Back to my mission to save the humanity from morality harassment and intellectual degradation of accursed Indonesian TV Shows *spectators' cheers from distance*
Behold the types of Indonesian TV shows :
Sinetron
Sinetron, come from words "Sinema Elektronik" which means Electronic Cinema, is a show that has been shown to, watched, and literally enjoyed by below average Indonesians, it is equivalent to Soap Opera in US, Dorama in Japan , or Telenovela in Spain.
There are types of Sinetrons, such as:
Complicated Love Stories
The story almost like movie's teenage love story, but the difference is how much obstacle the main character have to face, as usual we start from a gloomy-desolate-abused girl as main protagonist and we will make her as sad as possible but still logical to average Indonesians that we make her came from a very poor family and will make her walk through car showroom wearing garbage bag, then let her get scolded and expelled for how horrible and filthy she is. Yeah, we love showing the huge social-economical difference. Then came the main actor, who is (or in the end will be) awesome-marvelous-gorgeous-handsome-smart-romantic-sensitive-caring-super rich guy who 'was' totally out of her league.
The title of the Sinetron usually taken from the main character's name, none other than the girl, e.g. Jelita(pretty), Kasih(affection), Suci(holy), Mutiara(pearl), so these titles could have 2 meaning, the literal meaning, and the name of main protagonist, creative huh?
The story starts by showing how miserable the girl is, how awfully poor she is, how she could be so helpless and cry a lot that will make you hate her so much instead of feeling sorry, then the guy came, with all his majestic charming charisma, with the best ride the producer can afford. Then the two 'coincidentally' meet each other and feel the sensational attraction to each other that not long after that, they meet again, start knowing each other, fell in love, living inside happy love bubbles that it feels like the world just belong to those two.
From there, the director would tweak the story to be more outrageous interesting by adding antagonist, which is most likely to be the malevolent cunning mother of the guy, who would totally oppose their relationship, the mother would do everything to ruin her relationship, from words into physical contacts. From this point, the girl's duty is to show the audience how powerless she is and squeeze out her tears. Before she could solve her problems, the director would add more antagonists, such as: rich bitchy female friend of the guy, who has a big crush on him and loved by mom; evil uncle; annoying housemaid; the slutty girls gang lead by the guy's female friend; nasty stepmom and stepdad; random bullies. C-C-C-COMBO FINISH!!
The Sinetron antagonists will always do a lot of "whispering" in their heads thinking the next evil plan to ruin the relationship while the camera zoom their face, maybe it's some kinda image training to increase the effectiveness and success rate of the plan.
But true love always win, somehow she could handle it, don't care it's about how patient she is, or the appearance of angelic spiritual guidance in 15th episode whatsoever. The guy eventually would choose her over his family, friends, siblings to show what true love is, and the long story will have a happy ending.
Religion and Curses
The religious Sinetron is popular in 2007, this sinetron is like one-shot where the episodes didn't connect each other. So they have to prepare a stock of lots of characters to take a role in each episodes, or at least didn't do repetition that the audience would recognize.
I didn't mean to mock or despise a certain religion, I'm truly sorry if there's any readers offended.
The main idea should be about religion, Indonesians mostly are moslem, so the sinetron show us the moslem worship and moslem education. How people living their lives with what they believe in and the way they keep the sacred habit of their religion such as prayers, fasting, etc.
But, what they show in the sinetron is the result for being not abide to their religion and doing bad stuffs, which is fake and ridiculous that make people retch very terrifying.
Example: There's a woman who believes in faith, she has a son, which is awful and bad, he lies, cheats, being rude, kills people, and do a lot of other bad stuffs. At the point his mom could not stand it anymore, she prayed for God to punish her son, and suddenly a roaring mighty thunderbolt strike him to death, he's nothing but black-gooey-thingy.
I suppose the show is meant to be educational, but what they're doing is just scaring people, they give the antagonists a horrible death that people won't give shit about it couldn't imagine how 'coincidental' it is. Anyway, beside thunderbolts (it's one of favorite cause it's the most logical and possible to happen) there's a lot more, which is I don't exactly remember. Maybe: Curse of rotten body parts, Curse of bleeding eyeballs, Curse of fire-coming-from-nowhere burn you into ashes, Curse of fake-and-low-budget-3D-bees swarm which looks like flies, and many more.
Combat
I don't know what I should call this type of sinetron. The title of this sinetron (and of course the main character him/herself) is taken from the name of heroes/fighters in folklore. The plot of the story supposed to run according to the tale, but because the directors are puny but greedy creative, the story goes way complicated and cheesy. They add characters which didn't belong to the tale, prolong the story, and create new enemies. These "enemies" are the problem I'm discussing.
It would make sense if the main protagonist fight the main antagonist, won the battle, bring back peace, and the story ends, right? Wrong! We won't let it slip that fast, we will make the battle wayyyyyyy outrageous by make the main protagonist which is a human being, fight a dragon...repeat, dragon... Hell yeah, Bloody Mother Fucking DRAGON! I dunno whether the dragon made using Ms.Paint or Flash, it is so bad that you probably rather stab a fork into your eyeballs and eat them than watch the poor visual effect. You will see how freakin' cheesy the dragon is, it flies with weird movement, the coloring is bad, the texture is nasty, and the lighting always wrong. Oh yeah, do you like Alvin and The Chipmunks? You do? We also do! The difference is, you make a furball talks, we make a dragon talks! Isn't that awesome?
It is the same to the main character, who supposed tomake shame of himself and sacrifice his self esteem fight the dragon, it isn't fair if the dragon is the only one who could fly, he could fly too, by using his jump and control the gravity that he could pummel the dragon 5 minutes in the air before touch back ground. Oh and 1 more annoying thing, ALL the characters in that show are dubbed, I can't figure the reason why, but it's always like that, so all the characters have the same voice level and it's echoing all over, makes me hate the show even more.
Musical
This Sinetron is similar to Bollywood's (I don't know what it's called). The typical of lovey dovey guy and girl, running and singing a song. But the Indonesian version is worse. Maybe it's because the Bollywood version is just singing random words I can't hear but I could completely understand the Indonesian version, which is Kampungan (this is an adjective we use to describe something below average, weird, cheesy, and not up to date).
The show is exactly the same with Indians', we have a pair couple, we make them fell in love, then we make them flirt, chasing each other, and singing a song of disgrace. If you know the Bollywood's, you should know the habit of running all over seashore, singing with dubbed voice, typical fighting scene, hiding obviously behind thin palm tree while peeking and winking, a gang of back singer/dancer coming from nowhere, and the woman always have a high pitch eardrum-damage voice. We do that too, in addition plus scrubby slow-mo and disturbing zoom in and out to the character's face.
Reality Show
and not having a "reasonable" excuses list before, please stop humiliate yourself by showing up in there, that way we could get rid of the show and less people regretting of how they wasted they life and make shame on themselves .
It would make sense if the main protagonist fight the main antagonist, won the battle, bring back peace, and the story ends, right? Wrong! We won't let it slip that fast, we will make the battle wayyyyyyy outrageous by make the main protagonist which is a human being, fight a dragon...repeat, dragon... Hell yeah, Bloody Mother Fucking DRAGON! I dunno whether the dragon made using Ms.Paint or Flash, it is so bad that you probably rather stab a fork into your eyeballs and eat them than watch the poor visual effect. You will see how freakin' cheesy the dragon is, it flies with weird movement, the coloring is bad, the texture is nasty, and the lighting always wrong. Oh yeah, do you like Alvin and The Chipmunks? You do? We also do! The difference is, you make a furball talks, we make a dragon talks! Isn't that awesome?
It is the same to the main character, who supposed to
Musical
This Sinetron is similar to Bollywood's (I don't know what it's called). The typical of lovey dovey guy and girl, running and singing a song. But the Indonesian version is worse. Maybe it's because the Bollywood version is just singing random words I can't hear but I could completely understand the Indonesian version, which is Kampungan (this is an adjective we use to describe something below average, weird, cheesy, and not up to date).
The show is exactly the same with Indians', we have a pair couple, we make them fell in love, then we make them flirt, chasing each other, and singing a song of disgrace. If you know the Bollywood's, you should know the habit of running all over seashore, singing with dubbed voice, typical fighting scene, hiding obviously behind thin palm tree while peeking and winking, a gang of back singer/dancer coming from nowhere, and the woman always have a high pitch eardrum-damage voice. We do that too, in addition plus scrubby slow-mo and disturbing zoom in and out to the character's face.
Reality Show
Indonesian have this ability to make a reality show fake but people think "this is reality show, it must be real!" as moving and touching as possible.
Love and Dating
There is one show that help us to determine whether our partner (always mostly a guy) is a sly cheater or not, we just have to contact the person responsible for running the show and request them to make the mess, then we (the requester) just have to sit down spy your own partner being punk'd. They will prepare one person, which is obviously hotter and more attractive than the requester, to flirt with the victim (requester's date), and see if he will fall for the trap which he don't know is a trap or stay being a good boy and maintain the relationship while a big fat chance provided.
Try think about this, you have a cat, you feed it with dry food (does cats eat dryfood? I don't care) a whole year. One day you came with a big-healthy-juicy-tempting salmon and expect your cat to not eat it and stay with its old boring plain drain food. How is that possible? So this show's success rate must be high, if you're not a very attractive, or filthy rich, or literally possess your date, don't ask the question that you know the answer, which is torture-yourself-watching-your-mate-abandon-you-and-screaming-lunatically-at-him-then-being-shown-on-TV
Social and Economy Exposure
This is the show where Indonesiansdespise economical condition of minor civilian and exploit them on wide screen while laugh in background full of satisfaction put their concern on low economical minority by showing in public the life of poor people. They record the life of the person, show us how difficult his/her life, how horrible their house, how nasty their foods, how people (read: bunch of low-paycheck asses playing role of abusing them to make us feel sorry for them even more) treat them badly. There are plenty shows using this same formula, which I will just mention the ones I remember:
Social and Economy Exposure
This is the show where Indonesians
- House MakeOver: here they give the person with most wrecked house in the area to have their house from pitiful-debris into Indonesian-standard-happy-family-house.
- Faking: there are 2 types of faking they do, they can ask the crew to play the role, the crew asking people for help and the ones who help the crew will get a reward; or having a sallow hopeless face of some random poor kid/woman (which looks so powerless) to asking people some help
which is selling worthless junks in unlogistic price and making excuse such as "my mom is sick"while recorded and during the record, there will be unbelievable amount of people abuse and make fun of them soooo bad that I think they abuse them and get paid, and of course wide screen appearance as bonus payment. - Surprise Money: we give the money and require them to spent as much as he/she can. By giving a person 10 million rupiahs (about 1 grand) we can watch them in 30 minutes running all over the city buying stuffs and exhausted to the utmost (YAY~).
I make this as one subtopic because I hate it! I hate it very very much! This show is imitated from one show out there which has a similar name (I don't know exactly but I'm sure there is) and I doubt Indonesian asked the permission to make this show, well, whatever.
This show helps people to find his/her mate by let a girl whored up to the max show up and a bunch of desperate for getting laid guys will first press the button to choose whether or not this girl fulfill his standard, in other words decide if this girl is pretty enough or just a bag of poop. But sometimes when the girl is hideous, we get the feeling to make her less pathetic, and this is what cause the next disaster.
A guy would choose to stay just one first round intending to back off for the very next round, but it's not the same with the other guys who chose not to risk their futures by staying out of the competitors list in the first go. So then the "Mr. Nice Guy" would remain alone in the darkness with thebeast girl. Then he only got 2 choices between accept her and screw his life or reject her and screw both the girl and the entire show.
The funny part I am about to tell is the 'smart' reasons they tell to reject the girl they mess with, which they purposely and accidentally chose:
A guy would choose to stay just one first round intending to back off for the very next round, but it's not the same with the other guys who chose not to risk their futures by staying out of the competitors list in the first go. So then the "Mr. Nice Guy" would remain alone in the darkness with the
The funny part I am about to tell is the 'smart' reasons they tell to reject the girl they mess with, which they purposely and accidentally chose:
- "Umm... I'm just not feeling 'it' "
- "She reminds me of my Ex"
- "I don't think we could get along"
- "Because she's wearing highheels that makes her looks... Vulgar"
- "I have a girlfriend" (which I could translate as "I am a huge douchebag!")
- "She's wearing white dress" the host ask why "Because... Because... It's easily stained and I don't like it!" (He scores 10 for my Dumbass-Peanut-Brained-Idiotic-Reason scale)
And The Rest
Are typical shows which I really can't tell what kind it is, because I know it only exists in Indonesia and I think we haven't invented the genre for it.
There's one show called Term*h*k-m*h*k (if you're Indonesian, you should've known what the hell is that), where the dumbos consists of (I suppose) 1 guy and 1 girl being a drama queens trying to bug into some person's life, which I suppose is a drama too, because they make the story so tears-squeezing-dramatic (only affects low taste people, not me) and make the conflict unbelievably... unbelievable. The client (person whose life been made fuss of) should have a serious issue about his family, relationship, or whatever occur to him/her (mostly her) that the nosy dickballs (read: the 1 guy & 1 girl) will help him/her to get through that and solve his/her problem. I don't know whether the person they're helping request them to help or not, it doesn't matter, even when we don't give shit about who they are, it'll shouldn't be a pain in the arse having 2 'being' accompany us and helping us to knowing the truth whatsoever.
The story always go crazier than expected, I'll give an example of what I watched:
The client(girl) lost her best friend and know something fishy going on her friend with her partner's relationship, because of 'battle' scars on the friend. She (plus two become they) follow the friend and spy on her. Then when there's a chance, they sneak in her house and find a lot of inappropriate-stuffs-for-people-to-do-on-bed. When they found out the shocking truth and going out of the house after taking pictures of the inappropriate-stuffs-for-people-to-do-on-bed, the friend came and start freaked out and being crazy chick knowing people sneak in her room, the client then start to explain and wanting her to break up with her partner because of what he did that harm her, but the friend got angry and start saying stuffs like "who the hell do you think you are?", and "mind your own business &^$@*#!!". Finally the client failed at taking her back and there comes 1 more shocking truth, it turns out that the client was lesbian lover of her friend and wanted her to go back by doing whatever she could to ruin her relationship, that's what she said and recorded and shown on TV. Then finally we got to see the client walking alone with sad face with sepia effect, so ironic...
Then the nosy guys (or additional random person) get the chance to end the show by talking wisely about how we don't screw our life depending on what task they done.
And one more show, this show starring a guy from love and dating show, which tends to broke people's relationship by provoking the victim into a cheater. The most douchey and annoying guy that people hate the most, suddenly become host of 1 show which he suddenly could hypnotize person. He goes to crowded places and show off in front of many people, choose a person 'randomly', make him/her sit, then perform miracle. Typical hypnotize, the person sit, close the eyes, drooping, and answer questions. Well, it should be obvious that this is a total bullshit, the person being hypnotized could say stuffs like "uuuhhh.." "mmm..." "I think..." "ngghh.. maybe.." when questioned, yet sometimes, they take a peek. I don't know if the cameramen or the clip editor being stupid, why showing a scene which ensure people who watch the show that it's fake? This is the most ridiculous show in entire earth.
And that's all I could tell about how horrible the Indonesian TV show is, if you're not Indonesian and came by to Indonesia, I suggest you to never watch TV shows here, just put on some DVD or playing computer games, it's wayyyy worthed than wasting your time in front of TV then put bleacher on your violated eyeballs afterwards.
The story always go crazier than expected, I'll give an example of what I watched:
The client(girl) lost her best friend and know something fishy going on her friend with her partner's relationship, because of 'battle' scars on the friend. She (plus two become they) follow the friend and spy on her. Then when there's a chance, they sneak in her house and find a lot of inappropriate-stuffs-for-people-to-do-on-bed. When they found out the shocking truth and going out of the house after taking pictures of the inappropriate-stuffs-for-people-to-do-on-bed, the friend came and start freaked out and being crazy chick knowing people sneak in her room, the client then start to explain and wanting her to break up with her partner because of what he did that harm her, but the friend got angry and start saying stuffs like "who the hell do you think you are?", and "mind your own business &^$@*#!!". Finally the client failed at taking her back and there comes 1 more shocking truth, it turns out that the client was lesbian lover of her friend and wanted her to go back by doing whatever she could to ruin her relationship, that's what she said and recorded and shown on TV. Then finally we got to see the client walking alone with sad face with sepia effect, so ironic...
Then the nosy guys (or additional random person) get the chance to end the show by talking wisely about how we don't screw our life depending on what task they done.
And one more show, this show starring a guy from love and dating show, which tends to broke people's relationship by provoking the victim into a cheater. The most douchey and annoying guy that people hate the most, suddenly become host of 1 show which he suddenly could hypnotize person. He goes to crowded places and show off in front of many people, choose a person 'randomly', make him/her sit, then perform miracle. Typical hypnotize, the person sit, close the eyes, drooping, and answer questions. Well, it should be obvious that this is a total bullshit, the person being hypnotized could say stuffs like "uuuhhh.." "mmm..." "I think..." "ngghh.. maybe.." when questioned, yet sometimes, they take a peek. I don't know if the cameramen or the clip editor being stupid, why showing a scene which ensure people who watch the show that it's fake? This is the most ridiculous show in entire earth.
And that's all I could tell about how horrible the Indonesian TV show is, if you're not Indonesian and came by to Indonesia, I suggest you to never watch TV shows here, just put on some DVD or playing computer games, it's wayyyy worthed than wasting your time in front of TV then put bleacher on your violated eyeballs afterwards.