TELEVISA V. UNIVISION

The semester began, and with it my lack of time for writing in my blog. However, I don't want to let one more day pass by without mentioning that in this beginning of the new year, the telenovela world is watching intently the developments of a real-life telenovela. Namely, the one being played out in the California-based trial of Televisa v. Univision. 

Below are some links to news stories about this trial whose ending will bring about changes not only in the U.S. Hispanic market, but also in the international market for telenovelas. Hence, what happens in this courtroom will have enduring consequences for the telenovela genre:

Programming battle lands Univision in court (NPR)

Univisión v. Televisa: A courtroom drama (BusinessWeek)

Hispanic TV landscape could shift in L.S. trial (AP)

Televisa-Univisión court clash could alter landscape of Spanish-language TV (Los Angeles Times)

Inicia batalla legal entre Televisa y Univisión (El Financiero)

Televisa y Univisión discrepan sobre acuerdo al comenzar el juicio (Univisión)

Televisa y Univisión miden fuerzas en tribunales (El Economista)

TELEFUTURA MOVES MI PRIMA CIELA

Classes have ended and I'm in the midst of the delicate and difficult job of grading. This has kept me away from my blog for a whole week.

One of the recent happenings in the telenovela world that has stirred some commotion is that Telefutura has moved RCTV's telenovela Mi Prima Ciela from 5 p.m. to a half-hour slot at 9 a.m. This is a worse time and it also messes up the one-hour dramatic structure of each episode. In the place of Mi Prima Ciela, Telefutura is now broadcasting the decade-old version of La Usurpadora produced by Televisa. (An abridged version of this telenovela can be bought in DVD format).

In Univisón's message boards there were adverse reactions to this change as participants clamored that Mi Prima Ciela wouldn't be moved in the schedule: 1 y 2. Some bloggers, like Tania Azevedo also mentioned their unhappiness. Meanwhile, both in the message board TVVI and in Recordar es Vivir (1, 2, 3) participants theorized about the reasons behind Telefutura's decision. Some advanced conspiracy theories involving Cisneros, owner of Venevisión, RCTV's direct competitor in Venezuela.

Personally, I dislike both the change in the schedule and the treatment that Mi Prima Ciela has received in Telefutura. But, I'm not surprised at all. I disregard conspiracy theories about Venevisión having part on this, because Venevisión's telenovelas have also been victims of similar abuses in the Spanish-speaking TV here in the United States. The tendency by Univisión and its associated networks, (Telefutura and Galavisión), to treat Venezuelan telenovelas as second-class products is, by now, old. We know that prime time is reserved exclusively for Televisa telenovelas. But, through the years we have witnessed the invisibility of Brazilian telenovelas in their schedules and the rough and disrespectful way in which they have edited Venezuelan telenovelas such as El País de las Mujeres, Sueño con tu amor (Los Querendones), Amor a Palos and Amantes. We've also seen how Amantes de Luna Llena was broadcast in the humiliating 1 a.m. time slot. And, of course, we know they don't provide any space for any Venezuelan telenovela they classify as "localista". This fluid term is now equal to telenovelas made in Venezuela. (The main love story in Mi Prima Ciela is as universal as it gets--death as the antagonist--a plot we've seen and will keep seeing both in film and literature).

Of course, the background of this is the agreement between RCTV and Telefutura that allows the broadcasting in the latter of telenovelas produced by the former, albeit in the terrible conditions I'm discussing here.

Many will argue that if Mi Prima Ciela didn't garner good ratings at 5 p.m, it had to be taken out. However, I've seen my share of telenovelas at 5 p.m. with poor ratings that were never moved from that tiem slot. Of course, none of them were Venezuelan or Colombian. .

Mi Prima Ciela's schedule change is symptomatic of some of the worrisome trends I see in the market. In the U.S. there's a sort of re-education of the spectator in which audiences are only exposed to a particular type of telenovela. I know well that the Latinos of Mexican descent make up the majority of the Hispanic market. But, similarly to what happens in Mexico, these audiences only watch the same type of telenovela (and their remakes). Telenovelas deemed "different" are either stigmatized as "localistas", edited to the point of destroying their essence, or moved to terrible time slots, as in the case of Mi Prima Ciela.

This is not a good situation or a desirable one.

TELEVISA V. YOUTUBE--WHO WINS? NOT THE AUDIENCE, OF COURSE

Due to Televisa's copyright lawsuit against Youtube, the latter has been marking as "video unavailable" an huge amount of telenovela material that was in Youtube thanks to the efforts of people around the world who invested their time uploading their personal collections of telenovela videos.

Following is a small sample of the many posts in blogs and bulletin boards complaining about this development (they're in Spanish):

alt1040
Foro Univision
pellejos p'al gato
skhamp
TVVI

In Youtube not only Mexican Televisa's telenovela videos are disappearing, but also many clips of telenovelas produced in other countries. Not to mention that Youtube is closing the personal accounts of anyone who has uploaded telenovela material.

This is sad. Youtube had become a true telenovela archive, a "must visit" place for telenovela lovers, and for scholars like me who have focused our research on this television genre. As far as I know, there isn't anywhere an archive that has samples of telenovelas from all producing countries. Telenovela videos are, like telenovela memories, scattered around the world in the homes of those audience members who were so enthralled by a particular show that they taped--some or all--the episodes of a particular telenovela. Thanks to their dedication, time and effort, telenovela videos were uploaded, despite the fact that most are in non-digital formats. Because of these people, Youtube became the greatest and most important telenovela archive in the planet.

Don't get me wrong. I know copyright laws. I also understand Televisa's right to keep selling their telenovelas, abridged and in DVD format. (I own a respectable collection of Televisa telenovelas in DVD that I've bought through the years). But, I don't believe the videos in Youtube diminished either the sales or interest in Televisa's telenovelas around the world. Au contraire, this material enticed audiences to watch and purchase Televisa's telenovelas.

The biggest loss, though, is of all the erased videos of telenovelas that weren't made by Televisa. In Youtube we could find impossible-to-find videos of Cristal, Yo soy Betty, la Fea (and its different local versions made in different countries), La Dueña, Las Amazonas, Ciudad Bendita, Kassandra, etc. None of these telenovelas are commercially sold. They are the sentimental property of the people who follow telenovelas around the world, and who now go back in time to when they only had access to the telenovelas broadcast in their own countries. This, obviously, strenghtens Televisa's dominance and hold on the global telenovela market. Those videos will be sorely missed by the telenovela Youtube audience.

They will be missed also in my classroom, where I won't be able to show anymore the variety of telenovela videos that allowed my students to understand the history and typology of telenovelas.

The absence of telenovela videos in Youtube will also increase the difficulty of studying this genre that is so popular, but also so mistreated...even by one of its most important producers.

October 12, 2007 Postscript: Two months after writing this post, a comment prompts me to look up in which court the lawsuit took place. I couldn't find it, which makes me think that the extensive deletion of telenovela material in Youtube was due to a warning from Televisa.

Original Stories or Remakes?

This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Luis Clemens, a freelance reporter who covers Hispanic marketing and media for trade publications such as Multichannel News.

In his blog, Clemenseando, Clemens wrote a post titled Too Many Telenovela Remakes? in which he describes the current telenovela landscape in U.S. Spanish speaking networks:

All three of Univision's primetime telenovelas are remakes. "La Fea Más Bella" is a Televisa remake of Fernando Gaitán's "Yo soy Betty, la fea." "Destilando Amor" is the Mexicanization of another Gaitán novela "Café, con aroma de mujer". In the new Televisa-produced version, Colombian coffee has been replaced with Mexican tequila. (The original setting of a coffee plantation has been replaced with an agave plantation and agave is the basic ingredient of tequila). "Duelo de Pasiones" is yet another Televisa remake. This novela is a remake of "Flor de las Nieves", which first aired in Cuba in the late 1950s.

To be sure, remakes aren't exclusive to the U.S. telenovela landscape. Remakes ("refritos", as they are commonly called in Venezuela) are present in many television stations across the world which, like Univisión, purchase their telenovelas from Mexican giant Televisa.

In Venezuela, remakes also have a place in television production. In the last few years, RCTV re-made as single shows some of its most successful telenovelas like La Señora de Cárdenas, Natalia de 8 a 9 and Silvia Rivas, Divorciada, all originally written by José Ignacio Cabrujas. In 2006, RCTV broadcast to low ratings a remake of Julio César Mármol's El Desprecio. And before being taken off the air by the government's cancellation of its license, RCTV was airing Mi Prima Ciela, written by Pilar Romero as a remake of her two successful telenovelas Elizabeth and Maite. Venevisión has also produced remakes of variable quality and degrees of success. (By the way, the question why remakes aren't always successful in Venezuela merits a separate post).

As I told Clemens, when he interviewed me, I'm not against remakes. But, I am against producing an excessive number of them. I also disagree with those who see the remake as the only production option, or as their preferred production choice. I firmly believe that it isn't healthy for the telenovela industry that one of its crucial players--Televisa--produces almost exclusively remakes. This focus on remake production will gradually asphyxiate creativity, diminish the generation of new plots and the possibilities of Latin Americans telling the stories of who we are and how we love. In the long term, remakes may produce fatigue in the audience as the genre will lose its freshness.


Last summer Produ.com published on its website a collection of videotaped interviews with key producers and writers discussing the issue of remakes. In his interview, Colombian writer Fernando Gaitán, whose marvellous Yo soy Betty, la Fea has been successfully remade in many countries, and is the inspiration for ABC's Ugly Betty, states that "television can't continue repeating itself, they're going to kill the genre", and adds "the remake is eating up the telenovela".


Award-winning Venezuelan author Alberto Barrera Tyszka hits the nail on the head when he states that the current emphasis on remakes "is related to one of the telenovela industry's strongest anxieties: how to guarantee success".
Certainly, the percepction among many networks executives is that remakes are sure successes. This is particularly true in Mexico.


And, even though Mexican producers like Salvador Mejías argue that they are the ones taking risks "because the issue is that people don't feel it's a remake", it seems obvious to me that the preference for remakes is a telltale sign that the "business" aspect of the telenovela is paramount and more important than any of the other facets of this media/cultural product that so defines Latin Americans.

I alway say that telenovelas have a little (or a lot) of Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, The Count of Montecristo, The Prince and the Pauper, The Man in the Iron Mask and Ugly Duckling, among other classic plots. Notwithstanding this common ground, Latin American creativity has produced wonderfully diverse love stories with characters we know and recognize. These are stories about ourselves, and as such they must evolve with the social formation and not get stuck in a vicious cycle of repetition.

(Note: Here you can find several video interviews with Fernando Gaitán in Spanish, including the one in which he discusses remakes. Also, through the link Ver más opiniones del Remake, you can access other interviews on this same topic).