I was watching the 9pm drama on Channel 8, Crime Busters x2, some detective show with Tay Ping Hui and Dawn Yeoh as the leads.
It's quite watchable because the criminals in the show are weird enough so that you keep coming back for more, although the acting is shit. I find it a common trait in shows involving Dawn Yeoh. Either its her, or she has an aura that makes people around her forget how to act. However, possibly due to her auntie hairstyle in this show, she is no longer as "teh". In the past, she was so "teh" you couldn't watch her shows as you'd just cringe and die.
Anyway, for baddies so far they've had a schizo, some uncle who loves his niece a little too much, and a random guy who got forced to overdose on Ecstasy. Well, he died really ecstatically. I guess that is something to be happy about.
The show is characterised by how it has a new case with a totally new set of characters every few days, so if you miss a few episodes, you're suddenly lost! I really think that the reason they have so many small stories in the same show is to allow struggling artistes to make cameos.
Such people would include previous Project Superstar contestants, random calefares, Mediacorp artistes who will never make it big, and people who always act as gangsters and bad guys. You should be pretty familiar with the last bunch. Its always the same 10 or so people. I bet children point at them on the street and go "Mummy, bad guy!", what with them portraying Ah Bengs, mad people, triad bosses, drug abusers, and worst of all, perverts.
There are a few recurring scenes in this drama though. Tay Ping Hui always visits a VCD shop, and a supermarket after that. And its always these same two places, staffed by the same two people. In fact, these two people appear so often their screen time would probably qualify them as supporting actors. At first I didn't realise why these two places kept appearing. Then I realised those two places probably sponsored the show, and suddenly it all made sense. Product placement yo. The number of product placements in Mediacorp dramas nowadays is obscene.
One scene in the supermarket even had me impressed at how the government uses dramas to teach National Education. It was a scene where Dawn Yeoh was as usual, acting cute, hanging off the arm of Tay Ping Hui in the show. Being extremely happy, she went around telling the whole world she had a new boyfriend. So first of all, she found an angmoh guy in the supermarket and said "My new boyfriend!" And of course the angmoh guy will sportingly say "Very nice!" and flash a thumbs up sign, because angmohs by stereotype are supposed to be friendly and approachable. Even if you are disturbing their grocery shopping.
But what was even funnier was, after that, she actually found a Malay woman, and told her in Malay about her new boyfriend! And of course, after that, she had to find an Indian woman too, and talk to her in Tamil. If it wasn't incredible enough that she could find all the different races in a supermarket that always seems empty, she suddenly became a linguist able to speak 4 languages. That's so bloody incredible because the only Tamil words I know are like Vanakum, Deepavali, Muneru Valiba and um, roti prata. Certainly not enough to form any meaningful sentence.
And it was all so subtly done the average Singaporean viewer probably wouldn't catch it.
I wish the government would stop screwing around with our dramas. Businesses do it enough already, and if that wasn't bad enough, the level of acting by our local artistes actually helps a fair bit.