Ok, so I was catching up on some entertainment news today
and came across an article from on.cc (which I’ve linked up below). In the article, on.cc – or, more accurately,
their television division ON TV – officially announced yesterday (9/13) that
they are collaborating with TVB on a special poll. Together with TVB, they’ve chosen 10 ‘classic’
TVB series for netizens to vote on (via Facebook) during the 2 week timespan
from 9/14 to 9/28 -- TVB has agreed to re-broadcast the series with the most
votes in their midnight timeslot starting on 10/5 (once the currently airing
series Time Before Time is finished).
According to the article, the voting will go through 2
phases: in the first phase, OnTV will
post detailed information about each series, including cast photos, plot
summary, video clips, recommendations on ‘must-watch’ scenes, etc so that each
person voting will supposedly have all the details they need to vote. The second phase will launch next week,
though OnTV didn’t give any details on what this phase consists of. Also, a very important point – there is no
limit to the number of series each person can vote for…so for example, if you
like all 10 series, you can vote for all 10 if you want.
Before I list out the 10 series that OnTV and TVB chose,
I just want to say this: maybe I’m
thinking too much into things, but I just find it very coincidental that I
wrote about this EXACT SAME idea on my blog a few days before this whole thing
got rolled out. Technically, I wrote 2
posts on TVB midnight timeslot – the first one was in July in which I kind of ‘complained’
about TVB’s choice of series and informally gave them some ‘suggestions’ on the
next series to air. Then last week, I
did a most detailed post on which series I would’ve chosen if I were the
program lineup director. In addition to
that, I also relayed the suggestion of doing a poll to have audiences pick what
they want to watch in that timeslot.
Well, looks like now the poll is actually happening – though the part I
don’t understand is why OnTV is doing the poll rather than TVB themselves. [Sidenote:
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but there’s a part of me that
can’t help but think that OnTV is associated with TVB somehow. I already suspected this a few weeks ago when
I was able to trace a picture that a few websites had used back to OnTV’s video
clip – in that picture, OnTV was reporting on news about Lesley Chiang and Fred
Cheng’s breakup. They interviewed Lesley
while she was at HKTV’s dinner for their series Hidden Faces, yet in the picture, any reference to HKTV (including
their logo and the name of their series) were all blurred out. When I saw the picture, I had questioned why
a mainstream media outlet -- which, in order to maintain credibility and
reputability, should take a ‘neutral’ stance when reporting news – would have
the need to ‘block out’ another company’s logo and all references to that
company’s product (especially since they didn’t block out the logo to the
commercial sponsors of that event, Vidal Sassoon). I later discovered that the picture was ‘clipped’
from the news video posted on OnTV’s website – sure enough, when I went on to
check, everything in the video referring to HKTV was blurred out. This is the first time that I’ve actually
seen a mainstream media outlet in HK take such ‘action’ against a company that
is not one of their competitors. Well,
now this whole thing with the poll further fuels my ‘suspicion’ about OnTV’s
position. I won't go too much into it here, since it's kind of irrelevant to this post, but will probably revisit this topic again later on.]
Now that I’ve said my piece about the poll and OnTV, here
are the 10 series that OnTV and TVB have chosen for audiences to vote. (Discerning readers will probably notice that
a few of these series were on my ‘suggestions’ list as well, except my list was
limited to series from the 80s and 90s eras only).
Here are the 10 series from OnTV (in no particular
order):
War of the Genders
(男親女愛)
– 2000
Looking Back in
Anger (義不容情) – 1989
The Duke of Mount
Deer (鹿鼎記) – 1984
The Feud of Two
Brothers (流氓大亨) – 1986
It Runs in the
Family (孖仔孖心肝) – 1990
Detective
Investigation Files (刑事偵緝檔案) – 1995
Don’t Look Now
(執到寶)
– 1980
Files of Justice
(壹號皇庭)
– 1992
Police Cadet (新紮師兄)
– 1984
A Step Into the
Past (尋秦記) – 2001
And which series do I vote for? Without a doubt, definitely Looking
Back in Anger (not hard to guess considering I’ve been ‘harping’ on TVB
since July to air that series in their midnight timeslot and also relayed that
thought in 2 blog posts). Outside of
that series, I really don’t want to vote for the others because I actually
disagree with some of the series on the list.
I’m actually curious to know how they came up with these 10 choices
because as a long-time TVB fan who is familiar with their series from the late
70s to now, there are definitely other more ‘classic’ series that would bump
some of these series out of top 10 contention. I'll have to do a little more digging but hopefully, either OnTV or TVB explain their criteria for choosing these series somewhere on their website or FB pages.
Source links:
OnTV Facebook page (series profiles)
on.cc article (brief series intros)
