Winter hiatus. It takes place every year in America from late November to early February, and is the time during which TV networks regroup, reschedule, rewrite, and, while all that fun stuff is going on, repeat.
In other words, this is when there are 999 channels but nothing to watch.
Luckily, within any ten-block radius in New York City there are anywhere between 50 to 100 DVD shops. From monster-hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, to critically-acclaimed (and therefore nobody-watched) gems like Veronica Mars and Firefly, to shows including Scrubs and Newsradio, if it once existed, you can bet that it’s probably languishing on a shelf somewhere in DVD form.
Which brings us to the DVD that I found two days ago. It’s called Sports Night, and ran between 1998-2000 (tagline: “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”).
Sports Night never really caught on, and was axed by ABC despite 10 Golden Globes and 21 nominations. But although it shared superficially nothing in common with Sex And The City, which also premiered in 1998, it was as brilliant as City, and for the same reasons.
Most of the people who watched City will tell you that they started for the sex, but stayed for the stories. It’s easy to be ground-breaking, but there’s got to be something there underneath the surface if you want people to stay. Friends was a pop culture phenomenon because beneath all the canned laughter and glitzy living was heart. Joey looks headed for cancellation because it’s a shiny but ultimately shallow product. The creators of Lost don’t stress how much money the pilot cost (US $10m), but keep repeating in interviews that it’s a story about people and how people relate to each other.
It’s about people and how they relate to each other. It’s a simple enough maxim, but one that isn’t followed very often. That is why, after having channel-surfed through enough shows to know, I can tell you definitively that America is just as capable of producing entertainment garbage as Singapore is (and has). But the flip side of that argument is that Singapore is as capable of producing quality shows as America is. And when it does, people do notice.
Royston Tan created the international festival-touring Fifteen. Eric Khoo’s Be With Me only failed to qualify for the Oscars on a technicality, and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga actually did win an Oscar. Even Mediacorp, creator of the vomit-inducing Beautiful Connection (better known as Jiu Ceng Gao), the atrocious Living With Lydia, and the current rehash Love Concierge, once fanned a national fervor comparable to that of Lost and Housewives with its unmatched drama-thon Holland V.
All of these were quality shows because they were about people, real people, and about how these people related realistically to each other. The gangsters of Fifteen weren’t just Ah-Bengs. The cast of Singapore Gaga revealed the reality of Singapore behind Tourist Singapore. Mo Wanwan wasn’t just a fierce dragon-lady, Mo Yanyan wasn’t just a Villain, and Mo Jingjing wasn’t just innocent and cute.
Singapore is just as capable of telling good stories as America is. But it’s not an easy job, and you have to keep working at it, just as we journalists have to keep working to find the best ways to give you the best stories. And so it is one of my wishes for 2006 that Singapore excels not just economically, but artistically as well.
And yes, that means you too, Mediacorp. So can you please lay off the ‘conniving and evil sister’, ‘secretly rich and handsome guy’, and ‘innocent damsel-in-distress’ stereotypes already? The Mo family would be ashamed.
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