Survivor Pilipinas Initial Comments

Survivor Philippines on GMA piloted last night after around 30 minutes of delay (their website initially posted a start time of 9PM).


Things I initially like about the show:
1) The production apparently spent enough to give the show a feel of legitimacy with respect to the original franchise.

2) The casting crew managed to veer away from showbiz towards the "masa" (masses). I like the casting of the yaya, labandera, waiter, driver and farmer's daughter. It's good that there were only a handful of models among this season's cast.

3) No text voting! I would not be surprised if this changes later. GMA could introduce a Rupert-like contest for the favorite survivor to receive some sort of consolation price - possible when the clear fan favorite is booted off the island while the hated ones fight for the grand price.

Things I DO NOT initially like about the show:
1) The Philippine edition of the show is aired ala your typical daily soap opera. Crap. Crap. Crap. The local TV giants have degenerated enough to the point that they cant spend the needed directing and editing energy to make a superb once a week show. To cover their lack of editing talents, they decided to just throw in almost all clips taken from the show and air them over five days in a week. One of the reasons the original Survivor lasted so many seasons is that the show is action-packed and well edited. There would almost no boring moments each episode as the clips shown are handpicked. The local version hinted several dragging moments (the swimming portion alone took almost a third of the episode).

2) Paolo Bidiones the "boring". I pray Paolo buy DVD's (not from the sidewalk) of the original Survivor and study Jeff Probst more. I understand that Paolo has taken the time to learn Jeff's lines and translated them to Filipino but he failed in the tone. When you listen to Jeff, you feel the excitement (particularly in the challenges). Listening to Paolo drone about the action during the challenges and the show suffer. It's like listening to the late Blas Ople act as sports commentator for a PBA game. If Paolo fail to be more like Jeff during the tribal councils (fair and insightful) and be more like Kalbo Abunda during a typical showbiz talk show, I will stop watching.

3) Caused by reason #1 above, the show is slowwwwwww!

4) The first twist of the game - the punishment for the losers of the first reward challenge. The losers have to spend their first evening chained to each other. In the original survivor, for the interest of fairness, Jeff would declare that there would be twists/reward/punishment after a challenge but the contestants would learn about it after and that the twist is written in a scroll. This ensures that the production could not change the "twists" depending on the outcome of the contest. Who could be sure if Paolo lessened the punishment since the girls lost the challenge. Small detail but it typifies Pinoy's lack of respect for fairness and transparency.