Bag of tricks
As Filipino drama The Bagman is rebooted for international audiences, DQ hears from Ruel Bayani, head of international productions at ABS-CBN, about championing series from the Philippines and learning lessons about how high-end shows are made around the world.
In Filipino drama Bagman, Arjo Atayde stars as Benjo Malaya, a neighbourhood barber who lands a job as the governor’s henchman and gets caught up in a dangerous web of crime, corruption and political turmoil.
Debuting in 2019, it ran for two seasons and proved to be an award-winning hit. It was even acquired by Netflix in the Philippines.
Now the series has been rebooted for global audiences as The Bagman, with Atayde reprising his role as Benjo. When he learns that his family has gone missing, Benjo is left with no choice but to return to the vicious underworld that he previously turned his back on, and take on a new mission – this time as a bagman for the sitting president of the Republic of the Philippines – to stop an impending civil war.
A coproduction between ABS-CBN International Productions, Dreamscape Entertainment, Rein Entertainment and Nathan Studios, the eight-part spin-off is now in post-production and will be presented to potential international buyers by ABS-CBN this week at the Asia TV Forum & Market in Singapore.
“There were two seasons of Bagman and it aired on our OTT platform iWantTFC, but that only caters to a very small audience, so we decided to take the IP and turn it into an international series,” Ruel Bayani, head of international productions at ABS-CBN, tells DQ. “We don’t even consider [The Bagman] as the third instalment, but the first of a new iteration.
“We wanted it to be a multi-season series using the dynamics of the characters that were already established, and we were lucky that the original producers of the show, Rein Entertainment, and the same writer-director [Shugo Praico] who produced the original series are friends and frequent collaborators, and that’s why we work well together. That’s why they were also in charge of doing this version for us.”
From the beginning, Bayani believed the original Bagman story had the potential to be told on an international scale, thanks to its blend of crime and politics along with the specificity of its characters and sense of place that comes with its Filipino setting.
“It has universal themes in terms of terrorism and about people who are in power, not just in some little town or province but we’re talking about the entire Philippines. Every character in the story also represents a personality not just in our country but in the region as well,” he explains.
“To me, what makes a story international is if the characters are compelling, with a distinct global perspective but obviously culturally authentic, so that if viewers anywhere in the world watch The Bagman, they will get a sense of how it is in the Philippines or how it is in South-East Asia and what the similarities are [with their country], or [they will be able to] relate to [Benjo] as a father who wants to reunite with his missing children and a human being who wants to redeem himself and define himself with the decisions he will make.”
For projects to have a chance of breaking out internationally, Bayani also considers it essential to develop stories that have the potential to run for multiple seasons, as The Bagman can.
“If a story cannot be stretched or cannot be reimagined for multiple seasons, I find that it’s not international enough,” he says. “If I work with a streamer and the streamer says they like it enough that they’re going to sign a deal with you for three seasons, I cannot go back to the team and just say, ‘Let’s brainstorm and come up with how to stretch this over three seasons.’ We approach all projects, including projects that might not be considered for the same multi-season possibility, to be complex enough, to be rich and nuanced enough, to last at least three seasons.
“There’s a lot of preparation there, a lot of research and infrastructure building to be able to prepare a story in that sense, which is very different from how we used to come up with a local production.”
Now a producer, Bayani is a former writer and director whose TV credits include series titled Maalaala Mo Kaya, Budoy and Love Me Again, so he knows what it’s like to be “right there in the trenches” when it comes to story development. And he says it is up to all writers, directors and producers to have the courage to create stories with complex themes and character arcs if they are to compete on the international stage.
“We are not afraid to touch on societal issues or get into very difficult conversations, unlike before when everything used to be so domestic,” he says. “It’s always something that happens within the family and their neighbours and their relatives, and now it involves the community, the country.
“Mindsets have changed, preferences have evolved. The [television] landscape is completely disrupted. It’s actually very exciting to be a producer now because you appreciate the improved technical values and production values. You appreciate the kind of attention to detail that the creative team puts into the script.
ABS-CBN’s global ambitions are also being embraced by actors who want to see their work watched by people around the world. “This is not the industry of before. You’re not talking about something that only your neighbours will watch,” Bayani adds. “You know that people from other territories, from other countries will get to watch and will get to criticise if you’re good or you’re bad. This has also contributed to a very robust, very competitive and very passionate environment.”
Much of the way ABS-CBN is now developing and producing dramas for an international audience comes from the lessons learned on Almost Paradise, a US series that debuted on WGN America in 2020 before it was acquired by Freevee, telling the story of a former DEA agent who is forced into early retirement and opens a gift shop in the Philippines.
Bayani was a line producer on the show, which he says was the first US series filmed in the Philippines and doubled up as a showcase in American methods of television production.
“It was a little shock for our people, but then knowing how resilient and how adaptable Filipinos are, we were able to learn in time and we were able to implement it in our first two international productions without any Americans on the set,” he says. “The dream is that we get to influence more producers and influence the rest of the industry to really accept and embrace the challenges that this very difficult workflow entails. Our own local productions are also being inspired and influenced by the lessons we gained from Almost Paradise.”
Shot in Cebu, a province of the Philippines approximately 350 miles south of the capital, Manila, everything for the Almost Paradise production was prepared in advance, with numerous meetings held to map out every aspect of the shoot, especially when it came to the action scenes.
“There were so many meetings to get things right,” Bayani says. “Action scenes are rehearsed days in advance. It’s not like before when we would just try to rehearse and shoot it on the day itself. We worked with a stunt team from New Zealand; they were very professional and it opened our eyes about their preparation to make sure filming very complicated action scenes would be safe for the actors and everyone, and how they ensure the quality is always upheld.”
“One of the big differences for me, having been on both sets and also on ABS-CBN’s local soap opera sets, was that there were more people – definitely more people,” notes The Bagman associate producer Barbara Candano Liao. “That meant there were fewer people multitasking, and I found that people were more accountable for their work because there was really no person to blame other than themselves. That was pretty efficient during Almost Paradise and that’s something we carried over to The Bagman.
“We have also become more mindful in making sure everything is safe to air here and across other territories as well, from artworks to tattoos and any kind of design. We’re more mindful about IP now, coming from that experience and coming from the things we’ve learned as we established this division with Ruel’s leadership.”
“We also have much smaller budgets than the international productions,” adds fellow associate producer Louise Marjorie Gaviño, “so for this one, we were able to experience a production where there’s a bigger budget that could cover more aspects [of production] that need more preparation time. This will secure the safety of the people working on it, and then this will ensure the quality of the show.”
Bayani now hopes the Philippines will one day have its own version of Korean drama Squid Game – a local series that became a global sensation via streaming giant Netflix.
“We also aspire to be as elegant as the British dramas. We’re big fans of The Crown,” he adds. “We’re big fans of a lot of British series, and we always admired the economy of language and movement. People are so nuanced and yet so understated. We like that about British drama. So we learn from everyone and we try to work around it and see what is authentic in our culture and what kind of unique gifts we can bring to our production. The last thing we want is to be a copycat of Korea, to be a copycat of India. You will never succeed that way.”
The Bagman now stands as an example of “uniquely Asian” drama from the Philippines that Bayani hopes will signal a shift towards more “progressive” storytelling for viewers who have become used to watching series on international streaming platforms.
“We owe it all to our audiences. They were exposed to foreign-language films, they were exposed to modern narrative structures. Now we follow the lead and we to experiment more,” Bayani says. “We get to try all different kinds of storytelling techniques, which before our old bosses would say, ‘No, you cannot do non-linear. It has to stick to linear because they will get lost with all the commercial breaks.’ Now, it’s not the same. We also don’t want our characters to be caught up in the past and not reflect global sensibilities.”
tagged in: ABS-CBN, ABS-CBN International Productions, Barbara Candano Liao, Dreamscape Entertainment, Nathan Studios, Rein Entertainment, Ruel Bayani, The Bagman