‘SUN ka punta?
For over 27 years, GMA’s longest-running sketch comedy show ‘Bubble Gang’ has been a constant atfair on the network’s Friday night line-up. Save for Good Friday, New Year’s Eve countdown specials, and ‘super shows’ of e-commerce sites, the program is what a viewer would expect on the Kapuso network every Friday.
But in a teaser released on Monday, June 19, GMA announced that ‘Bubble Gang’ is bidding farewell to its long-held timeslot. It will mark their first major timeslot change since the show’s inception in October 1995.
To accommodate ‘Bubble Gang’ every Sunday, it is rumored that ‘The Boobay and Tekla Show’ will take a break after four years of airing. Hence, that move would pave the way for the broadcast of ‘Bubble Gang’ right after ‘Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho.’
End of an era, sort of
The transfer of ‘Bubble Gang’ to Sunday nights signifies end of an era in Philippine primetime television.
From the 1990s to the mid-to-late 2000s, weekly comedy shows were fixtures to the network’s primetime block. On GMA, ‘Bubble Gang’ contemporaries were the likes of ‘Kool Ka Lang,’ Beh Bote Nga,’ among other comedy shows. Together, they were grouped in the network’s KiliTV strip. On weekday evenings, the line-uo aired right after Telebabad dramas.
However, with the expansion of Telebabad and primetime dramas in general in the late-2000s and early 2010s, the KiliTV block ended. ‘Bubble Gang’ later became considered as part of the Telebabad block instead.
In 2016, GMA attempted to revive the KiliTV strip, with ‘Bubble Gang’ on Fridays, being complemented by ‘A1 Ko Sa’yo’ on Thursdays, and the rest of GMA’s comedy programs on weekend nights. When ‘A1’ ended, the KiliTV strip also came with it.
But in 2021, GMA bundled all of its comedy shows anew, this time under the ‘Comedy Weekend’ banner. The role of ‘Bubble Gang’ is to be the “gateway” to the weekends. With its transfer to late Sunday nights, it will convert to the “last hurrah” every weekend.
GMA Network has yet to reveal when the upcoming changes to its Friday and Sunday night blocks will happen.
UPDATE: ‘Bubble Gang’ will take over the 6:00 pm slot every Sunday from ‘Daig Kayo ng Lola Ko’ starting July 9. The latter show’s fate has yet to be determined.
Meanwhile, Dingdong Dantes’ ‘Amazing Earth’ will replace the Friday slot of ‘Bubble Gang’ starting July 7 at 9:35 pm.