A woman narrator of the Channel 8 show "Dearly Departed Ones" introduces us to a reality program which focuses a family's reaction to a sudden death. She takes us to a village in Pampanga, on Ash Wednesday 2008, and introduces Luz Mercado as she wakes up early, little suspecting the terrible news she is about to hear on TV. Luz's eldest son Jay, a schoolteacher working in Manila who was about to transfer to a lucrative post in Baltimore, has been stabbed to death in an apparent gay sex-crime. About ten minutes into this ugliness, we backtrack and observe how TV director Jay Santiago and his crew manipulated the situation and set up the re-enactments. What follows is a satire on the ethics of contemporary TV production.