Beautifully paced and filled with sincere and sentimental beats, this new primetime Kapuso drama glides gracefully and fluidly through the audience’s hearts.
GMA Entertainment Group
Actors: Ashley Ortega, Xian Lim, Amy Austria, Rita Avila, Tonton Gutierrez, Lito Pimentel, Ina Feleo, Cheska Iñigo, Roxie Smith, Skye Chua, Kim Perez, Ruiz Gomez
Genre: Sports Drama, Romance
Premise: A young aspiring dancer strives to become the country’s first ever figure skating champion, in order to receive love and validation from her overbearing mother.
Running Time: 35 minutes
Director: Dominic Zapata
Time slot: Weeknights, 8:50 pm
Why You Should See It:
The newest Kapuso sports drama on prime time glides on themes that are not too foreign to local audiences. Its core storyline is reminiscent of the strong formulaic beats that we usually see and experience in traditional soap operas. Family, and dreams, among others, are inherent subjects, that repeatedly get tackled in shows like ‘Hearts On Ice’. in the new Kapuso drama’s case, however, such subjects are delivered with more profound sentimentality, heart, and clarity.
Ponggay is a young figure skater trying to fulfill her mother’s dream of becoming a successful figure skater. An incident for which Ponggay’s mother, Libay (Amy Austria) is blaming herself, and impaired Ponggay’s leg when she was still a baby, is what keeps her from making her dreams come true. Once laid her eyes upon a skating rink and the young figure skaters gracefully gliding through the ice, Ponggay immediately fell for the sport and started dreaming of becoming a figure skater, herself. Unbeknownst to her, however, is her mother’s bitter past with the sport.
This is the first time that a local TV show is focusing its lens on ‘figure skating’ as its main subject. Sports dramas are a rare sight on local television, and this particular sport is not a favorite among local sports fans. That makes this effort by GMA Network both commendable and a bit worrying; commendable, because very few production companies take on such a not well-known subject, and worrying because it’s common for shows like this to still get overshadowed by their more formulaic themes. That is now Hearts On Ice’s biggest challenge: to remain committed to its originality and not to fall into the pitfalls of run-of-the-mill storylines and storytelling.
To the show’s credit, the pilot week exudes so much promise. Thanks to the exceptional performances of the more seasoned stars, including Amy Austria, Rita Avila, Tonton Gutierrez, and Lito Pimentel, there’s a power in the story’s delivery, and the overfamiliarity of its themes gets very much compensated by the sheer brilliance of its cast.
There is also this chemistry between Xian Lim and Ashely Ortega, which is yet to blossom in the coming episodes, but already promising at this early. There is gracefulness and fluidity in each turn of its beautifully-paced story, which somehow assures that this well-intended drama is headed to the right direction.
Hearts On Ice airs on GMA Network’s Telebabad block, from Mondays to Fridays, 8:50 PM. Watch the official full trailer below:
