Does Singapore TV Suck?

By Lim Jun Rong Terence

Local TV gets a pretty bad rep amongst us Gen Z youngsters. Chances are, you’ve barely seen any local content since you’ve had your shiny new Netflix subscription. Why wait for Channel 8’s 9pm dramas when you can watch Brooklyn 99 or The Good Place at your own convenience?

But what is it about local TV that turns us off? Here are three of the most common reasons found in our surveys.

1. The Acting

The most common answer. Many are quick to dismiss MediaCorp acting as bad or cringeworthy, but I disagree.

There are some cringey actors here and there, but many MediaCorp actors excel at expressing emotion. When characters experience emotional outbursts, they can deliver with instant tears, voices cracked with years of in-character frustration, and realism that stays true to life. The problem, however, is that this happens way too often.

(Zhang Zhenhuan was nominated for Best Actor at Star Awards 2017, for his work in The Dream Job. His acting has bagged him the Best Male Character Award in 2015, crowning him as one of the most promising young Mediacorp actors in the 2010s.) Source: Toggle

Singaporean acting, for the most part, lacks subtlety. It tells us exactly what the characters feel at each given moment and plays emotional piano music, essentially saying “Hey, this is where you should feel <insert emotion here>.” This isn’t always a bad thing, but when done too often, it loses effect. We no longer see it as good acting, we see it as “just another shouting match”.

2. Boring and repetitive shows

Many of our respondents talk about how unoriginal our shows are. One respondent stated that “Every new channel 8 drama is either a family show (that always ends with a reunion dinner) or a generic police drama.”

But that’s not completely the case. Doppelganger (2018) is a drama about a man who assumes the identity of a deceased businessman and falls in love with the deceased’s wife and children. 29 February (2018) is about a man trapped in an infinite timeloop on February 29 where his loved ones die over and over again.

(29 February was the first MediaCorp TV drama with a premise that revolves around time and space.) Source: Toggle

There is still the occasional generic family drama, but to say that MediaCorp hasn’t been innovating is untrue.

3. Trying too hard to pander to the Teens

(The infamous MediaCorp dab in the MediaCorp Chinese New Year Music Video in 2017 was the subject of widespread ridicule from the teens in Singapore.) Source: MediaCorp Channel 8 YouTube channel

Local TV tries so, so hard to appeal to the teenage audience, and that deserves some credit. But what they fail to realize is that it takes a lot more than just the casual mention of Pokémon GO or the latest meme trend to bring us back. Sometimes it’s funny to laugh at, but more often, it’s cringey.

But hey, can we blame them for trying? With online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, Mediacorp is slowly losing its teenage audience, but the fact that they tried shows that they care about us, for at least a little bit.

We are giving local TV way too little credit.

There have been some great, compelling shows such as Lion Mums and the Little Nyonya have received critical acclaim with the local audience, the latter boasting a record-breaking viewership rating of 33.8% (~1.7million viewers).

Yet when ‘Local TV’ comes to mind, most of us don’t think of the good ones. We think of the lacklustre examples – shows we’ve watched months or even years ago, scenes that left a bad taste in our mouths that we watch in passing without knowing any context of the story and plot.

We believe that foreign TV is better than local TV, but what we don’t realize is that for every Game of Thrones and Brooklyn 99s, there are hundreds of bad shows airing on foreign TV screens.

I’m sure most of us want local TV to become good, but if we don’t even give it a chance, we won’t even see it when it happens.