Asian Television Awards: ‘Descendants’ takes top honours
SEOUL: KBS 2TV series ‘Descendants of the Sun’ received the top prize at the 21st Asian Television Awards (ATA), Friday.
The mega hit drama was named Best Drama Series at the award ceremony that took place at the Suntec Convention Center in Singapore on Friday evening. The awards were presented over two consecutive evenings.
The second Friday night saw the presentation of awards in the more artistic categories and drew plenty of fan action. Fans, mostly female, were at their noisiest for the red carpet arrivals of Amber Liu and JJ Lin. Presenters
Presenters include Stephanie Carrington, Fiona Su, Adrian Pang and Alden Richards with Baki Zainal hosting. Musical interludes included one from Charli XCX, whose tunes have sold 33 million singles, and Ivy Grace Parades, from the Philippines. Both earned huge cheers and frantic waving of fluorescent wands by the fans.
The more serious stuff saw ‘Masterchef Asia’ from Singapore win a prize for best adaptation of an existing format, best original screenplay go to Huan Shi-Ming for ‘A Touch of Green’.
The prize for best single drama or telemovie went to ‘Tulus Ikhlas’ from Malaysia. And while ‘Descendants’ unsurprisingly claimed the drama prize, Singapore’s ‘The Dream Makers 2’ came a close second with the local crowd. Among the corporations, the award for terrestrial broadcaster of the year went to Singapore’s MediaCorp, while terrestrial channel of the year was PTS Public Television Service Foundation from Taiwan. Al Jazeera English, which is based in Qatar and has its Asian HQ in Malaysia, was named cable & satellite channel of the year.
The Asian Television Awards (ATA) started in 1999 in Singapore to hand out awards for television series in Asia in 41 categories.