A couple of weeks ago, I was stuck in the airport because my flight was delayed. I had nothing to do so I watched the “teleserye” [TV soaps] being shown at the waiting lounge. I hadn’t watched those things for ages, and the first thing I noticed was that nothing had changed. The “bida” [lead character] was still the beautiful young girl who was both clueless (i.e., “tanga”) and a pushover—qualities redeemed by her kindness, purity and meekness. The “contrabida” [villain] was a rich and sophisticated woman, wielding control over everything and everyone. Haciendas were ruled by powerful families. Policemen and other law enforcers were incapable of solving crime. People got rich once they found out that they were the sons/daughters of a dying millionaire, not because of hard work or an entrepreneurial bent.

That experience was less than edifying. Media is a powerful transmitter of ideas, and the things I just listed are definitely not what we want to teach our people. I dislike teleserye for three main reasons: first, they promote the wrong attitudes and values among the masses; second, they reinforce already defective social institutions that we have; third, they are counterproductive modes of enjoyment.

The main actress of teleseryes is often a beautiful girl, meek and obedient. This is the “ideal” that producers want to communicate to the audience.

The problem is that this Maria Clara “ideal” is both impractical and outdated. A Maria Clara would have been a treasure five decades ago, but she is obsolete now. For a girl to succeed today, she has to be an independent thinker, assertive, smart, resourceful and creative. These qualities are missing from the teleserye bida, but the same qualities are the ingredients to a teleserye success story. The bida gets the man of her dreams, becomes financially well-off, and makes friends with the rest of the cast, and so on. And the audience is left to associate the bida’s Maria Clara qualities to a happy ending, which of course very rarely happens in real life.

Among the wrong attitudes and values promoted by teleserye is that rich people are “greedy” and “evil.” They are the ones who sit around all day, obsessing about their inheritance or plotting against the bida. They speak broken English (because straight Filipino is only for the middle class) and they are dressed up to the nine even when they are at home. Their families are frequently defective and their morals generally low.

There are many things wrong with this picture, but let me just focus on one: rich people are portrayed as lazy individuals, when in fact they generally are not. True, there are some of them who lead lives of leisure because their money essentially works for them. But most of them are highly dynamic, entrepreneurial and hardworking individuals. They are active and full of enthusiasm for what they do.

Sadly, this is not what teleserye teach their audience. What they say is that once you are rich, you can sit around and enjoy for the remainder of your life. The truth is, you will never be successful if this is your paradigm.

Another thing I hate is the common concept of success: it is winning a singing contest, being a popular “artista” [actor] or, worst of all, getting the “man of your dreams” (with high probability of that man being rich, this solving most of life’s problems). Success is seldom defined as topping a board exam or earning an MBA. It is never having one’s paper published in a well-known academic journal or developing a new technology suited for the Filipino environment. It is never an appointment as an economic planner for the country or becoming a topnotch software developer. I hear so many complain about the poor being ignorant about science or dreaming about nothing but a chance at the spotlight. Guess who gives them these ideas?

In teleserye, public officials are corrupt. Governors, congressmen, mayors and “barangay” [village] captains accept bribes and are frequently cronies of the rich.

Do we really want to reinforce the view that our government is corrupt? That laws can be bent by those who have money? I don’t want the Filipino people to believe that all our institutions are inefficient and rotten. I don’t want people to see how laws are broken over and over again because they are not supposed to be broken. People who break laws should face the consequences and should not get away with it because a relative has the money or the influence to get him out of the mess.

I would also like to ask why in these teleserye crimes never get solved by the police, but by private individuals without an official mandate. Law enforcement is supposed to be a serious business and essential to keeping peace and order. And law enforcement should be carried out by the appropriate authorities, not by people to take the law into their own hands.

Teleserye also love to show powerful families controlling the lives of people. These families are stuck in their haciendas and they order everyone about like the feudal lords of the last century. It is a very medieval kind of system where the state and the government are almost meaningless because real power rests in the hands of the wealthy.

Also, in this semi-feudal setup, social mobility is very slow or nonexistent. Individual progress is not attained unless a person has “kapit” [connection], which is not completely true. Semi-feudalism is changing in our country, which is why people must not be brainwashed into believing that they are destined to remain where they are. Social mobility is a key idea in our present economic model and it should be promoted. There are so many chances in the globalizing Philippine economy and teleserye should not hide that reality.

When people watch teleserye, they are transfixed, their minds and muscles inactive. They focus on the life of several fictional characters, completely forgetting real life. Personal development is overlooked, hobbies are ignored, goals are thrown out the window. No one will get anywhere if all he does is work, watch “telenovelas” [TV soaps] and sleep. Life is too short to waste on these shows. It is all right to enjoy these shows, but we should never fall captive to them (which is what is happening).

I don’t think teleserye are bad by themselves. What are wrong are the ideas and values they transmit. Filipinos ought to know better and choose better. These shows address millions of Filipinos! I hope we will learn to use them well.

Kristy Anne Abello, 21, has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and works as a systems analyst.