Mere fanfare
Why does the Barretto family keep on hogging the headlines?
What is it about them that keeps us glued to social media, entertainment sites and blogs just to keep close tabs on the latest about them?
First of all, they’re celebrities. Who wouldn’t be interested in them?
Yet, the passion for excising and extracting juicy items about this ever-controversial family has never ceased, even to the point of seeing five items on them in the top headlines of one popular entertainment news site.
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Ingredients of a primetime soap
The answer lies not so much on how popular the protagonists or antagonists are, it is the way the drama unfolds—which somehow reminds us of a primetime soap.
How one faction of siblings, led by one ST queen of old, rises against the other faction of family members, led by its patriarch and matriarch and the once-princess of primetime TV dramas.
As the drama unfolds, the events turn out to be stinkier, uglier and more horrific. And we love it.
Owe that to a common ingredient in successful soaps—the dysfunctional family that gets stranger by the day.
READ MORE: Claudine accuses Raymart of perjury
Parents against children, siblings against siblings, and siblings allegedly siding with a sibling’s estranged husband in a bitter court battle, and in one press conference, the father branding his daughter a bad child and that daughter begging proof about it . To top it all off, the youngest of them all "ordering" her alienated elder sisters to drop their family name. Where else can you find that in your average Filipino family?
Not even in showbiz, where you find a fierce Annabelle Rama defending all her children, even to the grave.
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But that’s what makes the Barrettos special in the eyes of the entertainment-crazy audience. It shows how anyone in the family would not think twice about washing dirty linen in public, and find solace in the glare of media.
Unfortunately, that’s how “the cookie crumbles” when one subsists in the public eye, particularly with the onset of social media where protagonists themselves add fuel to the fire. Call it a painstaking drama, a terrible tragedy. But for one watching a showbiz talk show or reading an entertainment blog, it’s mere fanfare.
