Inside Indonesia's Sinetron Factories

There's a trope that's ridiculously common on sinetron: eventually, everyone gets hit by a car. Take Anak Jalanan (Street Kids). It was Indonesia's highest-rated soap opera when, in the 770th episode, Boy (the main character) was run down by a motorist as he furiously pedaled across town to save Reva (the other main character) from the "Godzilla Gang."

Why would a television show kill off one of its two main characters? Apparently, Boy, played by Stefan William, used to date Reva—Natasha Wilona—in real life. Then Stefan got married and according to rumors spread on social media his wife wasn't all that happy with her husband spending so much time on set with his ex. The solution? Kill off Boy.

It was an insane plot twist, but sinetron isn't exactly known for its quality. The soap operas are both maligned and adored in Indonesia. A national survey by the country's broadcasting commission found that most viewers ranked sinetron as one of the lowest forms of entertainment on television. The soaps are routinely blamed for poor behavior and corrupting the nation's youth. One official went as far as blaming sinetron for sexual assaults and school brawls.

But they are also some of the highest-rated shows on TV. Domestic soaps, as well as ones imported and dubbed from India and Turkey, pull huge numbers in Indonesia. Popular sinetron go for hundreds, or even thousands, of episodes, churning out new episode daily—often of diminishing quality. At one point, shows like Si Doel Anak Sekolahan (Doel the School Boy) won over audiences with good writing. Today, even the biggest hits are full of plot holes, laughable dialogue, and absurd plot twists.

"If we compare TV drama series today to, say, Si Doel Anak Sekolahan, we can see they're not exactly comparable," said Muhammad Heychael, the director of the media watchdog Remotivi. "Si Doel… was a high-quality series, it had logical plot."

So how did sinetron get so bad? The industry, experts said, demands it.

"We're not short on good story writers," said one co-writer of Anak Jalanan who refused to be named, so I'm just going to call him "Yonglek". "But it's difficult to write well for a sinetron. Imagine this: we have to produce one episode daily. Then tomorrow we'll create a new one, and it goes on and on forever. After more than a year, I had been working on it without a break."

Yonglek told me that he watches other series for inspiration, jotting down plot points and sending them off to a writers room for dialogue. The outlines end up on the desk of writers like Pitoresmi Pujiningsih, who worked on the 2006 sinetron  Mimpi Manis (Sweet Dreams) with dangdut star Dewi Perssik. Pitoresmi said the team sat in a room all day churning out scripts for sinetrons, never really knowing which show they would be working on until the last minute.

"It was a bit like a sweatshop, but not really as bad," Pitoresmi said. "At one point, it started to feel like my job was more transcription than writing. [Sometimes] we just 'moved' the dialogue from the [Korean show] to the script we were working on. I'm not kidding."

None of the writers ever received a writing credit. Instead, the production house would just send over short briefs and the writers would get to work. Most of the ideas, Pitoresmi said, came from an unnamed Indian man at the production house.

"That production house had one Indian man who watched Indian movies all day," he said. "From the movies he prepared about three-line sentences for every scene. It was our job to build the dialogue from what he gave us. But we never met.

"It felt like a cartel job, where nobody sees anyone's face."

I mentioned the story to Yonglek. That Indian guy was me, he said. It's nearly impossible to keep quality high when the television networks demand an endless supply of episodes regardless of the plot. The country's longest-running sinetron Tukang Bubur Naik Hajji (Porridge Cart Seller Went on Hajj) reached 2,150 episodes on less than four years. It was so popular that nothing, not even the death of the main character, and with him the entire premise of the show, could stop it.

In episode 1,001 Haji Sulam, the bubur vendor who wanted to go on hajj died. The series continued for another 1,149 episodes.

"Tukang Bubur Naik Haji's producer said that he had enough, but the TV station didn't want to cancel the series," Yonglek said.

The key to keeping a sinetron on the air? Develop as many subplots as possible.

 "There were many subplots [in Tukang Bubur Naik Haji], like Haji Muhidin's eternal feud, his children's issues, et cetera, that the story just goes on," Yonglek said. "As long as the audience still likes a character, all we need to do is provide a story for that character. The story just goes on and on and on."

It creates an environment where the sweet girl will always meet the man of her dreams, where the evil in-laws will always work against the village girl living in the big city, where the entire family will always mourn the death of a Hello Kitty stuffed animal found boiling in a pot on the stove.

Writers told me they tried to raise the bar, but complained that their scripts would only get bounced back with a note demanding rewrite. "They returned the scripts they thought were too intelligent," Pitoresmi said. Do the writers ever watch the episodes once the go on air?

"I'm too embarrassed to watch what my script has become on screen," Pitoresmi admitted.