Sinetrons, AKA Indonesian TV soap operas, have produced many memorably nonsensical moments, like when a whole family went into shock at the sight of a Hello Kitty doll being boiled in a pan. Seriously.
Despite their general awfulness, sinetron shows continue to reign in Indonesian in terms of ratings and producers often milk their show’s popularity by producing as hundreds and sometimes even thousands of episodes without there being any clear sense of where the story is going.
But the same can’t be said about the characters within a sinetron, who may be knocked off with short notice to suit the needs or ratings of a given show. That is what happened to the character Boy, played by teen heartthrob Stefan William, on the sinetron “Anak Jalanan” (Street Kids), who was killed off from the show because of some off-screen drama we don’t care to get into at all.
Boy’s death is interesting to us because it shows how much sinetron audiences can get invested in a badly-acted one-dimensional sinetron character, like this family who broke down in tears after witnessing Boy’s death on TV in a video of which went viral recently in Indonesia:
We don’t know if this is hilarious or just plain sad. We haven’t seen anyone cry like that since we refused to leave our rooms for three days after watching “Marley & Me”.
We feel especially bad for the little girl though. Maybe Stefan William can give her a surprise phone call the way President Jokowi did after learning about the girl who cried inconsolably after missing her chance to see him.
