GMA's Groundbreaking TV Flops
GMA is known for groundbreaking concept and has found success in introducing new ideas on Television, but they are also home to some of the worst creative ideas. Either bad creative planning or just thinking too much outside the box; these TV Shows failed miserably both in the ratings and on their intended purposes.
SabadoBadoo GMA has a weird fetish for Betong, putting him in every show possible and shoving him down everyone's throat, like in this comedy clip show with Sef Cadayona. There is nothing about the program but an excuse for GMA to get Betong on TV. If you don't remember this show that's because it barely lasted on air.
T.O.P. Top One Project, or just TOP, was GMA News And Public Affairs' reality talent show that aimed to form a boy band; why did the news department ever need a boy band? It was probably one of the main reasons why this show failed, aside from the fact that this was put together when GMA didn't even have a platform to feature musical acts, so why would the viewers even care? It was also shown on the graveyard shift as a testament that even GMA themselves never really wanted anyone to care about it. As for the winners, they disbanded almost immediately after winning. Such a huge waste because GMA could've started the current P-Pop trend.
30 Days Due to the success of the first season of StarStruck, GMA was inspired to make a similar reality talent show, but instead of discovering new stars, its main goal was to give a second chance to past stars who had been said to be close to superstardom but for some reason blew it, sounds good? But it was only until the contestants were revealed, which included the likes of Dino Guevarra, Biboy Ramirez, Jana Victoria, Jackie Forster, and other former actors you probably never heard of. StarStruck was a hit because it got people excited for new faces, but would they feel the same for washed stars who couldn't catch a break to begin with? The concept was a massive failure if we talk about viewership that it only had one season, and its sole winner, Dino Guevarra, was never really elevated into a big star or at least a lead actor; he was only given filler roles until he faded to irrelevance once again. Just showed the program barely did anything for his already dead career.
StarStruck Kids A direct spin-off of the hit first season of StarStruck that aims to discover the next big child stars. The teens' edition was phenomenal, so the kids' version should follow the same success, right? Well, not really, as the key demographic of StarStruck was mostly teens and would not want to watch kids say and do the darndest things on TV. This also showed it's not a good idea to put toddlers in a reality competition, particularly in a format like StarStruck, where you need to criticize contestants to get them better because you cannot criticize a child. The show was also chaos for the production as often the parents or even the kids themselves just didn't want to do certain tasks which resulted in clashes between the parents and the production team aside from the clashes between the stage parents, it was such a huge production nightmare that traumatized GMA, they never did another Kids edition ever again. And to make the experience even worse, its male winner migrated to Australia after taking the cash prizes.
H.O.T. TV With the growing threat of Social Media to Showbiz News programs and simply losing badly to The Buzz, GMA decided to change the format of their Sunday afternoon showbiz talk show. Hindi Ordinaryong Tsismis or simply H.O.T. was certainly not an ordinary showbiz-oriented talk show, it combines Showbiz news and paranormal, supernatural, or otherwise eye-rolling stories from normal people, GMA attempts to be different but come to think of it wasn't a new idea since it was the late Inday Badiday who did it first decades ago in her showbiz talk show Eye To Eye, where we saw a woman infamously gave birth to a fish that was even baptized on national TV. Although H.O.T. TV didn't go as far as making the hosts Jennylyn Mercado and Regine Velasquez be godparents to a fish, the show still never clicked with the viewers and they even accused it of making fake stories. Instead of bringing back a traditional entertainment news program, months later, GMA just vacated the slot and made it a movie block.
SundayAllStars After purposely ruining their Sunday musical variety show PartyPilipinas, GMA decided to replace it with a new one, which Entertainment Head Lilybeth Rasonable referred to as a groundbreaking concept that would surely get the viewers excited, except that it didn't. The concept of the show is that of a reality competition; they put the entire GMA roster on the show, divided them into groups, and every week, they would go head-to-head against each other with their own conceptualized production numbers. Which saw the stars putting up some over-the-top yet boring performances. There was nothing at stake in the competition other than shame, so why would anyone even care at all? The show got nothing but rightfully deserved online hate until GMA finally gave up on the concept, reverting to the traditional musical variety show format, which makes the whole axing of Party Pilipinas pointless. The title lasted for a surprising two years before finally getting canceled and replaced by the comedy variety show Sunday Pinasaya, putting an end to GMA's Sunday Musical Variety Show era, until it was revived in 2020.
