged confrontations, well-directed performances that simply gets viewers hooked five nights a week. Never mind if the main storyline is as hogwash as many movies in the ’50s and ’60s. The young actors—Sam Milby, Anne Curtis, Bea Alonzo, and most especially John Lloyd Cruz, are giving a new texture to acting in conventional TV dramas. Honestly, I am now able to sit through without getting uneasy about bad acting. Even Christopher de Leon is delightfully watchable again. Oh, yes, I love his evil ways in Maging Sino Ka Man.
GMA maintains ratings lead

The latter part of 2006 saw Mega Manila’s competing television giants —ABS-CBN and GMA Network—both claiming leadership in the ratings game.
But official AGB Nielsen ratings data for Mega Manila for the fourth quarter of 2006 clearly show GMA Network still leading the numbers game with a 16.7 percent total day ratings average compared to ABS-CBN’s 14.3 percent.

Furthermore, the top 4 slots of the Overall Top 5 Programs for the same period are all GMA primetime programs—Captain Barbell, Bakekang, Atlantika, and 24 Oras. ABS-CBN’s Kapamilya Deal or No Deal ranked fifth, being the only non-GMA show in the top 5.

With these results, the question now arises as to what really is the basis of ABS-CBN in claiming that it has already gotten the better of GMA in the ratings, as tirelessly drumbeated by “loyal” Kapamilya scribes.

But apparently, the more interesting twist to this is that GMA Network is still able to hold on to its ratings leadership in spite of the very abnormal and unexplainable cable ratings.
In the last quarter of 2006 alone, GMA got a 19.5 percent total day ratings average among non-cable homes and only 9.5 percent among cable households, thus resulting in a highly questionable 10 percent difference. The Lopez-owned ABS-CBN, in contrast, registered 13.7 percent among non-cable households and a significantly higher 15.9 percent among cable subscribers.

And knowing that two of the largest cable TV providers—SkyCable and Home Cable—are also owned by the Lopezes, are we, as regular television viewers, getting the real ratings score? In the spirit of fairness, I hope so. But then again, is it also possible that in that premise lays the explanation to the abnormal cable ratings?

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