Really Remote Control

Watching television in a foreign country can feel … foreign. Or sometimes, not at all.

- Guy Martin

THE HOTEL I WAS AT IN Zamboanga City, in the southern Philippines, a few years back offered an apt television diet for its place in the world. Zamboanga City is a trading post on the island of Mindanao, where a sectarian war between Muslim separatists and Manila has raged for some 400 years. In other words, nearly a half-millennium on, Manila’s strategy of drawing the southern Muslim clans toward peace via armed conflict has sometimes slowed but hasn’t truly stopped the fighting.

But the war had become a local industry, so the hotel housed a few business folk from Manila, a sprinkling of intelligence officers clad in more or less convincing mufti, Philippine army officers rotating in to run the jungle fighting, and myself, a reporter. The TV offerings consisted of the excellently weepy soap Pangako sa ’Yo (The Promise), the wildly popular Filipino edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and Magpakailanman (literally, Forevermore), an “inspirational” docu-bio-series utilizing the life stories of Philippine celebrities who triumphed over adversity. These shows played out against the usual televised news backdrop of mudslides and ferry sinkings across the archipelago, and the local Mindanao fare—pipe bomb attacks, guerrilla movements, army operations, drug raids, and kidnappings— most of which we knew, since we were in it.