In 1996, we didn’t have a television.
So every night, my parents and I stood outside a neighbor’s house and watched "Maria Mercedes" through their window. Not comfortably. Not even invited. Just close enough to follow the plot if you squinted and stayed very still, and hoped the episode wouldn’t end early because someone decided to close the window.
I was seven. Old enough to know we were outsiders. Young enough to think that maybe, one day, we wouldn’t be.
In 2010, that changed. ABS-CBN hired me.
The glass was no longer in front of me. I was inside, on the payroll, moving through hallways I used to only imagine existed somewhere behind that flickering screen. I ran into John Lloyd Cruz in the restroom, met Kris Aquino and, after a few minutes of obvious fanboying, told her I loved her, and saw Piolo Pascual often enough that I stopped noticing. At some point, I also realized I was part of the reason a "TV Patrol" report almost did not air, or why a teleserye still made it to broadcast.
At the time, it felt settled. The kind of place people assumed would just keep going. Things worked. Shows aired. It was also the kind of place where, after a long commute from Kapitolyo, Pasig, I knew I was safe the moment I stepped into the ELJ building. It felt like the one place where I knew I belonged. No one really dared think about what would happen if it stopped.
Then the pandemic hit. The franchise went away at the height of it. Whatever margin we thought we had turned out to be imaginary.
What is left now is a version of the company that still works, but without the same certainty behind it. The output is there. The confidence is not.
There is also the internal situation. A family dispute, if you want the polite version. Less polite if you have been in enough meetings to hear "shutdown" discussed without anyone treating it like a joke. From the outside, it is easy to settle on a conclusion. Preferential treatment. Bad management. A company that missed its window. It reads cleanly. Inside, it does not really look like that.
People agreed to take pay cuts so others could keep their salaries. What that led to later is not something I can get into, but it turned out better than most of us expected. There were senior leaders, 68 of them, who deferred pensions they had already earned. The decision was to make sure those who were retrenched got paid first.
I have been here since 2010. Long enough to remember when the concern was growth, and long enough to sit in rooms where the question is whether there is still a version of this company that continues at all. Some days, leaving feels like the reasonable thing to do. You look at everything and try to be practical about it. Then you go back to work. Usually for small reasons. Something still needs to air. Something still needs to be finished properly. It is not dramatic. It is just what is in front of you.
ABS-CBN is a company. That part is straightforward. It also occupies a space that does not disappear just because the structure around it is unstable. For a lot of people, it was the first time they saw themselves taken seriously on screen. You can question leadership. You can go through every decision that led here. That is fair. But reducing everything to failure misses what is still happening on the ground.
I do not know how this ends. I know what it looks like from here.
I am still here. Sixteen years in. Not because it is stable. Not because it is guaranteed to work out. Because I remember what it was like to stand outside, watching through glass, trying to catch enough of the story to follow along.
That part does not go away. ❤️💚💙