Game K N Bang Maging Weakest Link? An Assessment of Primetime TV Game Shows’ Impact on Urban Poor Households

Report 32: Game K N Bang Maging Weakest Link? An Assessment of Primetime TV Game Shows’ Impact on Urban Poor Households

Trends have always been part of Philippine Television history. Recent memory will bring to mind the once popular emergence of TF films, Soap Operas, Mexican telenovelas, and Anime cartoons. Some of the traces of these fads would still be hinted on the current television menu. Presently, primetime TV game shows joined the trend bandwagon. It can be recalled that TV game shows are not entirely new. But instead, it is the revival of the games of chance started in the 1960s, with the likes of Kwarta o Kahan. However, this time around, television game shows have occupied almost all the primetime slots in almost all television stations. Most of the time, different game shows are aired simultaneously by rival TV networks.

With this phenomenon in mind, the researchers have recognized the need for a study dealing exactly with “How do primetime TV game shows affect Urban Poor households?” It has been realized that previous studies and related literature focused more on the technical aspect of TV program management, and as of yet, there has not been a study on the social implications of primetime TV game shows. The researchers decided then on to identify the effects of TV game shows on Urban Poor households as the primary objective of this paper. The TV viewing patterns for TV game shows among selected Urban Poor households will be described; the factors contributing to the popularity of TV game shows among the Urban Poor will be identified; its positive and negative effects on the values, general knowledge, leisure and economic opportunities on the audience will be assessed; and the implications of this phenomenon in working with Urban Poor
areas will be cited.