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Viewing or Aiming?! Redundancy and Repetition strike at Ramadan Series

Since it’s impossible for any person, no matter how much free time he or she possesses, to follow the immense amount of series, light shows and sitcoms aired on local and satellite channels in Ramadan, viewers had to resort to the “aiming” method, which is the very same method some students use during their exams; where they randomly choose some parts of the curriculum to study on the night of the exam, hoping that the exam’s questions would be about the same parts they studied..

So, the TV viewer selects some series to focus on, and hopes that they would turn out to be good, or starts viewing some episodes from some series randomly till settling on the ones that attracted him the most. The viewer might make his choice depending on the main star of the series, or the series’ team like the director and the writer.

Some viewers prefer to depend on the newspapers’ and magazines’ reviews to make their choices. Some others depend on the opinions of friends, relatives and neighbors..

Using the “aiming” method, the most striking traits characterizing this year’s Ramadan serials were the redundancy and the boring repetition of incidents and lines...

A chronic condition
Repetition and Redundancy are both a chronic dramatic condition; one that appeared after the vanishing of the 13 episodes’ serials, and heading towards the 30 episodes series that occupy the whole month of Ramadan, and some of them, or should we say most of them continue for two, three or four more days, during Bairam. For so many years, we used to view a 15 episodes series during the first half of Ramadan, and another during the second half.

Usually, one of the two series was comic and the other tragic. Starting from Layali El-Hilmiya, Raafat El-Haggan and other successful long series, we started getting to know dramatic epics, in addition to the new fashion of sequel series that try to invest the success of the first sequel, such as the second sequel of “El-Dali”.

Most viewers agreed that this second part is much weaker than the first, that any viewer would get lost between the entangled net of events, and that they still didn’t know what scriptwriter Waleed Youssef is trying to say. On top of all, El-Dali’s character, played by superstar Nour El-Sherief, has lost a great deal of its charm…

The same boredom, redundancy and super slow tempo could be applied to many different works, the most important of which, is that of superstar Yehia El-Fakharany: “Sharaf Fath El-Bab”, written by Muhammad Galal Abdel Qawi.

Both El-Fakharany and Abdel Qawi made the boring series “Al-Marsa Wal Bahhar”, which was also characterized by its extreme slowness and the elongating of events for the sake of filling the gaps leading to the 30th episode, and the viewer may go to hell for all they care.

For reference, you may go back to the first scenes of the series, in which Sharaf Fath El-Bab’s daughter succeeds in Thanawiya Aama and starts preparing her papers for university, or even the scenes in which his son decides to leave the engineering faculty and starts selling and distributing eggs…

So, Egyptian drama became famous for filling the time with events and details that are of no significance at all to the dramatic development of the serial. Such unwanted details could be shortened or even omitted, without making any difference for the viewer.

And despite the outstanding performance of Sherif Mounir and Ghada Adel in “Qalb Mayet”, redundancy is still there, where the serial could have been shortened into 15 episodes max…

Regarding “Qamar”, which is starred, written and directed by Fifi Abdou, it is the absolute worst in everything, especially in the slow rhythm and the repetition of events and script lines…

Not one single Egyptian series escaped this vicious circle in Ramadan this year. Such phenomenon needs a quick and decisive cure, so that the intentions of writers, directors and artists to gain the biggest portion of money would not be the viewers’ problem anymore!

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