Born in 1980, Louie Jon Sánchez witnessed pivotal changes television had gone through, from analog to its colored, remote-controlled iteration, to flatscreens and smartphones. At a young age, he saw television not only as a household fixture but a way of life, as his penchant for soap operas — radio or television serials often driven by melodrama and sponsored by soap manufacturers — developed increasingly, beginning with Ilocano radio dramas in his province.

Although he couldn’t pinpoint exactly the logic behind this proclivity for serial dramas, it was heightened further when he was introduced to Mexican telenovela Marimar in high school — a fascination he would carry with him when he matriculated at the De La Salle University Manila in 2007 for a doctoral degree in literature and as he held a teaching post at the Ateneo de Manila University in 2014, instructing undergraduates in a course on Philippine teleserye.

So began his probing of our country’s serialized televisual narratives and its radiant inception and transfigurations from the 1930s until 2016, eventually becoming his dissertation, completed in 2018, and culminating in his latest book on cultural criticism, Ang Drama ng Ating Búhay: Isang Kultural na Kasaysayan ng Teleserye, released by DLSU Publishing House this year. 

The book’s provenance, Sánchez tells me, also has a lot to do with another book published in 1982, Nobelang Tagalog, 1905 1975: Tradisyon At Modernismo, arguably the earliest study of the Tagalog novel written by literary giant Soledad S. Reyes, who also oversaw the work to fruition and lauded it as “a pioneering work.”

“That book looked at the Tagalog novel as a mirror of Filipino life,” says the author. “And I was also thinking of that same idea about the teleserye. I tried to look into how I can possibly create a perspective that’s similar to that theoretical framework. And I thought of the teleserye as a drama, as the drama of Filipino life.”

Parallel to Reyes’ book, Sánchez knew he had to write Ang Drama ng Ating Búhay in Filipino to dispel the “misconception about scholarship being filled with jargon and fury.” And although an abridged, English version of the text can be accessed online, Sánchez says “the full experience of the teleserye has been captured by the Filipino language.”

The title, a follow-up to Abangán: Mga Pambungad na Resepsion sa Kultura ng Teleserye issued by UST Publishing House in 2022, will be formally launched on November 23.

Before becoming a literary and cultural scholar, though, Sánchez first ventured into creative writing, which was the concentration of his masteral degree at DLSU. Past this, he lived out several lives working for a nongovernmental organization and writing for the Philippines Graphic and Business Mirror.

Now an associate professor of broadcast communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Sánchez has since authored a number of poetry and essay collections, including Siwang sa Pinto ng Tabernakulo under Librong LIRA and Pagkahaba-haba man ng Prusisyon: Mga Pagtatapat at Pahayag ng Pananampalataya under UP Press, and has translated eminent writers like Edith Tiempo, Franz Kafka, and Ivana Dobrakovova.

The televisual narratives Sánchez chronicles and sorts by period in the book not only move across the cultural and historical aisle but also chart the socio-political conditions gnawing at every Filipino life, regime after regime.

With terrific command of the language he writes in, he navigates the corners that make the soap opera a popular form, at turns beloved and belittled, as well as a commodity exported worldwide. He pals around with both the viewed and the viewer to enflesh precisely the drama of our fraught lives.

Ahead of the book launch, I spoke with the author about cultural craft, archiving, the future of serial dramas, and why scholarship exists past storytelling. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The book’s front cover, designed and illustrated by Filipino artist Ginoe. Photo courtesy of Louie Jon Sánchez 

You completed the study in 2018, but how and when did you realize that your fascination with soap operas had to culminate in a book?

When I entered the PhD program of La Salle in 2007, I was already thinking of studying television. I was really interested in Philippine television and a very formative subject was literary history which I took under Professor Paz Verdadez Santos who’s now in Bicol. She actually showed me the importance of writing literary histories and how it accounts for not only literary formations but cultural formations at large. So that’s when it started. 

The teleserye studies only came to me around 2015 because I was an on-and-off student in my PhD. Sometimes I would enroll, most times I wouldn’t. So the only time that I decided to actually finish my PhD was around 2015.

And so many things have already happened to me around that time. First, around 2014, when I was still teaching in Ateneo de Manila University, I offered an undergraduate teleserye course. So the teleserye course is essentially the impetus to the writing of the dissertation, the writing of the book. It was in the undergrad elective where I actually explored the idea of the evolution of the soap opera — from its early forms on radio to its burgeoning forms on television back in 2015.

2014 to 2015 is a very important time for me because that was the 15th year of the teleserye concept. The teleserye was first introduced to us in 2000 via Pangako Sa ‘Yo. So in a way, I was also marking that important milestone. But earlier, around 2010-2011, I started to think about my own fascination with Koreanovelas. We called them Koreanovelas. And actually the study of the teleserye began with my explorations of Koreanovelas or K-dramas and how they have been starting to shape back then the form of the teleserye. 

So when I started to publish about K-dramas, I was thinking about the most logical thing to do. Back then, I hadn’t made up my mind about a dissertation topic. So that kinda inspired me. You know, the idea of trying to trace the evolution of the teleserye until that moment when it is starting to be shaped by K-drama. So those two things, my study of the K-drama and the teleserye elective which I offered during the school year 2014-2015 at Ateneo. These were the impetus for the writing of the book.

Why was it so important to you for serialized drama to be read as literature and to map how the cultural history of the Pinoy teleserye reflects the social history of our country?

Literature is basically a perspective that I used in the book and in assessing soap operas. I felt that as a discipline, it offered me the capacity to closely read the form and the content of the teleserye and at the same time ruminate on its evolution. So that’s precisely what literature, literary studies contributed to the shape of the book. 

And I thought of the teleserye as a drama, as the drama of Filipino life. And I say this because of these points: Number one, the soap opera, conventionally, is set in the domestic space. So most of its stories conventionally are about the home. Hence, they are about the lives of the people who listen to them. Primarily women, homemakers or the housewives.

For the longest time, we have been using dramatic forms as metaphors for current affairs. I’ve written elsewhere about Moro-moro, for example, being a metaphor for a very dysfunctional political system and political processes. 

I also believe that the teleserye is being used as a way to distill and frame our understanding of current affairs in history. So towards the end of the book, I would talk about Senate inquiries or blue ribbon committee investigations or even the impeachment trial of the late chief justice [Renato] Corona as some form of a teleserye.

So my point is we’ve been using the teleserye as a way to apprehend very complex experiences in our day-to-day lives and our precarious histories.

Was access to the materials you used and shows you studied in the book an issue? If so, how does piracy factor into this and into the work of cultural and media scholars at large?

I’ll probably just talk about the problem of the archive because this is an issue that I had to think about while I was writing the book. I covered some close to 80 years of the evolution of the teleserye from its early forms on radio to 2016.

Many of the materials I had to include in the book, specifically those from the 1960s to a big part of the 1990s, they’re not available anywhere. Perhaps they’re available in the official archives of the TV networks but they’re not accessible to me. There must be collectors out there who have recorded these programs but these are private collections. So we have a really big problem about archiving, especially media studies. 

And I think this is where cinema studies is much better off because they already have an organized body of knowledge and they value archiving and restoration in the field. We’re not there yet. The Philippines is not there yet in terms of academic archiving in media studies.

I have certain files of programs, of soap operas, but they’re basically pieces of materials from a personal collection. We do not have yet an institution or infrastructures to actually house these materials. And the more organized archives are inaccessible and highly guarded precisely because the networks can still make money out of them.

So they show them on their official platforms. But when I was studying teleserye, it was very limited. My access to the primary texts, essentially the programs themselves, are essentially nil. There’s really nothing. So what did I do? I had to look for people who were part of those productions. I interviewed them. I sat with them for many times. And I talked about the products, their production processes, and their other memories. 

In the mid 1990s, I was already watching television. So a lot of those things that I included, I have seen them myself. So that was actually part of my limitations when I was selecting materials to include, [that] there must be people and other archival materials that would support the writing of their critical synopsis or I should have seen them myself, so from the mid 1990s onwards, most of the soap operas that I mentioned there I’ve seen them myself.

About piracy, well, you can say that. But you know, it’s not really a matter of piracy. There were people in the past who have been recording programs on television. It’s part of their personal collection, so I wouldn’t really call that piracy. They’re mostly nostalgists [who] want to keep a record of television. Television is a very harried medium; it’s not like film which would usually have these pieces of film celluloid that could be kept somewhere, that could be digitized. We don’t have access to that. That’s one of the problems of media studies scholars. 

Obviously, you write longform, and I wonder if the aversion to this particular writing worries you, considering the shifting attention spans of new audiences who favor bite-sized, visual-heavy content? How do you think that bodes for literary, cultural, or media criticism and studies locally?

Well, the scholarship is a genre. So I’m not really worried about it being obsolete in the age of short-form storytelling because it has its own uses. The scholarship, the criticism, the literary history, cultural history, it has its own use. What could be possibly done is for the scholarship to be translated, adapted into the short forms that you are mentioning. 

So I think it won’t die. It’s not going to be overrun by short-form storytelling, precisely because it’s not just storytelling. Scholarship is not just storytelling. It’s more than that. You put in a lot of researching, a lot of thinking, a lot of fieldwork, and put it together, synthesize everything.

I’m curious to know what you think about the direction of serialized dramas in the streaming age and how the pandemic might have changed it.

When you talk about streaming, you’re basically talking about a more shortened and a more succinct form of storytelling consisting of only a few episodes, under 10 episodes. [Sometimes] you could exceed a little over 16. Conventionally speaking, when you say one season of a show, it’s 13 episodes of a weekly broadcast. 

Our [TV] series right now is already starting to run in the way of [streaming] series. They only get to be a little bit prolonged, for example, when they get airtime on free TV and that’s precisely because free TV also has to earn. But we’re looking at the series as a very downscaled serial drama because it’s no longer done the way we have been doing series or teleseryes before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, we had the indulgence of time and a little bit of resources to actually prolong our narratives as long as our audiences enjoy or patronize the series and as long as there’s advertising support.

Nowadays you’re looking at a first airing on a streaming platform. It’s a different format. It’s shorter and you have a more thorough production process, more thorough brainstorming of the plot and the conflicts, for example; and well thought-out production design, and well-edited materials because you have to respond to the demands of a global audience.

We’re looking at the teleserye as a cleaner, tighter product, and it is good. But we haven’t really completely veered away from the free TV model. In fact, we’re still fighting for that aspect of Philippine broadcasting, which has been essentially downscaled by the pandemic and also by the repressions inflicted upon the industry by [former] president Duterte.

Until now, the broadcast industry is still recovering. And of course, we still can’t get out of the free TV model. Streaming is just another horizon that we are exploring but when we say Philippine broadcasting, it’s still free TV. And we have a lot of problems with free TV. – Rappler.com