MANILA, Philippines?Decades ago, ?Family Feud? was a TV staple that viewers liked for its competition factor, and especially enjoyed because the opposing teams of contestants were made up of family members.
The ?family factor? clicked with the viewers, who watched the program at home with their own parents and siblings, making the show an empathetic viewing experience? and boosting its ratings figures as well.
In addition, the quiz show?s questions, which required contestants to guess what the US population thought about all sorts of topics and trivia, occasionally provided viewers with revealing tidbits of information.
Nothing earthshaking, but the factoids were deemed interesting, just the same, because they revealed opinions, beliefs and notions generally shared by families in the US.
Trouble was, logical answers were sometimes stymied, not because they were wrong, but because they didn?t score enough points in the informal opinion surveys the show conducted to bolster its quiz questions.
If the show clicked with US viewers, its new local version, hosted by Richard Gomez for GMA-7, can be expected to do even better here, because Filipinos are even more family-oriented than Americans.
Well-chosen teams
The weekday evening telecast of the show we caught pitted Joey Marquez and three of his children against Anjo Yllana, his wife Jackie and his siblings.
The teams were well-chosen, because Richard, Joey and Anjo were regulars on ?Palibhasa Lalake,? so they were comfortable with each other, imbuing the telecast with a fun, chummy breeziness that was a definite plus point for the show.
Joey was particularly in his ?comedic pater familias" element as he joshed with his children, prodding them to come up with more astute answers than the Yllanas, and ending up as the evening?s winning team.
The main element possibly going against the new show is its format?s time-worn predictability. It?s simply too well-known to be all that surprising.
The next time we watched the show, the competing teams were the Sottos versus the Ranillos. Things were less ?barkada-chummy,? but the proceedings were still diverting enough. This time around, the winning team (the Sottos) didn?t get to hit the 200-point mark in the championship round, so it didn?t get the P150,000 plum.
The team simply ran out of time. Which made us wonder if a possible factor could have been the length of the final quiz questions asked by Richard. If the questions were shorter, the team may have had more time to answer all of them. Just a thought.
?The Singing Bee?
On ABS-CBN, ?The Singing Bee? has returned as a weekend show, and is now one-hour long. Cesar Montano still hosts the program, but some of its segments have been adjusted.
The show now has a ?correction? portion, with contestants having to adjust some wrong lyrics. A more difficult new segment requires a contestant to fill in many blanks throughout the lyrics for an entire song. If he knows the number inside-out, he?s on easy street; if he doesn?t, he?s dead!
So, how have all these changes impacted on the show? There are times when we feel that the old 30-minute running time worked better. But, the new season?s longer time slot does give the production more elbow room that sometimes works in its favor.
A flaw that the show still has to remedy involves its choice of contestants. Some of them are still clueless about most of the songs in the competition. Worse, when they don?t know the correct lyrics, they giggle and make silly remarks that add insult to injury.
With more musically-knowledgeable contestants, the new ?The Singing Bee? could regain some of the appeal it had on its original version?s first season. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but chronic unfamiliarity (with lyrics) is a definite turn-off.
