LAST Monday, Viva Television unveiled its new evening soap opera, "May Bukas Pa," with Dina Bonnevie and Cherie Gil playing lead protagonist and antagonist, respectively.

The first few episodes of the new show were a hectic montage of births and adoptions. Movie star Cherie gave birth to an unwanted child and gave it away to a caretaker who in turn handed the child over to a friend.

Cherie's aunt (Marita Zobel) herself adopted another baby girl. For her part, Dina had a child who was taken to an unknown place by her husband (Daniel Fernando) because he thought that Dina had cuckolded him.

And then, in a dizzying pirouette of contradictory impulses, the child-hating Cherie upped and adopted a baby ostensibly because she was playing a mother in her next film, and her manager thought that news that she had adopted a child in real life would assure the box-office success of her latest starrer.

Of course, the child Cherie adopts just happens to be the baby that Dina has been looking for all this time!

After this flurry of deliveries and adoptions, the viewer realizes that credibility doesn't exactly rank high on the new show's list of priorities. So what if the baby parade is so hectic that it becomes risible? What's important is to be eventful and to prepare for the appearance of numerous teen leads (the babies in young-adulthood) in subsequent episodes to assure the show's popularity with the youth audience.

It also becomes clear that, to further bolster the show's chances in the ratings race, the combative Dina-Cherie relationship has been closely patterned after the very popular Sharon-Cherie rivalry in the film, "Bituing Walang Ningning."

Thus, when Dina is made to launch her own show biz career, Cherie tops her water-splashing humiliation of Sharon in "Bituing Walang Ningning" by smearing a raw egg all over Dina's face at a supermarket! Ugh.

In addition, she tries to top her "classic" kontrabida line, "You're nothing but a second-rate, trying-hard copycat" with even more purple prose like "Bumaba na yata ang taste mo" (to Dina's manager, for discovering her), "The height of ka-cheapan" (a critique of Dina's wardrobe) and "Give her one more year, laos na yan" (on Dina's show biz career).

Of course, Cherie's sour prognostications are completely contradicted by Dina's phenomenal success as a singing star and movie actress. Never mind if Dina isn't all that believable as a terrific singer, the point is to put Cherie in her place by making her a sour-graping has-been as Dina's star soars.

In addition, Cherie loses out to Dina in affairs of the heart, as her movie-star boyfriend (played by Albert Martinez) shifts professional and personal allegiance to Dina, whom he eventually marries. Cherie is forced to settle for the less estimable Fidel (Ricardo Cepeda). And, when her career hits the skids, she resigns herself to singing in low-class dives.

By the show's second episode, the babies have become teenagers and it becomes even more of a chore to figure out what's what and who's who in the soap's continuing storyline and ever-increasing cast of characters.

Let's just say that the teen leads turn out to be just about as stereotypically goody-goody or super-evil as their senior counterparts. No doubt, as the soap's plot further thickens, the young misses will also end up hating each other with a passion!

Despite the new soap's major lapses in believability, we must credit it with pacing its storytelling briskly. Thus, even its sticky scenes can be endured because they don't go on for very long.

Unfortunately, the jackrabbit pacing leaves some plot connections in disarray, but the viewer is free to fill in the blanks as he pleases, since logic isn't the new show's reason for being.

Since the material can't be depended on to keep the show together, perhaps the performances can provide "May Bukas Pa" with the strong fulcrum it needs? No such luck.

The much-admired Cherie Gil, who was so deliciously bitchy on the movie screen in "Bituing Walang Ningning" comes on too strongly on the smaller TV screen. Too bad that nobody bothered to rein her in by pointing out the difference between the movies and television on point of largeness of performance.

Dina Bonnevie's portrayal is of the right size for TV, but her problems involve her believability as an exciting, phenomenal singing star and the excessive goodness of her character thus far. One hopes rather urgently that her true-blue streak won't continue for long, and that her goody-goody role will be made more complicated and even occasionally contradictory in future episodes.

As for the show as a whole, it should work harder to delineate its characters more clearly, one from the other, particularly in the case of the teen girls who have begun to sprout like mushrooms after a sudden lightning storm.