Adam Munir
Several years after its launch as one of the platforms specializing in Arabic entertainment content, Shahid begins making her own original content, to be shown directly to her, and the first series she presented is "Diva".
But the question here is, is the nature of the series, which goes on behind the scenes of a talent discovery program, appropriate for a platform start?
Untapped history
The "Shahid" platform is owned by the MBC channel network, which also owns the rights of most of the programs' discovery programs in the Arab countries, such as "The Voice" (The Best Voice) and "Arabes Gout Talent". Consequently, it possesses a good balance of the scenes of these programs, whether with regard to the relationship between members of the arbitration committees, or the positions of the participants in these programs.
Of these scenes, of course, some scenes appear on the surface, either intentionally such as episodes that show comic situations, or unintended such as the differences that gradually erupted between Ragheb Alama and Ahlam.
From these scenes comes the idea of the series "Diva" written by Alex Maouchi, while she directed the series, Randa Alam, who has in her credit a single movie, "Bahr Al-Nujoom", and is best known for its video clip production, which is reflected in the series.
The events revolve around the scenes of a program called Dream of Fame, where we find his nickname Diffa (Sirin Abdel Nour) as one of the members of the jury, and the other two are Omar (Yaqoub Al-Farhan) and Yasmine (Bossi), which we witness features of hatred manifested unintentionally, and during this charged atmosphere Between the jury and the director, the series takes place.
It's strange to find that the episodes are less than 15 minutes long, which looks more like a YouTube video than a series. Although many series have become recently, especially foreign ones on the Netflix platform and others, they adopt the shortest episodes, which range from 25 to thirty minutes, but other series are still presenting their episodes in a period of approximately one hour, but the episode in sequences is less than 15 minutes It is something that neither fattens nor sings hunger for sure, as we do not feel that there have been events in the episode, and with the weekly show of episodes we will wait a lot until we feel a real development in the events.
Despite the abundance of talent programs and behind-the-scenes programs as mentioned, the first two episodes presented the characters Diva and Jasmine in a one-dimensional way, as Diva resembles an innocent angel, very liked by the audience, and the role of Yasmin is to hate Diva and resent her only, and perhaps later other dimensions of the characters become clear.
And just as the main characters come in one-dimensional, the secondary characters also come, so we find one of the contestants takes a large group of calming tablets without introductions and without a clear reason, only to make a sudden sub-plot, pouring into the main plot, to see more bickering between Rima and Jasmine. The upcoming episodes may hide more developments for us, but as we mentioned the length of the episodes does not allow for much to be presented.
video clip
The director of the series has a long history in the video clip field, which was evident from the way the series was directed. We will find that the episodes depend on the very fast shots inside the scene, while the colors used in lighting are what distinguish the episodes as they approach the clips.
And we will find that there is green lighting all the time in most scenes without any logical or technical justification, and this directive method may fit with a clip of minutes that depends mainly on kidnapping the viewer's eye through colors, but the drama is a different matter, the colors must have employment and influence, As for lighting only for aesthetic purpose without any effect, it is definitely incomprehensible.
On the other hand, we find that Randa Alam did not leave a good imprint either on moving actors. And let us stop at Bossi, who has performed previously in the series "The Account Collects", directed by Hani Khalifa, which means that she is able to play the roles well. For fairness, she does not play the role here in a bad way, but she uses all the usual clichés of the evil character, even if she casts her sentence inside the program that is broadcast on the air, instead of finding a figure for the character we find her sentences using facial movements and the volume of the voice that makes us say "Yes, this is Evil character. "
The "Diva" series is certainly still in its infancy, but it is a start that does not promise much and can not be relied upon as a real start to the original "Shahid" series, as it was expected to work more powerful and more productive.