Review: A Slow Start for ABS-CBN’s Ina, Kapatid, Anak

They didn’t even show up in the first week, but they lack title cards.

TYPE OF REVIEW : FIRST IMPRESSION REVIEW
Basic spoilers.

It was a slow first week for ABS-CBN’s newest teleserye, the awkwardly titled Ina, Kapatid, Anak.

The first week can be easily summed up as: Theresa (Cherry Pie Picache) runs away while pregnant as the surrogate for her half-sister Beatrice (Janice de Belen) and her husband, Julio (Ariel Rivera), whom Theresa has been in love with since college.

Basic. Interested yet?

Theresa’s mother left her and her drunk of a father for a wealthy man and gave birth to Beatrice. Theresa remains reasonably close to her mother and half-sister, but rich 2nd husband wants nothing to do with his wife’s first family. Meanwhile, Beatrice can’t get pregnant and has meltdowns over the fact. Desperate for money to get her father out of jail (thanks to rich 2nd husband), Theresa agrees to be a surrogate for Beatrice and Julio. But another one of Beatrice’s meltdowns pushes Theresa to run all the way to Cebu and raise the baby as her own. Meanwhile, Beatrice pops up after a brief separation from Julio with another baby they eventually raise as their own.

Okay.

So where’s the supposed Gossip Girl (meh) and Magkaribal (yay!) influences the series was supposed to have? I guess that’ll come in the 2nd week, now that the babies are young adults in the persons of Kim Chiu, Maja Salvador, Enchong Dee and Xian Lim. Or not, since you can’t trust any of the spin from Philippine network praise releases.

But it’s hard to think about how that supposed style of story would fit in with the overly traditional and old-fashioned first week setup.

Rival sisters or half-sisters or cousins… definitely not a new concept. Heck, Kathryn Bernardo and Julia Montes did the same story twice in the god-awful Mara Clara remake and their movie Way Back Home.

Now for Filipino teleseryes, it’s pretty pointless to judge the entire series based on its first week, whether positive or negative. Because teleseryes could just as easily dive into hell as they can perk up and genuinely entertain.

The first week was pretty lackluster, save for a wonderfully charming performance by Blythe Gorostiza as the fast talking, fast thinking young Celine. Other than that, there wasn’t really anything that compels me to keep watching, except for the four young actors that are set to hopefully takeover.

Cherry Pie Picache and Ronaldo Valdez (as Theresa’s father) were fine, while Janice de Belen, Ariel Rivera, Pilar Pilapil (as the two family mother), and Eddie Gutierrez (as the rich 2nd husband) turned in typical teleserye character performances.

But it is the expected performances out of the reliables Chiu, Salavdor, Dee and Lim. (Three Chinese actors and a Latino?) that have me still looking forward to more episodes of the series.

Now my dream teleserye young cast is still Enchong Dee, Erich Gonzales, Maja Salvador and Jason Abalos. All four have proven chemistry and would work so well in a romantic drama where “loveteams” are nonexistent and you had no idea who’d end up with who.

I get half of my dream cast in Ina, Kapatid, Anak, but both Kim Chiu and Xian Lim are definitely just as talented and thankfully, not ones to merely ham it up for the cameras and phone in their performances.

These four young actors definitely deserve and are capable of handling, good, solid material. So I hope they get it, and fresh.

Otherwise, Ina, Kapatid, Anak might as well be Tried, True, Tested… and Boring.

0 thoughts on “Review: A Slow Start for ABS-CBN’s Ina, Kapatid, Anak

  1. medyo trad yung start niya e. pero they seem to be setting up interesting characters. just hope they can sustain it. remember how we hotly debated character interpretations in mara clara (i know, i know, you hated it 😉 ), that’s the kind of audience engagement that i want to see for this series’ characters. yun bang iba ibang interpretations.

    btw, medyo scenery porn para sakin yung episode ngayon (oct. 16). bigla kong namiss ang unibersidad. yup, a lot of freshies (including myself) did that bit with the oblation statue. apparently, alumni either yung director or one of the writers, with the way they did the shots inside the campus.

    i just hope that UP isn’t just a setting and becomes integral in the story itself. for instance what if either margaux or celine become a student activist later on? that would be interesting.

    1. lol, I would never wish Enchong, Kim, Maja or Xian to experience being a part of something like Mara Clara. haha, but I do hope they get some good material here. They deserve it.

      I haven’t been able to watch any episodes this week yet though.

  2. So far so good.

    I say this all the time each time a new teleserye starts: I hope to high heavens, the production learns from all the strengths and all the weaknesses of their past teleseryes and persist in building on the strengths while avoiding the past mistakes and improving on weak areas.

    For most seryes, a blatantly weak area is poor script support so that the story concept is often interesting and compelling but the script fails the concept over time. That’s why we see seryes begin so magnificently, loses its way and peters out from middle to close to the end then tries to recoup by ending with a big bang. The script needs to sustain and endure over time.

    For many a serye, a great strength is the the cast’s ability to persist and turn out great performances despite the script meandering and making up unlikely scenarios. Often, the only thing that keeps the seryes going is the strength of its performers.

    For this one, I am enjoying Cherrie Pie Picache and Ronaldo Valdez in their roles and feel that Ariel Rivera could still improve given more variety in role exposure. Kim Chiu always seems to light up on-screen and I think it is a natural earnestness in her that is compelling. Enchong Dee is new to me and has a speech uptilt that sometimes throws me, and aside from My Binondo Girl, Xian Lim is fairly new to me too. Maja, I thought, was magnificent in MLKI. My dream cast would include Maja and Coco Martin in it.

      1. i second the motion.

        i am liking kim chiu’s performance. celine’s characterization is a bit similar to jade (my binondo girl), but kim was able to make her a distinct character. as of now, the only one i am not sure of would be xian lim. he still has to get out of that pretty boy hearthrob and cone on his own. the other three already played out of the box characters before, so they have a headway.

        teka DM, ito ba yung soap na tinutukoy mo sa conversation natin before?

        @1010gabriela
        mam, naoverrun na tayo ng mga faneys sa forums.

        1. @ flamerounin

          Nice to see you, flame. Intersting observation on the UP scene. If I am not mistaken the episode writer, Diuco, is an alumni.

          The forums have been down for a while and yes, the faneys are frustrating; like, matching wits with the witless.

  3. nice, margaux is turning out to be another interesting character. her rich spoiled brat persona is just a facade (a bit similar to julia montes’ clara). from her character buildup, me possibility na siya nga yung tipo na magiging student activist (if they do indeed go with that plot development).

    and they did it again with the UP references, this time around, the “dreaded” TBA prank (was tempted to pull that one on some freshies during my time, lol! :D)

  4. Hi. Thanks for the review.

    Today, ten episodes after, I’m sure the readers will appreciate a re-review… thanks!

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