A scene from Beloved. PHOTO/COURTESY OF BELOVED X ACCOUNT
Ugandan TV dramas probably need their research paper. That paper will delve into how these shows particularly start and end.
With American dramas, you know things will start off in a heated way and later set up events that will set the story on a rollercoaster. You are sure the pilot episode is only an attention bait; it is a pitch for the drama one can expect.
On the other hand, the final episode is where most things come a full circle, with one twist thrown in the deep to keep the audience engaged.
Then we get local TV dramas; many of which rarely get the pilot right, but they still try regardless; however, when it comes to ending it all, Ugandans can be shabby. The finale episode is something most Ugandan screenplay writers fail to nail; that is if they get a chance to end things anyway.
Think about it: That’s Life Mwattu, Bibaawo, The Hostel, and Centre 4, among others; they could have been popular with the audience, but none had a proper ending.
No one may have an idea of what happened at the tail end of the Kigenya Agenya story. It is like time came and these shows stopped airing and everyone moved on.
This brings us to the current top dramas; we have since bid farewell to Sanyu, Prestige, Kojjas, and Beloved, among others.
Sanyu ended with a slap that blacked the screen out with a series of people in jail for the right and wrong reasons. The show also left many unresolved fates, but well, you cannot iron out everything. Prestige tried to solve a lot of the puzzles and took out the villain, leaving behind a series of damaged and bad people, but guess the show had to end.
Prestige also ended at the right time; it had not overstayed its welcome and even by the final episode, there were many original cast members whose storylines were winding up beautifully. It made sense.
But then we were served, Beloved.
It is easy to believe the show ended against its will. See, Beloved managed to set up a lot of tropes from the time the show started when Andrew Benon Kibuuka portrayed the patriarch of the Kaya house to the time of his death. The set-up of the show, which resembles that of Monarca, the Mexican drama, and Blood Legacy, the South African adaptation, was supposed to give us Ssubi Nantale as a protagonist and a matriarch no one had envisioned. Thus, the entire show with Mr Kaya present was supposed to set us up for her reign, challenges, drama, and how she would go through all that while managing to stay human and humane.
The show had to pick up after Mr Kaya’s death; it was supposed to start yet, the way things turned out, his death started the end of it all.
For some reason, what had to start Ssubi’s reign—juggling a mad family, a stepmother, a crazy cousin, and an aunt did not exactly play out as one could have imagined.
The story that had been built for an epic showdown between the Kayas and their latest addition to the family became a race to the end.
Our protagonist, Ssubi Nantale, became an heiress and in a snap had to decide between taking on the role and leaving the love of her life, Marcus.
Much as this was a brilliant twist, especially because Ssubi and Marcus’s romance was becoming boring, throwing it all in the mud made more than 60 weeks of drama useless.
For a relationship that had been built up for months, episodes, and scenarios, breaking up because of a clause was wild, and never being revisited by the writers was even wilder.
So, last Friday, the final episode of Beloved aired, and as the happy family enjoyed the final meal, the main antagonist Monicah Kaya showed up, seemingly ready to spill blood. And not her blood. And that was the final scene; where we will remember Sanyu for ending with a slap that blacked out the screen, Beloved is with their villain technically holding them hostage. And that is the image people will keep with them for good.
The main question though is: why did the writers make the decisions they made if, at the end of it all, the villain would still survive? What was the point all through?
