Reality takes a novela turn

Nine unscripted series will fill prime time slots on Spanish-language TV, but the shows will have a soap opera twist.

BY MARIA ELENA FERNANDEZ
July 12, 2004

Minerva Ruvalcaba was featured on "La Cenicienta."

The genre's still new enough to Spanish-language television that nobody's given it a name yet.

"Rrrrreality?" suggested Univision President Ray Rodriguez with a shrug. "Just roll the R."

Or the dice. Spanish-language networks are gambling that reality television is about to win over the U.S. Latino market in a big way.

Telemundo, which pioneered the genre with such hits as "La Cenicienta" (Cinderella), now is facing competition from the much larger Univision and it's sister network TeleFutura. The three networks combined are developing nine unscripted series for the upcoming season that, in an unprecedented move, will be scheduled in prime-time slots typically devoted to highly popular telenovelas.

At stake for the networks: 39 million potential viewers, with a median age of 26 and a buying power of nearly $570 billion.

"We've been tracking reality in English and we know that our audience has an affinity for and attraction to it," said Ramon Escobar, executive vice president of programming and production at Telemundo. "This audience is very savvy. They watch the shows in English so we have to come up with original twists that appeal to them directly."

No show did a better job of attracting bilingual viewers than Fox's "American Idol," the most watched show among the young Latinos sought by advertisers, said Doug Alligood, senior vice president of special markets for the advertising agency BBDO Worldwide. But that same audience enjoys nightly doses of traditional soap opera fare.

"What these networks have discovered is that the same people are watching soap operas at the same time every night, so maybe if there's reality programming for them in Spanish, they'll watch that too," Alligood said.

But getting there is not as simple as buying the rights to an English-language show, duplicating the format and having the participants speak in Spanish. Telemundo tried that last year, with disappointing results, when it aired "La Isla de Tentacion," its version of "Temptation Island." For a reality show to work in the Spanish-speaking market, producers believe, the audience must identify with the participants and relate to their cultural sagas, even when the heroine is a modern-day Cinderella as in the case of Telemundo's highly rated "La Cenicienta," a dating show that borrowed heavily from "The Bachelorette."

And the best way to achieve that? Combine the suspense and clever twist of the reality genre with the compelling narrative form of telenovelas, which routinely dominate the top 20 prime-time shows on Spanish television. Unlike English-language soap operas, telenovelas wind up in a few months and feature superstar cast, fast-paced action and plots turns that run the gamut from sex and romance to murder and betrayal.

"At the heart of our reality TV is the concept that our audience loves: the love story or the dramatic arc or conflict that is at the heart of telenovela," Escobar said. "Reality has struck a chord because it revolves around human drams and relationships that our audience cares about as well as the aspirational elements that are so popular in our novelas."

Producer: Nely Galán has found a lucrative niche with reality shows such as "La Cenicienta" and Fox's "The Swan"

Cultural issues
No one better understands the specific challenge to come up with shows that are at once original and culturally relevant than Nely Galán. The former Telemundo head of programming left 10 years ago to start her own production company and is the only reality-TV producer straddling the ever-expanding genre biculturally. A striking, often polarizing player in Spanish-language broadcasting in the U.S., Galán found her own lucrative niche that play on her own ideas about women, like herself, who make lemonade out of life's lemons: Telemundo's "La Cenicienta" and Fox's "The Swan."

"La Cenicienta", which aired in the fall, featured Minerva Ruvalcaba, a Mexican American divorced single mother searching for Prince Charming among a group of 20 bachelors of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In addition to worrying about impressing Cinderella, the suitors answered to her mother, brother, godmother, two friends, a priest and an astrologer. When they spent time with Ruvalcaba, a chaperon tagged along to make sure there was no hanky-panky. "The issue I was interested in, especially, was single motherhood and the hypocrisy in our market that a single mother is damaged goods but men get to do whatever they want," Galán said. "I really believe that when you work from your life experiences and the issues you need to work out and the things that resonate with you, they will resonate with others. That's what people responded to in that show, that beautiful single mother who has such bad luck with love."

"La Cenicienta," Escobar added, "showed us that machismo is alive and well in most Latin families." Which is precisely what Galán says inspired the show. A single mother of a 4-year-old boy. Galán, who has dealt with her family's pressures to find Mr. Right throughout her life, said she felt a lot of shame when she became a mother without becoming a wife.

"I like to do shows based on my own experience," said the 40-year-old Cuban-born producer, who says she also developed "The Swan" - a successful but controversial unscripted show in which women undergo sometimes dramatic plastic surgery as well as Galán's unique brand of "life coaching" - out of her personal aging crisis. "When I was coming up with 'La Cenicienta,' 'The Bachelor' was on the air and I thought about how I could put my own spin on it. As a single mother, in the American world, I'm cool. But in the Latin world, there's something wrong with me. It made me realize that I can work in both of these worlds because I live in both worlds. So I think about the issues on my mind and I explore if it's coming from my Latina self or from just being a woman and I go from there."

Like many of its English-language counter-parts, "La Cenicienta" had a deceiving twist - one that built suspense and exposed an age-old double standard. The audience knew about Ruvalcaba's 3-year-old daughter and two failed marriages by age 23, but producers strategically kept that from the bachelors to force them to deal with their macho tendencies.

"None of the reality shows on the English channels would have given a woman like me, a single mother, a chance to go on television and look for love," said Ruvalcaba, now 24. "You know that many Latin men are very machista and wouldn't accept a woman like me. I am the opposite of what Cinderella is. But on the show I was treated like a princess and I realized that I deserve to be treated that way, even if I have not known how to select the best men for myself."

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