Prime-time soaps sizzle in Spanish but fall flat in English
GLENN GARVIN
Herald
Feb 12, 2007
The contrast couldn't be more stark: Last week, a new television network with a schedule of all English-language telenovelas admitted defeat, abandoning the format in the face of devastatingly low ratings. And Monday night, the Spanish-language network Telemundo rolls out a new big-budget telenovela version of Zorro, shot in high-definition and festooned with pricey bells and whistles like a theme song by Beyoncé and Mexican pop star Alejandro Fernandez.
''It's one of the big questions of television, why Spanish-language viewers love telenovelas so much, and English-language viewers won't watch them at all,'' said Derena Allen, an executive with a Hispanic marketing company. ``Everybody's trying to figure it out.''
Novelas, the serialized dramas long a staple of Latin television, are essentially soap operas with an important difference: They run for only a few months and are plotted with a beginning, middle and end, unlike their American counterparts that roll along for years and even decades.
Between six and eight of them are running during prime-time hours 52 weeks a year on Univisión and Telemundo, America's two biggest Spanish-language networks, and they've never been more successful. Univisión's most popular novela, La fea mas bella (The Prettiest Ugly Girl) in January attracted 6.2 million viewers, the biggest prime-time audience in the network's history. La fea mas bella, itself a remake of the hit novela Betty La Fea, was virtually the only program on television on Tuesday and Wednesday nights that didn't lose viewers when Fox's ratings juggernaut American Idol returned to the air last month.
Telemundo is expecting similar numbers for Zorro: la espada y la rosa (Zorro: The Sword and the Rose), which debuts for a 24-week run at 9 p.m. Monday, the first episode in high-def. Adapted from a novel by Isabel Allende, this Zorro follows the familiar story of a wealthy landowner who by night dons a mask to defend the poor against cruel Spanish colonial rulers in early-19th-century California. But, in typical telenovela fashion, this Zorro will lock lips as often as swords.
''Don't worry, there's still a lot of sword-fighting and horseback chases,'' said Mexican heartthrob Erick Elias, who plays Renzo the Gypsy, Zorro's main rival. ``Zorro is still the only Hispanic superhero. But there's a romantic angle, too -- a big one.''
Zorro will be shown with closed captions available for English speakers who want to watch, but if the recent fate of MyNetworkTV is any guide, there won't be many. Launched in September with an all-novela lineup featuring established stars like Morgan Fairchild, Bo Derek and Tatum O'Neal, MyNetwork foundered badly, barely drawing a million viewers most nights.
That's chump change in the English-language television universe, where Grey's Anatomy, House and other successful dramas routinely pull in more than 20 million sets of eyeballs. MyNetwork announced last week that it will cut novelas back to two nights a week and fill the rest of its schedule with movies and martial-arts tournaments. Meanwhile, chatter about launching a prime-time novela, once persistent among executives of the big four broadcasting networks -- CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox -- has died away.
''There are a lot of people in television trying to figure out why it is that Spanish-speaking Hispanics are so loyal to novelas, and in English they don't seem to have the same cachet,'' said Allen, the managing partner of the California-based Santiago Solutions Group, which devises strategies for reaching the Hispanic market.
Network executives, academics who study television and other broadcast analysts say everything from immigration patterns to program content to cultural values has affected the relative success of novelas. But, they say, there may be fewer differences in viewing tastes than the audiences themselves think -- and that novelas may still have a future on English-language television.
''The fact is, several of our top shows in English-language television are following a novela format,'' Allen argued. ``Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Betty -- which of course was adapted from a Spanish-language novela, Betty la fea -- and even reality shows like Survivor and Dancing With The Stars, these are all programs with continuing storylines and distinctive characters who inspire a very emotional type of loyalty.''
Robert Thompson of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Culture and Television, says that English-language television has been creeping steadily toward the novela model ever since Dallas, the first big nighttime soap opera, debuted to monster ratings nearly three decades ago.
''Until Dallas came along, the general theory of prime-time television was that people had no memory,'' he said. 'Every episode of a show was 100 percent independent of every other episode, to the point it was maddening. I mean, how many times did Archie Bunker learn a lesson about the evil of bigotry on All In The Family? But at the end of every episode, the `clear' button was pushed and he had to start all over.
``Now, though, some of the most successful dramas on television are some of the most heavily serialized, like Lost and 24, and even the sitcoms have serial elements.''
But there's an important difference: However soapy and serialized English-language programs get, they still air just once a week, unlike the Monday-through-Friday telenovelas on Spanish-language television.
Kristin Moran, who teaches communications studies at the University of San Diego and has written a book on novelas, believes that airing its novelas every night was what killed MyNetworkTV. English-language viewers, she says, have too many television options to commit to a single show five or six nights a week.
''They aren't going to want to miss the water-cooler shows, the ones everybody talks about like Lost and Grey's Anatomy and American Idol,'' Moran said. ``That's why Ugly Betty has been so successful. It's just as campy and fun as Betty la fea, but it's not every night.''
Spanish-speaking viewers, with far less television to choose from -- fewer than 20 channels, compared to 300 or so in English -- are more willing to sign on to a program that airs every night, agrees Vivian Rojas, a communications professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio. But she also believes there are significant differences in the audiences that will keep Hispanic viewers loyal to novelas even as Spanish-language TV grows.
''Hispanic immigrants don't necessarily assimilate fast,'' Rojas said. ``It's an individual process. Some people are more in transition than others, some are still negotiating with elements of their traditional culture. The novelas, which they know from Mexico or Guatemala or wherever they came from, are a way of staying in touch with that.''
Even as new generations are born and grow in the United States, she adds, the novela habit continues. ''In almost every Hispanic household, there's at least a grandpa who doesn't speak English, so the family sits and watches novelas together because it's something they can all enjoy,'' she said. ``Look, I teach at a school that's about 65 percent Hispanic. Many of them don't even speak Spanish, but they're all pretty familiar with the novelas. That's because somebody's watching them at home.''
Eventually, English-speakers will be watching too, predicts Telemundo President Don Browne. He says the digital revolution that's allowing viewers to watch TV shows on their computers, cellphones and iPods, at times they, rather than network programmers, choose, will make novelas more practical. And as television continues its shift to original programming around the clock 365 days a year, economics will make the low-cost novelas necessary.
