The Legal Wife

Monica Santiago and Nicole Esquivel grow up as close friends, both searching for a father's love: Monica is raised away from her wealthy family after her mother flees a violent husband, while Nicole grows up without her biological father at all. When Monica is brought back into her father Javier's household at age seven, the two girls reconnect and bond as something close to sisters.

As adults, Monica marries Adrian de Villa, and the marriage starts out as a genuine love match. Family pressure and old dysfunction wear on it, and Adrian drifts into an affair with Nicole, whose unresolved need for validation makes her vulnerable to exactly that kind of attention. The series gives the marriage, the affair, and the two women on either side of it roughly equal screen time and roughly equal sympathy; the title is the argument, since being the legal wife is a status, not a victory.

The series starred Angel Locsin as Monica, Jericho Rosales as Adrian, and Maja Salvador as Nicole, with JC de Vera and Christopher de Leon in supporting roles. It ran for 98 episodes on ABS-CBN from January to June 2014, and its finale drew 36.2 per cent nationwide, the highest any show had scored on late primetime since the Philippines' 2009 ratings change, topping both the Kantar Media and AGB Nielsen measurements that week.