TELENOVELAS

Recent Titles in
The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization

Baseball
Border Culture
Cesar Chavez
Health Care
Immigration
Latina Writers
Latino Identity
Mexican-American Cuisine
Quinceañeras
Soccer
Spanglish
Telenovelas
TELENOVELAS
Edited by Ilan Stavans
Copyright © 2010 by Ilan Stavans

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Telenovelas / edited by Ilan Stavans.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-313-36492-1 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-36493-8
(ebook)
1. Television soap operas—Latin America—History and criticism.
2. Television soap operas—Social aspects—Latin America. I. Stavans, Ilan.
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Contents

Series Foreword by Ilan Stavans vii

Preface ix

I PANORAMAS 1

What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 3

Laura Stempel Mumford
The International Telenovela Debate and
the Contra-Flow Argument: A Reappraisal 33
Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers
Telenovelas and Soap Operas: Negotiating Reality
from the Periphery 51
Christina Slade
Romancing the Globe 61
Ibsen Martínez
Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front:
A Complex Analysis of a Complex Reality 68
Jorge González
Opening America?
The Telenovela-ization of U.S. Soap Operas 79
Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington
Engaging the Audience: The Social Imagery of the Novela 93
Reginald Clifford

II CASE STUDIES 101

Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction:

A Transformation of Genre and Roles in Mexican Telenovelas 103
María de la Luz Casas Pérez
vi Contents

Fact or Fiction? Narrative and Reality in the Mexican Telenovela 110

Rosalind C. Pearson
Whose Life in the Mirror?
Examining Three Mexican Telenovelas as Cultural
and Commercial Products 116
Laura J. Beard

Selected Bibliography 133

Index 135
About the Editor and Contributors 143
Series Foreword

The book series The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization, the first of its
kind, is devoted to exploring all the facets of Hispanic civilization in the
United States, with its ramifications in the Americas, the Caribbean Basin,
and the Iberian Peninsula. The objective is to showcase its richness and com-
plexity from a myriad perspective. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the
Latino minority is the largest in the nation. It is also the fifth largest concen-
tration of Hispanics in the globe.
One out of every seven Americans traces his or her roots to the Spanish-
speaking world. Mexicans make up about 65% of the minority. Other major
national groups are Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Gua-
temalans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians. They are either immi-
grants, descendants of immigrants, or dwellers in a territory (Puerto Rico, the
Southwest) having a conflicted relationship with the mainland U.S. As such,
they are the perfect example of encuentro: an encounter with different social
and political modes, an encounter with a new language, and encounter with
a different way of dreaming.
The series is a response to the limited resources available and the abun-
dance of stereotypes, which are a sign of lazy thinking. The 20th century
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, author of The Revolt of the Masses,
once said: “By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that
forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept
is in itself an exaggeration.” The purpose of the series is not to clarify but
to complicate our understanding of Latinos. Do so many individuals from
different national, geographic, economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds
coalesce as an integrated whole? Is there an unum in the pluribus?
Baruch Spinoza believed that every thing in the universe wants to be pre-
served in its present form: a tree wants to be a tree, and a dog a dog. Lati-
nos in the United States want to be Latinos in the United States—no easy
task, and therefore an intriguing one to explore. Each volume of the series
contains an assortment of approximately a dozen articles, essays and in-
terviews by journalists and specialists in their respective fields, followed
by a bibliography of important resources on the topic. Their compilation is
viii Series Foreword

designed to generate debate and foster research: to complicate our knowl-

edge. Every attempt is made to balance the ideological viewpoint of the au-
thors. The target audience is students, specialists, and the lay reader. Themes
will range from politics to sports, from music to cuisine. Historical periods
and benchmarks like the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, the Zoot
Suit Riots, the Bracero Program, and the Cuban Revolution, as well as contro-
versial topics like Immigration, Bilingual Education, and Spanglish will be
tackled.
Democracy is able to thrive only when it engages in an open, honest ex-
change of information. By offering diverse, insightful volumes about Hispanic
life in the United States and inviting people to engage in critical thinking, The
Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization seeks to open new vistas to appreciate
the fastest growing, increasingly heterogeneous minority in the nation—to be
part of the encuentro.

Ilan Stavans
Preface

My father is a telenovela actor in Mexico. I came of age in the seventies visit-

ing Televisa, the largest manufacturer of soap operas in the Spanish-speaking
world. It was a world of make-believe: actors’ physiques reshaped by surgery
and cosmetics and hiding behind the panoply of the day, spotless artificial sets
where it was always spring, and an overabundance of emotions spilling out
in every direction. (I wrote about it, tangentially, in my memoir On Borrowed
Words [2001].) The academic exploration of telenovelas is a much-needed field of
study that has grown exponentially in the last couple of decades with prob-
ing explorations of the transnational projects manufactured in Mexico, Brazil,
Venezuela, and Miami. Spanish- and Portuguese-language soap-operas are
spiritual sustenance in places as remote as Russia, Israel, and the Philippines,
their casts a constellation of celebrities competing against Hollywood power.
In this volume I’ve collected essays on a variety of topics. U.S. scholar
Laura Stempel Mumford and Venezuelan playwright Ibsen Martínez look at
the phenomenon through a wide lens. There are studies of particular cases
like Xica, Betty la fea, and Laberintos de Pasión. The connection between ste-
reotypes and gender roles, particularly among young women, is analyzed.
Another area of exploration is the relationship between fact and fiction. The
impact of television in the Hispanic world, from Buenos Aires to Los Ange-
les, is enormous. The closing episode of a prime-time telenovela is capable of
bringing a country to full stop. Indeed, I remember when Mexico’s president
apologized for cancelling a meeting with congressmen because he didn’t
want to miss the finale of his favorite soap-opera. I forget which one it was
but I do remember that it wasn’t his favorite. Proof of its impact was that the
following day, almost every major Mexican daily reported the news of who
the father of the telenovela’s illegitimate child was.
My hope is that these reflections open lines of research. A single episode
of a popular telenovela in the United States is watched by more viewers in Uni-
visión than the sum of readers of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece One
Hundred Years of Solitude since its publication in 1967.
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PART I
PANORAMAS
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What Is This Thing Called
Soap Opera?

Laura Stempel Mumford

The name given to the new genre is as interesting as it is unusual. Isn’t

it unprecedented for a cultural product to indicate so crudely its material
origin . . . and its conscription in the battle between different commercial
brands? At the same time, a whole household definition of a broadcast litera-
ture reveals itself plainly, making unambiguously clear a twofold function:
to promote the sale of household products, and to subsume the housewife
in her role by offering her romantic gratification.
—Michele Mattelart, “From Soap to Serial”

Despite the close critical and theoretical attention that has been paid to soap
operas over the last decade, few writers have offered a very clear definition
of the genre. Many have identified general characteristics, compiling lists
that may include everything from major features of the programs’ narrative
structure to the work habits of their female characters.1 Others have remarked
on viewers’ understanding of “the poetic and generic rules that govern soap
opera programs.”2 Still others have joined Charlotte Brunsdon in calling soap
opera “in some ways the paradigmatic television genre (domestic, continu-
ous, contemporary, episodic, repetitive, fragmented, and aural).”3 Yet for the
most part, theorists have been content to employ a commonsense definition
of the form, such as Robert Allen’s simple equation of soap operas with “day-
time dramatic serials.”4
Among the things that have allowed work on soap opera to proceed with-
out a more detailed basic definition is the fact that, as with many other televi-
sion forms, industry parameters for the original and still-dominant version,
U.S. daytime soap operas, have so closely tallied with viewers’ understanding
of the genre that the category has appeared already to be defined. Because

Laura Stempel Mumford: Excerpt from “What Is This Called Soap Opera? Public Ex-
posure and How Things End,” first published in Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap
Operas, Women, and Television Genre, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press,
1995: 14–46.
4 Telenovelas

there is little argument over whether or not, for example, General Hospital
qualifies as a soap, the need for a more precise definition has not seemed
especially urgent.
Yet this apparent clarity disappears the moment we move beyond such
an obvious example, and the category of soap opera is no longer as trans-
parent as it may once have seemed. The days when all the U.S. programs
that could potentially be identified as soap operas shared a clear set of char-
acteristics—notably, daily daytime broadcast—ended with the 1978 debut
of Dallas, the first major “prime-time soap.” Since then, we have watched a
seemingly endless set of variations on the soap opera form. Today, the very
same commonsense definition that is on one level so self-evident that even
relatively inexperienced viewers can immediately recognize, not only that
General Hospital is a soap opera, but that SCTV Network’s Days of the Week is
a parody of one, dissolves into incoherence when we ask only slightly more
complex questions: Are weekly prime-time serials like Dallas and Dynasty re-
ally soaps? What about the murder-centered Twin Peaks or the law drama L.A.
Law? How is it that programs as diverse as the police series Hill Street Blues
and the family drama thirtysomething can both be called soaps?5 And where
do parodies like Soap and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, or productions from
Europe and Latin America, fit in?
Efforts have, of course, been made to differentiate among programs like
these. Some critics have drawn a line between television serials and other
forms of television melodrama (a category that is, as I will argue below, also
far less transparent than its usage often suggests), while others have explic-
itly separated daytime soap operas from so-called “prime-time soaps.” Muriel
Cantor and Suzanne Pingree, for instance, discriminate between soap operas
and prime-time serials such as Dallas in terms of production values and costs,
number of episodes produced, and content, and Ien Ang makes a similar case
when she insists that “an important formal difference between Dallas and the
daytime soap opera is the much greater attention to visualization in Dallas.”6
Because daytime and prime-time serials share so many features and are so
often equated,7 the distinction between them is perhaps the most crucial one,
and Gabriele Kreutzner and Ellen Seiter identify two possible stances: regard-
ing prime-time serials as simply “a modification of the US daytime soap opera,”
or considering series like Dynasty and Dallas “as an expression of significant
changes within the category of texts geared toward an adult audience.”8 Still,
the more basic problem of marking soap operas off from programs that exhibit
similar characteristics has not been adequately addressed.
A closer look at one attempt to distinguish among closely related program
forms suggests just how difficult this task can be. Christine Geraghty’s work
on soap opera dates back at least to her contributions to the British Film Insti-
tute’s important 1981 publication Coronation Street. Her 1991 book Women and
Soap Opera can thus be seen as the culmination of over a decade’s analysis of
both the British and U.S. versions of the television serial. It also represents
an attempt to move beyond a text-based understanding of the genre in favor
of one that defines soap opera in terms of how viewers make use of it, and
thus reflects a major trend in television studies. In Women and Soap Opera,
Geraghty, a British scholar, equates U.S. daytime, U.S. prime-time, and British
serials, calling all of them “soaps.” In explaining the principle that unites this
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 5

group of programs, she writes that “soap operas . . . can now be defined not
purely by daytime scheduling or even by a clear appeal to a female audience
but by the presence of stories which engage an audience in such a way that
they become the subject for public interest and interrogation.”9 As a defining
characteristic, however, this produces a category called “soaps” that poten-
tially encompasses nearly all of television. Although Geraghty has in mind
the public fascination with the identity of J.R.’s would-be murderer on Dallas
and speculation about the fates of characters on British serials like Coronation
Street and EastEnders, it is easy to recall other instances of “public interroga-
tion” inspired by programs that can in no way be defined as soap operas,
especially in the United States. Think, for instance, of the 1992 debate about
Murphy Brown’s sitcom pregnancy or the controversy over PBS’s 1991 airing
of Marlon Riggs’s controversial film Tongues Untied, to name just two recent
U.S. examples.
The problem here is that Geraghty is, quite understandably, trying to define
the genre in mainly functional terms, emphasizing what she calls “the capac-
ity of soaps to engage their audiences in the narrative and their ability to open
up for public discussion emotional and domestic issues which are normally
deemed to be private.”10 Yet we could argue that this capacity is not actually
special to soap operas at all, but is instead a characteristic of television as a
simultaneously public and domestic medium. As it has done from its begin-
nings, television introduces public concerns into the private viewing space of
the home through news and public affairs programming, fictional uses of cur-
rent events (sitcoms or crime dramas that incorporate issues from recent head-
lines), and the presentation of public performances, sports, and political events
for consumption in a domestic setting.11 At the same time, TV’s position as the
dominant medium of entertainment and information makes it an obvious and
constant topic of both private conversation and public discussion. Geraghty
implies that, outside of the programs she refers to as “soaps,” such talk about
television has traditionally focused on subjects that are neither “emotional”
nor “domestic,” and that it is only through prime-time serials aimed at women
that these topics enter the sphere of public talk about TV. Yet cultural-studies-
oriented audience research makes it clear that viewers are capable of raising
personal issues in connection with programs that encompass a variety of
genres.12 And even if this were not true, the phenomenon of the daytime talk
show—Donahue, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the like—has institutionalized
the public discussion of intensely “private” issues, such as sexuality, domestic
violence, parent-child relationships, and so on.13
As Geraghty acknowledges, the important thing “is not so much to give
[particular programs] the correct label but to recognise why there is a prob-
lem about definition.”14 One of the complicating issues is the tendency for
television as a whole to incorporate aspects of the melodramatic mode of ad-
dress into previously established genres, particularly through the increasing
personalization of all television expressions, from comedy to the news, a sub-
ject to which I will return later in this chapter. Although this has intensified
since prime-time serials such as Dallas and Dynasty became popular, it is a
medium-wide trend—at least in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the
United Kingdom—and one that renders essentially pointless any strict iden-
tification of the personal with soap opera.
6 Telenovelas

To avoid the kind of confusion that arises from a definition that empha-
sizes function in this way, we need to develop one that focuses instead on
the specific characteristics of the genre itself, a definition that allows us not
merely to describe and categorize a wide range of programs, but to imag-
ine other possible permutations. Otherwise, theoretical developments will be
limited by the fact that those of us who work in the field can never be sure
that we are all talking about the same thing. What, for example, does it mean
to speak of closure’s function in soap opera (to cite only one major theoretical
issue) if the “genre” includes daytime and prime-time serials, episodic series
that follow a single plot trajectory, episodic series with multiple storylines,
and limited-run prime-time series?
Although several important theoretical questions need to be considered
before we can examine the following definition in detail, let me begin by
specifying as precisely as I can what I mean by the term “soap opera”:

A soap opera is a continuing fictional dramatic television program, presented in

multiple serial installments each week, through a narrative composed of inter-
locking storylines that focus on the relationships within a specific community
of characters.

These are the elements I see as “necessary and sufficient to constitute and de-
limit [the] genre,”15 and define the term as I will use it throughout this chapter.
Although the traditional U.S. soap opera serves as my primary model, I have
deliberately tried to define the form in such a way as to allow for the possibil-
ity of a wide range of permutations beyond those that have actually been pro-
duced (such as future soaps from nonbroadcast and noncommercial sources
and from other than U.S. producers), without sacrificing the specificity that
makes a definition useful. Although these parameters are to a great extent
derived from commercially produced U.S. daytime serials, there is no reason
to imagine that such programs represent the limits of the genre. (At least one
national cable service has already produced a serial that meets my criteria, the
Christian Broadcasting Network’s Another Life, which ran from 1981 to 1984.)
In particular, we need not expect future examples to be limited to daytime,
and the fact that other programs, especially British and Australian serials,
already meet most of my criteria suggests that we have by no means seen all
the possible variants on the form.
Before I look at the individual elements of my definition in more detail,
however, I want to consider why the issue of definition itself has been prob-
lematic and to suggest what the effort to define soap opera as a unique genre
implies for work on other television forms. The project of genre definition
has at least one obvious function for TV theorists: Because it allows us to
distinguish among programs that might otherwise seem quite similar, it per-
mits us to separate the operations of specific forms (genres) of programming
from the operations both of individual televisual practices—which may occur
in a variety of genres—and of television as a medium. (An example of this
would be my attempt, above, to separate the formal operations of soap opera
from television’s capacity as a medium to introduce domestic issues into the
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 7

public arena.) In the case of soap operas, the need for this kind of separation
becomes more and more urgent as conventions traditionally associated with
daytime serials bleed into prime time. At least since the U.S. debut of Dallas,
and certainly since the 1981 premiere of Hill Street Blues, televisual practices
such as serial-style episodic nonclosure and complexly overlapping storylines
have become more and more common on programs that bear few other obvi-
ous affinities with daytime soap operas. (Some people might argue that the
1965 debut of Peyton Place actually marked the beginning of soap opera’s in-
vasion of prime time, but while popular, that series never had Dallas’s impact
on television conventions.) Jane Feuer has argued that U.S. television exhib-
its a “general movement . . . towards the continuing serial form.”16 In fact, it
is impossible to isolate a single major generic characteristic of soaps—with
the possible exception of multiple weekly installments—that is not now also
employed by other types of fictional television programs. If we expand the
landscape to include nonfiction forms, such as news programs, talk, or game
shows, we cannot even except daily presentation.
Nevertheless, certain problems face those who attempt to define specific
television genres, and these are not unique to the field of soap opera. A pro-
found theoretical uncertainty underlies most discussions of television form:
the lack of an adequate theory of television genre as a whole. While genre has
long been a site of debate within film theory, it has only recently begun to
be dealt with seriously in television studies. And not surprisingly, questions
about the validity of genre itself have accompanied theorists’ first serious ef-
forts to move beyond broad generalizations like “television melodrama.”
A major objection to the project of genre definition is that television is re-
sistant as a medium to the rigidity that such categorization is thought to re-
quire. Television is seen, for example, as both the ultimate representative and
the primary purveyor of a postmodern sensibility, the site of a self-reflexive
mix of ahistorical pastiche and apolitical parody, filled with programs that
refer mainly to other programs, and emblematized by MTV. Its fluid formats,
argue postmodern theorists, have borders far too permeable to fix into any-
thing that resembles the genres of the past.17 Others object on the grounds
that television categories are too changeable to anchor anything as stable as
genre definition, arguing instead that the medium is characterized by con-
stant movement within which, as John Fiske claims, “Each new show shifts
genre boundaries and develops definitions.”18
Yet claims like these seem to ignore a basic characteristic of television, es-
pecially in its commercial broadcast incarnation. Indeed, in John Caughie’s
words, “Questions of genre . . . seem fundamental to television,”19 particu-
larly in the United States, where television is uniquely genre-driven—not
least because the industry obsession with ratings has led producers, broad-
casters, and, more recently, cablecasters on a perpetual quest for the program-
ming formula that will guarantee a large and dependable audience. However
malleable TV formats may seem, industry self-promotion and trade publi-
cations make it clear that programmers rely heavily on viewers’ realization
that specific programs belong to specific genres. This has several important
consequences: While literary and film theorists can, for instance, usefully
8 Telenovelas

distinguish between “genre” fiction or movies and other forms, such a dis-
tinction is not very useful for television.20 Even industry discussions of pro-
gramming innovations demonstrate the importance of a basic genre stability,
and most new shows are designed to be immediately recognizable in terms
of familiar existing genres, whether as traditional members or as new varia-
tions on them. This process is a self-perpetuating one: Programs that viewers
find impossible to understand in familiar genre terms tend to be interpreted
as mocking audience expectations—as indeed they are, since audiences have
been led to expect that new programs will conform to old patterns.
The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon, and one of the
most complex demonstrations of the dominance of genre, is Twin Peaks. Its
initial popularity can probably be attributed to the combined effects of co-
creator David Lynch’s cult status and the fact that the program’s challenges to
television conventions—its overt expressions of sexuality and violence, black
comedy, allusions to film culture, and so on—seemed at first to take place
within a format that mixed the already popular genres of the prime-time se-
rial and the crime/mystery series. Ultimately, however, Peaks’ loss of audience
and both critics’ and viewers’ intense alienation from the series can, I think,
be traced directly to the fact that the audience found it nearly impossible to
continue to understand the show in terms of recognizable genres.21 (It is in-
teresting to note that the few programs that do resist this kind of categori-
zation—including Twin Peaks—tend at some point to be identified as soap
operas, as if this serves as a default genre.)
An important factor here is the way in which the basic programming
structure of U.S. commercial broadcast television (and its noncommercial
and cable imitators) interacts with audience expectations to reinforce familiar
genre categories. As Caughie has pointed out, “the schedules of the majority
viewing channels . . . [concentrate] particular genres and subgenres within
the same time-slot: the competition is directed quite blatantly at the same
demographic group or taste constituency, and, characteristically, for the net-
work viewer, the choice is within genres and subgenres rather than between
them.”22 Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of low-caste genres
such as soap operas, children’s programs, game shows, and talk shows, which
tend to be clustered together in fringe time periods. That is not to say that the
individual programs within these clusters are identical. Patricia Mellencamp
contends that “While there is still a programming block of time and general
set of conventions which define ‘soap opera,’ each serial is also marked by
differentiation,” yet such “differentiation” does not necessarily mean, as Mel-
lencamp concludes, that “genre analyses of TV no longer cohere.”23 For both
programmers and viewers, genres are to a great extent defined by their place-
ment on the schedule: To place a series in a particular spot on the schedule
grid is implicitly to locate it within a particular genre.
The centrality of genre to the operations of the TV industry, then, makes it
ironic that, while specific individual forms such as soap operas and sitcoms
have received an enormous amount of analytic attention, television genre
theory itself is still at a relatively early stage of development. What Caughie
calls “assumptions of genre” pervade TV studies, but major books on televi-
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 9

sion form have only recently begun automatically to include detailed discus-
sions of genre theory, and that theory has only begun to deal with the impact
of television’s unique combination of repetition and difference on notions of
genre.24
One reason for this late start is the relatively recent separation of tele-
vision studies from the study of film and literature. Although the issue of
television’s difference from film was raised early on, it has taken a long time
for critics and theorists to recognize just how limited an application there
may be in TV for concepts originally developed for the study of film.25 Much
work continues to draw on film theory, but it is crucial to remember that, in
Jane Feuer’s words, “television as an apparatus differs in almost every signif-
icant respect from cinema.”26 The role of the major U.S. broadcast networks
in shaping the television programming agenda, the effect of commercials
on the narrative structure of individual programs, the simultaneous avail-
ability of anywhere from 4 to 150 viewing options, the networks’ changing
relationships both to their affiliates and to cable services, and the domestic
setting in which television is consumed are only a few of the things that set
the medium apart from film.
This insight is particularly important in the case of soap opera, which has
almost universally been understood as a form of melodrama, and therefore
has frequently been discussed using the analyses developed for the stage and
film versions of it. Melodrama may be invoked as a meta-genre, a mode of
address, a form of imagination, or a performance style. Or it may be used as
a blanket term that means roughly the same thing as “television drama,” as
David Thorburn seems to do when he includes in the category of TV melo-
drama “most made-for-television movies, the soap operas, and all the law-
yers, cowboys, cops and docs, the fugitives and adventurers, the fraternal and
filial comrades who have filled the prime hours of so many American nights
for the last thirty years.”27 But paradoxically, as melodrama comes to be—and
to be seen as—the dominant mode of television expression, its usefulness as a
way of understanding a specific genre such as soap opera becomes more and
more limited.
In “Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home,” Laura Mulvey traces
the development of what she variously calls the “melodramatic style” and
the “melodramatic aesthetic” from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
stage through Hollywood cinema and finally “to its death in the television-
dominated home.”28 In its stage incarnation, melodrama is characterized by
exaggerated gestures and a plot more dependent on fate than on individual
heroic action, while Hollywood film versions focus on women and the home,
sexuality, repression, and a conflict between the individual and an intrusive
community. Finally, says Mulvey, in television, “the long-standing tension
between inside”—home, sexuality, emotion—”and outside is resolved”: melo-
drama, which originally depended on public theatrical expressions of private
emotions, becomes totally absorbed into the home when it is consumed via
the domesticated medium of television.29
Mulvey seems to imply that television melodrama is essentially impos-
sible, its necessarily public character canceled out when it is consumed in
10 Telenovelas

the home. But according to Lynne Joyrich, we can instead see melodrama
as “the preferred form for TV.”30 Joyrich points out daytime and prime-time
serials’ employment of specific stylistic markers associated with melodrama,
such as “the use of music to convey emotional effects” and the heightening
of dramatic moments through “concentrated visual metaphors” (p. 131), but
she argues that melodrama “so dominates [television’s] discourse that it be-
comes difficult to locate as a separate TV genre” (p. 131). Although she draws
on Thorburn’s argument, her claim here is quite different from his sweeping
generalizations, resting as it does on an analysis of postmodern consumerism
and the ways in which the personal and domestic framework characteristic
of film melodrama has come to enclose a wide range of television forms, from
made-for-TV movies to police dramas to the stories on the evening news. Still,
she admits that, “as it spreads across a number of TV forms . . . melodrama
loses its specificity, becoming diffuse and ungrounded in its multiple deploy-
ments in the flow of TV” (p. 135).
Joyrich’s argument is extremely persuasive, and several of the traits she
assigns to melodrama will be important later in this essay—among them
the externalization of internal conflicts, the perpetuation of the myth of the
total legibility of meaning, an intense concern with gender, and the way that
framing a story in exclusively personal terms allows the framer to evade its
ideological implications. Yet the essay raises a serious problem for work on
television genres that have traditionally been considered melodramas, for the
increasing diffuseness Joyrich describes applies as much to the usefulness
of the concept of melodrama as to its presence on the program grid. If melo-
drama is seen as TV’s dominant mode of address, its dominant aesthetic, or
the meta-genre that subsumes the majority of television genres—and I think
it may be all of these at once—then there is limited value in discussing spe-
cific genres such as soap opera primarily in terms of their melodramatic na-
ture. In other words, even if almost all of television is melodramatic, we still
need to distinguish soap opera from the other melodramatic genres that fill
the airwaves. An understanding of melodrama must certainly inform any
serious discussions of soap opera, but we are still left with much the same
question we have always needed to ask: how is soap opera different from
other television genres?
At the same time, melodrama’s very pervasiveness reminds us once again
of the necessity of questioning the extent to which we can usefully employ
filmic (or theatrical or literary) concepts in discussions of television. In its hey-
day from the 1930s to the 1950s, after all, film melodrama was only one of a
number of different cinematic forms. Although some, such as film noir, were
inflected by it, few film genres were actually transformed into melodrama, as
so much of television has been.31 At the very least, as Robyn Wiegman insists
in her analysis of TV’s presentation of the 1991 Gulf War, “melodrama must
be understood, in its televisual deployment, as a ‘contaminated’ genre: cut-
ting, mixing, and otherwise transforming the representational strategies we
associate with it from the study of cinema.”32 Television takes up melodramatic
strategies, as it takes up strategies employed by other film, stage, and literary
traditions, such as the domestic novel, the mystery, vaudeville, the film musi-
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 11

cal, and so on. But rather than simply being transplanted to television, these
features are adapted and transformed into specifically televisual strategies;
while never wholly severed from other media, they follow a specific develop-
mental trajectory within television.
In fact, there may be good reason to question even a broad equation of
soap opera with melodrama. Christine Gledhill has drawn attention to the
ambiguous historical and theoretical relationships between the two, tracing
the ties between melodrama and a variety of “women’s” fictions, including
the domestic novel, film melodramas, and both radio and TV soaps.33 She
argues that soap opera’s emphasis on dialogue undermines melodrama’s de-
pendence on gestural and metaphoric expressions of emotion, while serializa-
tion is antagonistic to what she describes as melodrama’s “deus-ex-machina
resolutions” (p. 113). Although Gledhill acknowledges that the forms share
a number of mechanisms—including a heavy reliance on stories involving
coincidence, mysteries about parentage, and the reappearance of long-lost
characters—she suggests that melodrama and soap opera actually constitute
separate narrative strategies for dealing with the realm of the personal. One
of her most intriguing insights is that soap opera’s much-publicized ability
to deal with social issues is the result of a kind of handoff from melodrama
to strategies specific to soaps: “once melodrama has put the problem on the
agenda, soap opera’s diagnostic technique of conversation will frequently dis-
sipate the melodramatic charge as characters chew over . . . the emotional,
moral, and social implications and consequences of the event” (p. 121).
Questions of genre necessarily also raise questions about the complex re-
lationship between a medium and its audience and about the site(s) at which
meaning is produced. In the case of television studies, the reluctance to dwell
on genre definitions is probably connected to the fact that much contemporary
criticism and theory developed in reaction both to social-science-based audi-
ence studies organized around issues of “influence” and to textual analyses
growing out of film and literary studies. The resulting work has emphasized
the notion of active viewers who make meaning through their encounters
with polysemous television texts, and has shifted attention away from textu-
ally based studies. As I suggested in my discussion of Christine Geraghty’s
functional approach, this acknowledgment of viewers’ role in the production
of meaning has some clear implications for defining soap opera in particular.
Yet, since one of the major projects of genre study is to group individual texts
according to their shared formal characteristics, texts must necessarily be the
basis of any notion of genre.
This is an especially vexing problem in television studies, for many theo-
rists agree that what Robyn Wiegman calls television’s “permeable borders
. . . make difficult the isolation of any unified, singular televisual text.”34 In
her discussions of the notion of “good” or “quality” TV, however, Charlotte
Brunsdon defends retaining the concept of the television text while also taking
seriously the difficulties inherent in identifying such an object. She acknowl-
edges a diversity of viewing practices, yet she insists that such strategies can
represent “defining features” of television as a medium only “if we choose
not to pay attention to what is on the screen.”35 Instead, Brunsdon points to
12 Telenovelas

“the symbolic necessity of the audience, its varied inscription throughout the
television text,” the ways in which “the audience is called on, and constructed
by television, as its main source of legitimation” (p. 120). She argues that, far
from proving the nonexistence of such a text, critical approaches that focus
on the audience or that emphasize television’s intertextuality actually prove
“that the choice of what is recognized as constituting ‘a’ text . . . is a political
as well as a critical matter” (p. 123). (Thus, for example, critics may attempt
to “redeem” an otherwise ideologically suspect media product—Madonna’s
videos, say, or maternal melodramas—by shifting the focus from the text it-
self to the various strategies through which viewers construct a preferable
reading.)
In claiming that it is not television as a medium, but critical and theoretical
approaches to television that undermine its textuality, Brunsdon concludes
that,

difficult as it may be, we have to retain a notion of the television text. That is,
without the guarantees of common sense or the authority of a political tele-
ology[,] with the recognition of the potentially infinite proliferation of textual
sites, and the agency of the always already social reader, in a range of contexts, it
is still necessary—and possible—to construct a televisual object of study—and
judgment. (p. 125)

However, just as, in Brunsdon’s view, soap opera presents a paradigm of

television as a whole, so too it offers a particularly extreme demonstration of
the difficulty of identifying such an “object of study.” There are special prob-
lems attendant on defining the soap opera “text,” problems that go well be-
yond the predictable difficulties involved in defining any text—or, indeed, in
reaching a critical consensus about the possibility or desirability of identify-
ing “a” text at all. For some, the genre’s apparently total lack of closure means
that, “in the instance of soap opera, there is no such thing as a text . . . , since
the stories in question have no end.”36 This is by no means the only ground on
which critics and theorists deny the existence of the soap opera text. The sheer
volume of episodes of an individual television soap opera—the fact that some
programs have been broadcast five days a week since the early 1950s—makes
it hard for a critic to describe, much less recapture, a program’s broadcast his-
tory. In contrast, even the longest-running situation comedy or drama, aired
only once a week, can more easily be reviewed in its entirety.
In fact, the irretrievability of the complete record of a long-running soap
has led Robert Allen and others to claim that such a text can never be de-
fined with any certainty. Allen has argued that there is something about soap
opera’s narrative form that removes it from the realm of traditional aesthetic
objects, making it impossible to describe it as a “text” in any meaningful
way. He describes soaps as “narratively anomalous,” contending that they
“cannot be said to have a ‘form’ in the traditional sense.”37 Even if we accept
the possibility of locating a specific television text, we cannot watch a “com-
plete” soap opera, says Allen, so it is therefore impossible to define it as a
text. Significantly, this conclusion is based not only on the predicted lack of
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 13

series closure—viewers’ expectations that an individual program will go on

forever—but on the assumption that a particular program’s origins are also
inaccessible:

I would argue that the soap opera as text can be specified only as the sum of all
its episodes broadcast since it began. Hence what we are dealing with is a huge
meta-text . . . which [in the case of a 30-year-old program] . . . would take 780
hours . . . to run. . . . But even at the end of this marathon screening, the critic
could still not claim to have “read” the entire text of the soap, since during the
32.5 days of continuous viewing, 16 additional hours of textual material would
have been produced.38

The idea that what Allen calls the soap opera “meta-text” is ultimately ir-
retrievable, however, overlooks several significant factors. First of all, there
certainly exist viewers who have experienced the entire broadcast run of
particular programs, whether these are older ones who remember Guiding
Light’s 1952 move to television or viewers who have watched The Bold and the
Beautiful or Santa Barbara since the far more recent beginnings of these shows
in the 1980s. Indeed, for some programs, begun in the 1970s or 1980s and can-
celed within a decade (such as Ryan’s Hope, Generations, Texas, Santa Barbara,
and Capitol), there exist viewers who have consumed entire series, from be-
ginning to end. Even if such viewers have missed occasional individual epi-
sodes—and in these days of VCRs, we need not assume even that gap—their
position would in no way resemble that of Allen’s critic, who sits down with
a collection of unviewed videotapes representing 30 years of broadcasts. As
a matter of fact, we might argue that the viewing experience of Allen’s critic
would bear so little resemblance to that of a regular viewer as to constitute a
different practice entirely, and that it would thus yield few insights into the
process by which soaps are actually consumed.
Equally problematic from a theoretical standpoint, however, is the implica-
tion that we cannot speak meaningfully about a program as a “text” unless
we have consumed it in its entirety. Allen’s own work demonstrates that the
impossibility of reviewing the entire run of these programs in no way pre-
vents the development of a sophisticated analysis of the form. But even more
important, the lack of this kind of total retrievability is part of what marks
television’s specific difference from print, the medium whose “repeatability”
implicitly forms the basis for any theory that presumes the critic must “read”
an entire work in order to consider it as a text. Irretrievability also marks
television’s difference from film, whose discrete individual units—single
films—can be endlessly reviewed in a way that television series cannot.39
Other differences between television and film or literature also have clear
implications for the concept of the TV text, as well as special importance
in understanding soap opera. Heath and Skirrow pointed out what is per-
haps the most important difference in 1977: Television is characterized by an
“immediacy effect . . . supported by the experience of flow: like the world,
television never stops, is continuous,” and this effect is in turn inflected by
“the overall definition of television as ‘live.’”40 Building on this insight, Jane
14 Telenovelas

Feuer contends that “notions of ‘liveness’” apply as much to taped or filmed

and edited programs as they do to events broadcast at the moment of occur-
rence,41 and that television’s capacity to transmit events as they happen has
led to the application of “an ideology of the live” (p. 14) to all television trans-
missions—regardless of the actual temporal relationship between an event
and its televisual presentation. Thus all television transmissions are in some
sense presented, consumed, and understood as if they were live.
The concept of television’s perpetual liveness will come up again in con-
nection with soap operas’ multiple weekly installments, but for now I want
to underline the fact that this “liveness” is at the root of some of TV’s cen-
tral differences from film. Feuer points to the conflation of the “live” with
the “real”—if something is happening as we watch it, it must “really” be
happening—as well as to the way that television seems “real” in the sense
of being “an entirely ordinary experience” (p. 15). She also emphasizes the
processes by which the “circuit of address” on genuinely live programs
“propagates an ideology of ‘liveness’ overcoming [the] fragmentation” of
television’s ordinary segmented flow (p. 17). These observations have spe-
cial meaning in the case of soap operas, where the apparent liveness of tele-
vision is augmented by the programs’ manipulation of time. By promoting
the fiction that viewers’ and characters’ time passes at the same rate, soaps
present themselves as “real” in both of the senses Feuer employs. The fact
that many soap opera events take the same amount of time they would oc-
cupy in viewers’ lives makes their depictions especially “realistic,” while
the frequent coincidence between “real time” and both diegetic time and
the time that elapses between episodes lends an air of immediacy to events
within the programs.42
These differences between television and film or literature suggest that
soap operas, which exemplify so many television traits, may demand an
entirely new conception of “text,” one that allows for the kind of viewing
habits that actually characterize the experience of their regular audience
members. In this connection, the notion of soaps as an “indefinitely expand-
able middle”43 may be useful, although that notion’s usual association with
the programs’ lack of closure will be problematic. Putting aside, however,
the question of whether or not soap operas ever achieve closure, viewers’
consumption of them certainly has an identifiable beginning. Regardless
of whether or not that beginning coincides with the first broadcast episode
of the program, it constitutes the beginning of the viewing experience, and
thus a point that we can at least provisionally identify as the beginning of a
text.
Audience research suggests, in fact, that viewers think of the soap opera
“text” in just this way. Ellen Seiter and her colleagues, for instance, have noted
that their “informants were aware of the impossibility for a single person to
grasp fully the text of a soap opera,” largely because they could not watch
every single episode.44 Nevertheless, these same viewers assembled “a con-
densed version of the text” through selective viewing, consultation with other
viewers, and speculation based on their own “expert textual knowledge” (p.
234). The authors therefore “identified the text with the experience of soap
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 15

operas as our viewers described it on the basis of their individual exposure to

the genre” (p. 232).
Clearly, however, there is more at stake here than questions about whether
or not one can define a program without seeing it from its beginning to its
end. Allen’s concern over the impossibility of reviewing the complete broad-
cast history of a particular soap opera, for example, is ultimately based on
a critique of the very notion of genre. Rather than defining soap opera in
traditional generic terms, he prefers to consider it as the intersection of the
three different discursive systems used by the industrial, critical, and viewer
communities.45
Yet it is not necessary, as Allen seems to imply, to choose between rigid
genre categories and no genres at all. Instead, we can follow theorists like
Steve Neale, who understands genres as “systems of expectation and hypoth-
esis,” as processes that involve both producers and consumers of the programs
that comprise them.46 This is particularly appropriate in the case of soap op-
eras, for, as audience studies have demonstrated, regular viewers bring very
specific kinds of expectations to their viewing experience. While they may
not talk explicitly about soap operas or soap-opera-like programs in terms of
genre, they understand the series they watch as following a set of dramatic,
narrative, ideological, and moral rules and conventions in which certain sorts
of developments are permitted and others are unlikely or impossible.47 This is
actually a crucial component of audience pleasure, and competent soap view-
ers play a constant game of speculation and anticipation with regard to future
story and character development. In a form whose viewers often draw on
years of detailed expertise regarding specific programs and soap operas in
general, the relevance of an understanding of genre as a relationship between
producers’ texts and consumers’ expectations seems clear.
Let me return now to the definition I proposed at the beginning of this
chapter:

A soap opera is a continuing fictional dramatic television program, presented in

multiple serial installments each week through a narrative composed of inter-
locking storylines that focus on the relationships within a specific community
of characters.

As I have already indicated, each element in this definition can be found in

other categories of contemporary U.S. television, and any regular TV viewer
will be able to name programs that are not soap operas but that still incorpo-
rate many of these same traits. The serial format, for example, characterizes
Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, Wiseguy, Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Land-
ing, and, through the use of multipart story arcs and cliffhanger episodes,
certain situation comedies as well (e.g., Cheers, Murphy Brown). Multiple and
often interlocking storylines are a major structural feature, not only of the
dramatic programs I’ve listed, but of Hotel, Fantasy Island, and The Love Boat
as well. Personal relationships within a self-contained community dominate
shows like Northern Exposure and thirtysomething, as well as more traditional
series, such as The Andy Griffith Show, M*A*S*H, and Emergency.
16 Telenovelas

Despite their individual appearance across a range of genres, however,

certain of these characteristics are firmly associated with soap operas: Any
program that presents an intense mesh of personal stories that continue, se-
rial-like, beyond a single episode, is likely to be called a soap. While the term
has long been used as a sweeping derogatory equivalent for “trash TV” or
“melodrama,” it is now broadly applied not only by cultural critics, but by
journalists and even industry promotion departments, and no longer inevita-
bly signals a specific negative evaluation of an individual program.48 But it is
this specific combination of characteristics, the idiosyncratic mix of these fa-
miliar elements that distinguishes a soap from a program that simply employs
some of them. As Stephen Neale writes, “Generic specificity is a question not
of particular and exclusive elements, however defined, but of exclusive and
particular combinations and articulations of elements.”49
In order to understand how these characteristics combine to create a
unique television genre, then, let us look at the elements individually. A soap
opera is a continuing fictional dramatic television program: By using the word
“continuing,” I mean to distinguish soaps, which are presented as first-run
episodes 52 weeks a year, from the more limited runs of conventional tele-
vision series aired according to industry “seasons,” as well as from shorter
miniseries, multipart made-for-television movies, and so on. (Thus, while
sharing many traits with U.S. soaps, the telenovelas of Latin America do not
qualify as continuing dramas in this sense, since they usually have a limited,
if lengthy, run.)
Soap operas’ fictional status may seem self-evident, but the May 1992 debut
of MTV’s nonfiction series The Real World—described in its own network pro-
motions as “a real-life soap opera”—suggests otherwise. We need to be care-
ful to distinguish fictional television programs from those that are unscripted
and may be “performed” by nonactors, as in the case of The Real World and
its precursors, the 1973 PBS series An American Family and Fox’s 1991 Yearbook.
Although such programs are elaborately mediated and constructed through
highly selective editing and other practices, their allegedly nonfictional status
puts them into a different category of television genres.
I also distinguish dramatic from possible comedy and parody series—Soap
and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, for instance—to emphasize the fact that,
while soap opera performance may involve a high degree of self-conscious-
ness and may even be overtly camp, the programs themselves are essen-
tially unironic. While it was possible to follow the storylines of Soap or Mary
Hartman as one would a traditional serial, both programs offered preferred
readings of themselves as parodies.50 Soap operas, on the other hand, take
themselves and their conventions seriously; indeed, it is that very serious-
ness that permits certain audiences to perform what Jane Feuer has called
“camp decodings” of the programs and that makes possible the parodies that
represent the ultimate ironic reading of them.51 While Feuer insists that the
decodings performed by gay male viewers are actually among Dynasty’s pre-
ferred readings, I am obviously suggesting just the opposite: that they exist
in contrast to the dominant readings proposed by the program itself. It may
also be true, however, that prime-time serials such as Dynasty offer, or at the
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 17

very least make space for, easily accessible alternative, oppositional, camp,
and/or comic readings as a function of their attempt to appeal to the broadest
possible audience—a goal that characterizes U.S. prime-time far more than
daytime television.
According to my definition, soaps are presented in multiple installments
each week; in the United States, that means five days a week. Although many
elements separate daytime from so-called “prime-time soaps”—including
the prime-time emphasis on business and financial power—in my view
these are secondary to the far more basic differences that arise from five-
day-a-week versus weekly broadcast. In fact, what we might call soaps’ “dai-
liness” has significant consequences both for the programs’ structure and
style and for regular viewers’ experience of them.
Early theorists like Tania Modleski argued that the specific narrative struc-
ture of soap operas, particularly their cycles of interruption and repetition,
closely resembles the daily lives of conventional housewives and therefore
makes the experience of watching soap operas especially appealing, as well
as easy to reconcile with the interruptions that supposedly characterize their
days.52 Others have contended that it is the domestic content of the programs
that makes soaps both interesting and relevant to women viewers whose at-
tention is traditionally focused on the personal.53
I would argue, however, that the intimacy that seems to characterize the
experience of watching soap operas results at least as much from viewers’
daily exposure to the programs as it does from the specific content and struc-
ture of the episodes themselves, or from particular camera work and other
production choices.54 The relatively brief interval between episodes permits
the act of watching them to become part of a regular routine—part of “view-
ers’ daily rituals”55—constructing a uniquely intense viewing experience and
investing it with a status quite different from that of programs consumed
weekly or even less frequently. While audience studies acknowledge that
many fans miss occasional episodes or even watch irregularly, the same re-
search suggests that they also watch with the assumption that daily viewing
of the programs is the ideal.56
“Dailiness” functions on the levels of both production and consumption,
and is connected to the “ideology of liveness” that has dominated and defined
U.S. (and British) television from the outset. As Jane Feuer indicates in regard
to Good Morning America, the construction of liveness, whether actual or artifi-
cial, allows a particular program “to insinuate itself into our lives.”57 Habitual
daily viewing intensifies this process in the case of soap operas, and the notion
of repetition may be useful in beginning to understand why. Charlotte Bruns-
don has pointed out that, while researchers have concentrated on the conse-
quences of the fact that women often watch soap operas in groups, a more
thorough understanding may come from work that distinguishes “between
modes of viewing which are repeated on a regular basis and uncommon or
unfamiliar modes of viewing.”58 This seems to me to point to a potentially
crucial way of understanding the television viewing experience. Although
many recent theorists have called attention to television’s penchant for repeti-
tion, it has often been made secondary to the notion of interruption, as in John
18 Telenovelas

Caughie’s claim that, like the “novelistic” in general, “the television novelis-
tic is organized around interruption.”59 Caughie makes this point as a way of
linking television to a long narrative tradition, to which television’s “definitive
contribution” is the development of “a narrative form built on the principle of
interruption and therefore organizing expectation and attention to the short
segments which will soften the disruption of being interrupted.”60
But while it is important to consider the narrative effect of the constant
interruption that characterizes commercial television, an argument like
Caughie’s ignores viewers’ habit of returning to these “interrupted” televi-
sion narratives on a weekly or, in the case of soaps, daily basis. The experi-
ence of watching an individual television program may indeed be marked by
disruption, as the episode’s forward movement is repeatedly broken by the
intrusion of commercials and other forms of promotion, and Raymond Wil-
liams’s notion of “flow” captures the extent to which an evening of viewing
can be seen as consisting of a loose assembly of such fragments. But if we step
back to take a wider perspective of, say, a week, a month, or a year of viewing,
we can also see a pattern of repetition in which much of the audience returns
again and again, not only to specific programs, but to particular day-parts
(such as early morning or prime-time). As Heath and Skirrow maintain in
their revision of Williams, “the ‘central fact of television experience’ is much
less flow than flow and regularity; the anachronistic succession is also a con-
stant repetition.”61
Although nonfiction genres like talk, news, or game shows may operate
on a similar schedule, soap operas are the only fictional examples of first-run
daily telecast on U.S. television. This therefore puts soaps in a unique posi-
tion as paradigmatic, not simply of the extent to which television narrative
is built on constant interruption, but of the concomitant expectation that the
interrupted narrative will resume. Indeed, as I will argue shortly, each soap
opera episode presents in miniature both the “flow” and the pattern of return
typical of television.
One question raised by my insistence on multiple weekly installments as
a defining characteristic of soap opera is whether some threshold number of
episodes must air each week in order for a program to qualify as a soap. For
instance, in contrast to the U.S. standard of five episodes per week, British
serials such as Coronation Street and EastEnders broadcast only two or three,
usually with an omnibus installment on the weekend. The question of how
these programs’ multiple episodes fit into my definition is here complicated
by the fact that, while U.S. daytime TV serials have always aired five days a
week and had completely replaced radio serials by the 1960–61 season, their
British television counterparts have had a far more varied broadcast his-
tory, including the fact that radio serials still continue to air alongside them.
Thus, although the expectations and consumption patterns of U.S. soap opera
viewers have been shaped by the kind of “dailiness” I am describing, British
viewers may have quite a different set of expectations. Similarly, from the
production side, U.S. soaps are inevitably structured around the demands of
five-day-a-week broadcast, while the narrative and story development of Brit-
ish programs may be organized to meet quite different demands.62
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 19

These differences remind us of the crucial role played by local viewing (and
production) conditions. As Sean Cubitt points out in his book on video cul-
ture, “the importance of the local . . . helps to circumscribe the generalisation of
arguments to universal values, geographically or historically. . . . Programmes
or programme formats in world-wide distribution are viewed differently in
various cultures, even within the same culture, or by the same person viewing
at different times.”63 Cubitt is arguing here that, while the widespread use of
VCRs has changed British viewing habits in fundamental ways, the fact that
communal, real-time viewing still dominates in many other parts of the world
makes it difficult to extrapolate from British experience to the experience of
viewers elsewhere. But his remarks are relevant for all areas of TV, including
the exportation of the U.S. soap opera format (and of actual programs) to other
cultures. Despite a shared set of televisual conventions and the long-standing
exchange of specific individual programs, both the production and the con-
sumption conditions of British and U.S. television differ considerably.64 (Among
the most obvious and influential differences is the historical development of
U.S. television as primarily commercial and privately owned, versus the Brit-
ish model of noncommercial government monopoly.)65 Thus, while the overlap
between the two systems allows us to use examples from one to illuminate the
other, we must do so with great care, for conclusions based on the experience of
U.S. television may not apply smoothly to the British, and vice versa.
The emphasis on multiple episodes provides a perfect example of the com-
plications that may arise when we ignore the differences between television
cultures, not least because an individual program acquires its significance
within the context of the larger televisual landscape. Five-day-a-week U.S.
programs such as soap operas are explicitly marked as different from weekly
ones, and watching them is therefore necessarily a different experience from
watching those that appear once a week. Since U.S. television currently has no
programs scheduled to air two or three times a week, the primary differences
are between five-day-a-week and weekly broadcast. (I am speaking here of
first-run episodes, rather than programs that are scheduled for one original
and one or more repeat airings during a single week—a common practice on
many local PBS affiliates, as well as on MTV, CNN, HBO, and other cable ser-
vices.) In the United Kingdom, however, where programs may air anywhere
from daily to weekly, the difference is somewhat more complicated. We might
argue, therefore, that, in any television system that relies mainly on a weekly
programming rotation, it is the experience of multiple episodes during a single
week that is marked as different and therefore significant. Thus, the British
practice of airing, say, three weekly episodes of a serial would generate many
of the same patterns of expectation, including an incorporation of a particular
series into viewers’ regular routines similar to that generated by the five-day-
a-week broadcast of U.S. soap operas.66
My emphasis on “dailiness” also raises an interesting question about an-
other category of programs, series that are “stripped,” or aired five or even
seven days a week through syndication: Can a series designed to run weekly
“become” a soap opera simply by moving into five-day-a-week syndication?
In most cases the answer is no, since a sitcom or a traditional crime drama
20 Telenovelas

stripped daily still fails to meet the other criteria that define a soap opera.
But the situation alters considerably when we consider dramas that closely
resemble soaps in their use of interlocking storylines and their emphasis on
personal relationships. Series such as thirtysomething and L.A. Law, which
focus on the relationships within a small, essentially closed group of friends
and relatives or coworkers, beg for comparison with soap operas. L.A. Law’s
tendency to leave problems unresolved at the end of an episode and thirty-
something’s obsession with questions of gender, romance, and family, as well
as the degree of viewers’ emotional involvement with both series and their
characters, make it particularly tempting to classify them as soaps.67
I have been arguing that, among other things, daily viewing allows audi-
ence members to incorporate a program into their lives in a way quite dif-
ferent from programs that recur on a weekly basis. If I am correct about this
effect, then the intensity and intimacy created by daily involvement with a
dramatic series do not depend on the specific structure of the narrative itself.
Nor are they dependent on the particular purpose—daytime or prime-time
scheduling, weekly or daily rotation, broadcast or cable setting, domestic or
foreign consumption—for which it was originally designed. But the fact that
I have been invoking the concept of “dailiness” primarily in terms of its effect
on viewers does not mean that the prospect of five-day-a-week broadcast has
no influence on story development, narrative structure, characterization, or
other features of the production.
For instance, writers, directors, actors, and other participants in the produc-
tion process who have five days a week in which to develop a story, explore
a character, express an idea, consider a social issue, and so on, can employ a
degree of detail unavailable to those who produce a weekly series. Soap opera
stories proceed at what inexperienced viewers may see as an excruciating
pace, but because of its attempt to imitate the rate at which events transpire
in “real life,” this pace contributes to the fiction of the programs’ “liveness,”
the sense that the events depicted are actually happening as we watch them.
Once again, the phenomenon of “dailiness” and television’s “ideology of live-
ness” inflect each other through soaps’ construction of time.
There are also specific negative consequences for production and perfor-
mance style. Soaps’ year-round five-day-a-week broadcast schedule requires
a five-day-a-week production schedule, which means that actors have lim-
ited rehearsal time. This in turn results in what many viewers recognize as
characteristically unpolished performances, exacerbated by a limited use of
retakes, along with editing and production values that tend to be judged by
nonfans as considerably “lower” than the more lavish ones of most prime-
time television. In some ways, the fact that actors flub lines or improvise when
memory fails them may contribute to soaps’ apparent realism, since charac-
ters’ conversations often seem no smoother than viewers’. At the same time,
however, the impossibility of creating the perfect performances and camera
work typical of prime-time programs also contributes to the low esteem in
which nonfans hold soap operas.
If we were to arrange TV dramas along a continuum ordered in terms of
their increasing likeness to soap opera—with, say, completely freestanding
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 21

episodic series at one end and prime-time serials at the other—and then con-
sider the impact of daily cable- or broadcast on each of them, we would find
that, by the time we got to the daily syndicated airing of a series like Dallas,
we would have reached a viewing experience nearly indistinguishable from
that of a “real” soap. The possibility that a series originally designed as a
weekly prime-time drama can seemingly be transformed into a soap opera
also serves as yet another reminder of the importance of developing a com-
prehensive definition of the genre. In this case, soaps can be distinguished
from other programs that might air daily by the fact that they take serial form
and are generally characterized by episodic nonclosure, which manifests it-
self through the postponement of individual storyline resolutions and the use
of major and minor cliff-hangers in place of the more definitive conclusions
typical of traditional episodic television.68 John Ellis claims that the serial
form is actually characteristic of television narratives of all sorts, including
episodic series, in which the essential problematic that powers a program
remains unresolved across episodes.69 Precisely because this brings us back
once again to the idea that television is marked overall as much by repetition
and return as by interruption, we need to be careful to distinguish between
true serial form and the “serialness” of TV in general.70
This open-endedness is one of the most discussed aspects of soap operas’
narrative form, forming the basis for many theories about soaps’ narrative
structure. Some theorists have discerned ties between irresolution and a spe-
cific kind of female viewing pleasure, while others have argued that nonclo-
sure undermines the traditional narrative trajectory. Soap opera closure is
a complex issue, yet while it is arguable that soaps do not attain traditional
narrative closure at many levels—both at the levels of individual episodes
and, as a rule, at the level of the program as a whole—they do achieve it in a
number of other important ways. In addition, occasional individual episodes
actually end with the explicit resolution of a specific problem, often a question
of identity, and thus resemble a traditional television episode.
Still, there can be no doubt about their basic serial nature, an element that,
as Robert Allen and others have documented, has its roots in the form’s com-
mercial origins. And like the airing of multiple episodes each week, soaps’
serial format enhances the ease with which viewers can incorporate the pro-
grams into their regular routines. As Christine Gledhill contends, seriality is
an “initially accidental but ultimately defining feature,” one that lends “solid-
ity” and “three dimensional reality to a tale that runs in parallel to its [view-
ers’] lives.”71
Closely connected to their serial nature is the fact that soap operas’ narra-
tive is composed of multiple, interlocking storylines. The adaptation of the form
from radio to television and the shift over the years from 15- to 30- and then to
60-minute episodes allowed storylines to multiply from the two or three that
characterized radio and early television serials to the dozen or more ongoing
stories that can be found in current programs. In contrast to more conventional
storytelling practice, however, soap operas have from their beginnings fea-
tured plural storylines, and this has had a very specific consequence for their
narrative development. Rather than following the linear path of a single story,
22 Telenovelas

organized around the exploits of a single (heroic) character, soap opera narra-
tives necessarily proceed in what is at most only a quasi-linear fashion, with
each story’s forward progress constantly interrupted by the eruption of the lat-
est events in another one. Typically, programs will cut among three stories in
a single episode, allotting each only one scene at a time before moving on to
another story. This means that soap operas offer an extremely complex form of
storytelling, one that requires viewers to follow several stories at once and to
suspend their interest in one temporarily when events from another intervene.72
As I suggested earlier, however, the multiplicity of soap opera storylines
also imitates the “flow” of (commercial U.S.) television itself, in which regu-
larly recurring programs constantly interrupt each other. In a week in which
a habitual Roseanne viewer watches only a few other prime-time programs,
for instance, she may be required to remember what distinguishes the indi-
vidual members of the Conner family from one another, while paying equal
attention to the intervening episodes of Melrose Place, Seinfeld, Murphy Brown,
and NYPD Blue, and trying all the while not to be distracted by ads for a
variety of products, as well as promotions for programs in which she has no
interest. In the case of soap operas, of course, these interventions occur within
as well as between individual episodes, and while an hour-long episode typi-
cally features events from only three or four storylines, a typical week may
present developments in three or four times as many, most of which in turn
assume viewer memories of earlier stories. Once again, then, soaps can be
seen as a paradigm of U.S. television’s overall form, making precision about
their operations even more important.
Each story’s indirect movement toward a climax or resolution is further
complicated by the fact that individual soap opera storylines are all in some
way connected to one another. That is because, to return to my definition,
all of them focus on the relationships within a specific community of characters.
The construction of this community plays a crucial role in the organization
of soap opera narrative, particularly in the programs’ obsession with char-
acters’ exchange of private information. But the important fact is that soaps
take place within closed communities and that they emphasize the personal
relationships among members of those communities rather than, for instance,
their political or work lives, or the connection between a particular commu-
nity and the larger world.
Such overlap between characters’ lives and among the storylines that de-
pict them must be distinguished, however, from what occurs on a program in
which multiple storylines are linked merely by the fact that their protagonists
share a law partnership or cruise-line employment. Although individual L.A.
Law or Love Boat storylines may resonate with each other, for example, devel-
opments within each of them tend to be relatively autonomous.73 In contrast,
soap opera characters are diegetically entangled by their past, present, and
potential future ties of kinship and romance, blood, marriage, and friendship.
They are narratively entangled by the fact that their economic, political, and
other “public” relationships are subordinated to these personal ties. Thus, the
intimate connections among soap opera characters mean that events in one
storyline inevitably have consequences in others.
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 23

The domestic, personal, and emotional emphasis of soap opera has received
a considerable amount of critical and theoretical attention, most of it attrib-
uting the programs’ focus to the fact that the form was designed—and still
functions—to target a predominantly female audience, presumed to be inter-
ested in personal relations. While there are many ways in which soap opera
expresses what Charlotte Brunsdon has identified as the “ideological problem-
atic” of the genre, “personal life in its everyday realization through personal
relationships,”74 I simply want to point out the necessity of understanding this
interest in the personal as a defining characteristic of the genre. Although the
melodramatic strategies increasingly being adopted by U.S. television have
given the personal a new prominence across genres, it is important to distin-
guish here between, for example, police or medical stories framed in personal
terms and dramas that have the personal as their primary obsession. On a
melodrama-inflected series like Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, for instance,
major storylines about crime are often framed by the personal concerns of the
police officers (or, less frequently, the criminals or lawyers) involved, but the
relationships among characters, their positions within the program, and the
implications of individual story resolutions are couched primarily in terms
of public issues such as the crumbling criminal justice system. In contrast,
on a soap like Another World, which regularly features storylines about crime,
the “public” aspects of such stories are subordinated to the personal by being
couched almost entirely in terms of the familial, romantic, and emotional re-
lationships between characters. And while those characters may have other
ties, they are connected to each other primarily by personal rather than public
bonds.

My definition omits a number of characteristics that are commonly con-

sidered to be central to soap opera narrative and style. The major missing
element, of course, is nonclosure, but other traits of narrative, production,
and performance style have also figured prominently in critics’ attempts to
outline what constitutes a soap opera. I do not mean to suggest, however,
that the nonlinear narrative strategies that advance soap operas’ interlocking
storylines are unimportant, but instead that their nonlinearity is a function
of the fact that they are intertwined in such a complex manner. Nor would
I claim that the programs’ almost exclusive use of interior sets, their obses-
sion with close-ups, their glossy “look,” and the cosmetic, costuming, and
decorative excesses usually associated with current soap opera production
are trivial factors in constructing a soap’s televisual style. What I do want to
argue is that these are not necessary characteristics of the genre, but rather,
stylistic elements that serve soap opera structure and format rather than defin-
ing them. The distinction I am drawing here is between those elements that
define soap opera as a genre and the characteristics that merely mark them,
a category that also includes what Robert Allen has called their “subliterary”
production features, such as authorial anonymity and “industrial assembly-
line methods.”75
Some of these elements are more easily identified as secondary than oth-
ers. As proof of the dispensability of the current “look,” for example, we need
24 Telenovelas

only turn to programs from the days of black-and-white broadcast. Early epi-
sodes look grim and dowdy in comparison to today’s colorful glossiness, yet
no one would seriously claim that their lack of high-fashion glitz means that
the 1950s or 1960s incarnations are not “really” soaps. British serials’ focus on
working-class life and the obvious “ordinariness” of their mise-en-scène also
suggest how wide a range of “looks” might be possible within the genre. At
the same time, the fact that genres like the variety, talk, and game show—and
to some extent the whole range of current U.S. prime-time programming—are
characterized by glamorous costumes, implausible hairstyles, and elaborate
sets should demonstrate that excessive style alone is not enough to make a
program a soap opera.
Similarly, a serious consideration of the whole range of programming
available on U.S. TV reveals that the specific settings (domestic interiors) and
camera work (close-ups) familiar to soap opera viewers actually character-
ize many genres. Situation comedies, for example, tend both to take place
in the home or workplace and to employ a limited number of indoor sets,
just as soap operas do. While prime-time family dramas (Family, The Waltons,
Little House on the Prairie) make more frequent and more sophisticated use of
outdoor locations, they, too, tend to share with soaps a focus on domestic set-
tings. So, too, the intense close-ups that seem to provide soap opera viewers
with such intimate knowledge of individual characters’ affective lives serve
the same function in a variety of film and television genres. Soap operas may
rely more heavily on such shots, but the practice was well-established long
before the rise of television.76
Among the other major features with a claim to defining status, some
writers have identified soaps’ emphasis on dialogue over action. Christine
Gledhill, for instance, claims that “soap opera constructs a feminine world
of personal conversation,” while Robert Allen describes soaps as “in a sense,
‘about’ talk.”77 There is certainly no doubt that soap opera narrative moves
forward more through the discussion of events than through their direct on-
screen representation, yet I have chosen not to identify this as a basic defin-
ing trait because I think it has more to do with the content of the programs
than with their essential form. That is, I see the primacy of talk, the telling
and retelling of stories, as a function of the programs’ concentration on per-
sonal relationships and their continual efforts to construct a particular kind
of community.
Another characteristic of soap operas that may seem essential to the genre
is its commercially motivated targeting of a predominantly female audience.
As Allen and others have shown, the form originated in advertisers’ desire to
reach women consumers, making soap operas perhaps the most transparently
commercial of all broadcast genres.78 But the fact that commercial radio and
television exist primarily to deliver audiences to advertisers means that the
genre’s history is not unique, but merely extreme. Furthermore, television pro-
ducers’ practice of aiming specific programming at increasingly narrow demo-
graphic groups means that soap operas are only one among many genres and
subgenres designed for a specialized audience. Adult women are extremely
desirable viewers because of their control of household purchasing power, and
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 25

in recent years we have seen their importance acknowledged by network pro-

gramming strategies such as CBS’s famous Monday night lineup of “women’s”
shows, rooted initially in a desire to attract female viewers uninterested in
ABC’s Monday Night Football. The success of that strategy has reinforced faith
in what has come to be called “boutique” programming, to the point where
some network executives have begun to dismiss the traditional race to be num-
ber one in the overall ratings, insisting instead on the greater significance of
high ratings among “quality” viewers. At the same time, increasing pressure
from cablecasters, Fox Broadcasting, and the videocassette market has made
the targeting of reliable, if small, audiences a standard television practice, par-
ticularly among beleagured Big Three network programmers.79
A genre definition that assumed women as the primary audience would
also forestall the possibility of soap operas designed to be watched by other
target audiences. Yet there is reason to believe that many other potential soap
opera audiences exist, such as the ones for which Swans Crossing and Paradise
Beach—nationally syndicated five-day-a-week serials launched, respectively,
in June 1992 and June 1993 and aimed at teens and preteens of both sexes—
were designed. Serials have also been developed in college video production
classes, on community-access cable stations, and elsewhere, often with fairly
specific audiences (students, gay and lesbian viewers) in mind, and it is easy to
imagine projects aimed at other population groups or subcultures. Although
soap operas have traditionally been a “women’s genre,” we do not need to as-
sume that genre rules demand that soap operas be aimed at women.
Still, I agree with Charlotte Brunsdon’s argument that the cultural com-
petence required to make sense of soap operas consists, not merely of expe-
rience of the television genre, but of a particular kind of social knowledge.
Writing of the British serial Crossroads, Brunsdon has maintained that the
program—and, by implication, the genre as a whole—”textually implies a
feminine viewer to the extent that its textual discontinuities, in order to make
sense, require a viewer competent within the ideological and moral frame-
works (the rules) of romance, marriage and family life.”80 Although conceived
in a British setting, her words apply equally to the U.S. context, but it is crucial
to recognize that she is using the notion of a “feminine viewer” to represent,
not a biological female or even a gendered female social subject, but a set of
knowledges and skills normally associated with women in patriarchal cul-
ture. Only if we understand the “feminine viewer” in these terms is it reason-
able to identify the soap opera audience as necessarily “female.”81
Annette Kuhn has pointed out the importance of distinguishing between
spectators—the viewing subjects “constituted in signification, interpellated by
the . . . TV text”82—and the actual social audiences that consume particular
texts. Although Kuhn regards both of these groups as primarily discursive
concepts, her terms are still helpful in separating the audiences targeted by,
say, a particular soap opera producer from the viewers who actually watch that
program. Still, I also have not included as a defining characteristic of the genre
the fact that, to some extent apart from industry and advertiser intentions,
soap opera audiences are in fact predominantly female. Ratings demonstrate
gender differences in viewing across television genres, often corresponding to
26 Telenovelas

the most stereotypical ideas of what interests women and men.83 Thus, to af-
firm soap operas’ uniqueness on the grounds that they offer a special viewing
opportunity for women is to overlook the fact that, at least in the United States,
differences in viewing habits are quite often defined by gender.84
Finally, I have another reason for not defining the genre primarily in terms
of who consumes it. Because viewing patterns may change over time (for in-
stance, more men now watch daytime soap operas than did during, say, the
1950s and 1960s), a definition that depended on the identity of current view-
ers would be inherently unstable. For many theorists, this very instability
would be an advantage, reflecting the inherent instability of the television
text and underlining the role viewers play in constructing the programs they
consume, and therefore in defining specific TV genres. But as I indicated in
my introduction, I am drawing on a different notion of the viewing process,
one that depends at least as much on the existence of an identifiable, if dif-
ficult to describe, television text as it does on viewers’ active participation in
the construction of that text.

NOTES
1. For example, Mary Ellen Brown lists the following as general characteristics of
the genre:
1. serial form which resists narrative closure;
2. multiple characters and plots;
3. use of time which parallels actual time and implies that the action continues to
take place whether we watch it or not;
4. abrupt segmentation between parts;
5. emphasis on dialogue, problem solving, and intimate conversation;
6. many of the male characters portrayed as “sensitive men”;
7. female characters often professional or otherwise powerful in the world outside
the home;
8. the home, or some other place which functions as a home, is the setting for the
show.
See “The Politics of Soaps: Pleasure and Female Empowerment,” Australian Journal of
Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (1987): 4.
2. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth, “‘Don’t
Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naive’: Toward an Ethnography of Soap Opera View-
ers,” in Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter, Hans
Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 234.
3. Charlotte Brunsdon, “Text and Audience,” in Seiter et al., Remote Control, p. 123.
4. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1975), p. 3. Social scientists like Muriel G. Cantor and Suzanne Pingree may
add more details, but they still describe soap opera as “a form of serialized dramatic
television broadcast daily over the three commercial television networks . . . usually
during the afternoon,” The Soap Opera (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), p. 19.
Even a guide for would-be scriptwriters, Jean Rouverol’s Writing for the Soaps (Cincin-
nati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1984), never actually defines soap operas, but assumes its
readers’ familiarity with the genre and its conventions, and offers instructions on the
production process and hints about how to break into the business. Among the other
writers who have specifically tried to define the form is Christine Geraghty, “The
Continuous Serial—A Definition,” in Coronation Street, ed. Richard Dyer, Christine
Geraghty, Marion Jordan, Terry Lovell, Richard Paterson, and John Stewart (London:
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 27

British Film Institute, 1981 ), p. 926. While her essay contains many important observa-
tions about the serial structure, however, Geraghty explicitly confines her discussion
to British programs. Other recent attempts to define the genre within a U.S. context
include Martha Nochimson, No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1992), and Carol Traynor Williams, “It’s Time for
My Story”: Soap Opera Sources, Structure, and Response (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992),
especially pp. 61–70. For a brief review of other critical attempts to define the genre,
see Robert C. Allen, “Bursting Bubbles: ‘Soap Opera,’ Audiences, and the Limits of
Genre,” in Seiter et al., Remote Control, pp. 44–55.
5. Among examples from the popular media, Twin Peaks has been called a “soap
noir” (New York Times, May 5, 1991, section 2, p. 1) and a “prime-time soap” (Entertain-
ment Weekly, no. 8 [April 6, 1990]: 6). In his book Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks
Lost Their Way (New York: Random House, 1991), Ken Auletta groups Dynasty and
Hotel together as “prime-time soap operas” (p. 45). TV Guide, which runs a weekly
page of soap opera plot summaries confined entirely to daytime serials, is less precise
on other pages, calling the ensemble drama Homefront, for instance, “ABC’s post-WWII
soap” (July 18, 1992, p. 2), and Soap Opera Weekly’s editor, Mimi Torchin, devoted her
November 11, 1992, column to her conflict with Homefront’s producers over the series’
status as a soap opera (p. 4). Fan magazines regularly blur genre boundaries by in-
cluding prime-time programs, from Knots Landing to the revived Dark Shadows and
Twin Peaks, in their plot summaries and treating actors from those series as part of
the community of soap performers. Soap Opera Digest’s special issue, “Looking Back
At: 60 Years of Soaps” (Winter 1991) featured a “comprehensive” list of TV soaps that
included not only the predictable prime-time serials, but the public television broad-
casts of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs as well. In From Mary Noble to Mary
Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), Madeleine
Edmondson and David Rounds document the fan-magazine debate over the correct
genre categorization of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, pp. 173–85.
Among scholars, the subtitle to Ien Ang’s book Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the
Melodramatic Imagination, trans. Della Couling (London: Methuen, 1985), is only one
of many such references. Lidia Curti, who includes both Dallas and Dynasty in the
category, has gone so far as the formulation, “Women’s television, that is, soap opera”;
see “What Is Real and What Is Not: Female Fabulations in Cultural Analysis,” in Cul-
tural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 142.
6. Cantor and Pingree, The Soap Opera, p. 26; Ang, Watching Dallas, p. 55. Despite her
disclaimers, however, Ang’s usage throughout the book indicates that she considers
Dallas and programs like it to be soap operas of some kind.
7. Jane Feuer, for example, stresses “the similarities between daytime soaps and the
prime-time continuing melodramatic serials,” arguing that they “share a narrative
form . . . [and] concentrate on the domestic sphere,” “Melodrama, Serial Form and
Television Today,” Screen 25, no. 1 (January–February 1984): 4.
8. Gabriele Kreutzner and Ellen Seiter, “Not All ‘Soaps’ Are Created Equal: To-
wards a Crosscultural Criticism of Television Serials,” Screen 32, no. 2 (Summer 1991):
156. See also Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today,” p. 5.
9. Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 4.
10. Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera, p. 5.
11. Lynn Spigel discusses this phenomenon throughout Make Room for TV: Televi-
sion and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
e.g., pp. 113, 116–18, 139. See also Laura Mulvey, “Melodrama Inside and Outside the
Home,” in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
pp. 63–77.
28 Telenovelas

12. For a suggestion of the breadth of work done under the banner of cultural stud-
ies and the ways that individual viewers attempt to make personal meanings out of
mass-produced media products, see Grossberg et al., Cultural Studies, especially the
essays by Rosalind Brunt, Lidia Curti, John Fiske, and Constance Penley.
13. See Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, “C’mon Girl: Oprah Winfrey and the Discourse of
Feminine Talk,” Genders 11 (Fall 1991): 81–110.
14. Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera, p. 3.
15. Mimi White, “Television Genres: Intertextuality,” Journal of Film and Video 37, no.
3 (Summer 1985): 41.
16. Jane Feuer, “Narrative Form in American Network Television,” in High Theory/
Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television, ed. Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1986), p. 111. Among discussions of the genre mixing that seems increasingly
to characterize television, see White, “Television Genres,” and Todd Gitlin’s discus-
sion of “recombinant” TV in Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp.
77–81.
17. See for instance E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Post-
modernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), esp. pp. 143–53; and her
edited collection, Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London: Verso,
1988).
18. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 112.
19. John Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach: Repetition, Difference and Television
Genre,” Screen 32, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 128.
20. See Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio Sys-
tem (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 6.
21. Cf. John Caughie’s remark in “Adorno’s Reproach” that, “With Twin Peaks, the
fascination is in watching, with mounting incredulity, the parodic games of multiple
genres and thoroughly cliched conventions” (p. 149); and Jim Collins’s discussion of
Twin Peaks as an example of the “policing” of the boundaries between “high” and
“low” art in “Television and Postmodernism,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled:
Television and Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 341–49. See also Richard Dienst’s discussion of
Twin Peaks, in Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994), pp. 89–99.
22. Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach,” p. 149.
23. Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 240.
24. Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach,” p. 127. See for example Fiske, Television Culture,
pp. 109–15; John Tulloch, Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990), pp. 58–86; and Jane Feuer, “Genre Study,” in Allen, Channels of Discourse,
Reassembled, pp. 138–60.
25. Among the earliest theoretical explorations of this difference is Stephen Heath
and Gillian Skirrow, “Television: A World in Action,” Screen 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977):
7–59.
26. Feuer, “Narrative Form in American Network Television,” p. 101.
27. David Thorburn, “Television Melodrama,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th
ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 631.
28. Mulvey, “Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home,” p. 65, See also Peter
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of
Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
29. Mulvey, “Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home,” p. 76.
30. Lynne Joyrich, “All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism
and Consumer Culture,” Camera Obscura, no. 16 (1988): 130; subsequent references
cited in text.
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 29

31. Sec Thomas Schatz’s discussion of the family melodrama in Hollywood Genres,
pp. 221–60.
32. Robyn Wiegman, “Melodrama, Masculinity, and the Televisual War,” paper
presented at the first annual conference, Console-ing Passions: Television, Video,
and Feminism, April 1992, Iowa City, Iowa, p. 7. See also Caren J. Deming’s discus-
sion of TV melodrama in “For Television-Centred Television Criticism: Lessons from
Feminism,” in Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular, ed. Mary Ellen
Brown (London: Sage Publications, 1990), pp. 53–58.
33. Christine Gledhill, “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and
Melodrama,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 1–2 (1992): 103–24; subsequent
references cited in text. See also her statement in the introduction to Home Is Where
the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film (London: British Film Institute,
1987) that “soap opera is commonly seen as the last resort of melodrama. But soap
opera, like the woman’s film, has an affiliation with women’s culture, the elision of
which with melodrama should not be assumed” (p. 2).
34. Wiegman, “Melodrama, Masculinity, and the Televisual War,” p. 8.
35. Brunsdon, “Text and Audience,” p. 119; subsequent references cited in text. See
also her “Problems with Quality,” Screen 31, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 67–90.
36. Jerry Palmer, Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1991), p. 7.
37. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas, p. 14.
38. Robert C. Allen, “On Reading Soaps: A Semiotic Primer,” in Regarding Televi-
sion: Critical Perspectives—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: University
Publications of America/American Film Institute, 1983), p. 98. See also Dennis Porter,
“Soap Time: Thoughts on a Commodity Art Form,” College English 38, no. 8 (April
1977): 782–88, especially his claim that a soap opera’s “beginnings are always lost sight
of” (p. 783).
39. John Caughie contends that television actually continues the tradition of “nov-
elistic” discourse that film, with its single-sitting pattern of consumption, interrupts,
“Adorno’s Reproach,” p. 141.
40. Heath and Skirrow, “Television,” p. 54. For the original conception of televi-
sion’s “flow,” see Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New
York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 86–96.
41. Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television,” p. 19; subsequent references cited in
text.
42. See Geraghty, “The Continuous Serial,” p. 10; and Dorothy Hobson, “Crossroads”:
The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 34–35. Examples of the coinci-
dence between characters’ and viewers’ time include the soap‘s regular celebration of
holidays and their frequent allusions to actual days of the week or month. Soap time
does not, however, pass in a consistent manner, but is manipulated for diegetic pur-
poses. The classic example of this practice is the aging of child characters, who may pass
miraculously from infancy to adolescence to adulthood. Some writers have identified
the passage of time on soap operas as itself a basic feature of the genre. For example, in
The Soap Opera, Muriel Cantor and Suzanne Pingree call the programs’ pace “very slow”
(p. 23) and explicitly contrast the rate of story development with the “much more rapid”
pace of the prime-time Peyton Place (p. 27).
43. Porter, “Soap Time,” p. 783.
44. Seiler et al., “‘Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve,’” p. 233; subse-
quent references cited in text.
45. Robert C. Allen, “Bursting Bubbles,” p. 45. See also Jane Feuer’s position that,
at least in the case of Dynasty, “the reading formation is the text,” “Reading Dynasty:
Television and Reception Theory,” SAQ 88, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 458.
46. Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre,” Screen, 31, no. 14 (Spring 1990): 46, 56.
30 Telenovelas

47. See Brown, “The Politics of Soaps”; Seiter et al., “’Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So
Stupid and Naive’”; and Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “Decoding Dallas: Notes from a
Cross-Cultural Study,” in Newcomb, Television, pp. 419–32.
48. Some critics have closely interrogated the deployment of the term “soap opera,”
pointing out the ways in which it has come to be associated with commercialism
(versus “real” art), low quality, and even to stand for U.S. television and culture. In
“Text and Audience,” for instance, Charlotte Brunsdon calls this “a little connotational
string: soap opera—television—commercial—American” (p. 117).
49. Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 22–23.
50. Although their humor obviously depends on at least some knowledge of the
original, the fact that parodies can be appreciated even by viewers with relatively little
experience of soap operas demonstrates how far knowledge of the genre’s conven-
tions pervades the culture. The general outlines of the form are so widely recognized
that written parodies may appear in publications that cannot necessarily assume their
readers’ familiarity with specific soap operas. One example is Ian Frazier, “Have You
Ever,” The New Yorker 68, no. 1 (February 24, 1992): 34–35.
51. Feuer, “Reading Dynasty,” pp. 447, 456; and “Melodrama, Serial Form and Tele-
vision Today,” p. 9. See also Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach,” pp. 150–53.
52. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women
(New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 85–109.
53. Charlotte Brunsdon, “Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera,” in Kaplan, Regarding
Television, pp. 76–83.
54. Modleski, for instance, argues that “soap opera stimulates women’s desire for
connectedness . . . through the constant, claustrophobic use of close-up shots,” Loving
with a Vengeance, p. 99.
55. Tulloch, Television Drama, p. 211.
56. Seiter et al., “’Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naive,’” pp. 230–31. There
is also evidence that some of these viewers think of the time they spend watching
soap operas as a regular respite from their responsibilities in the home. Cf. Janice A.
Radway’s description of Gothic romance readers in Reading the Romance: Women, Pa-
triarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984),
pp. 86–118.
57. Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television,” p. 19. See also John Ellis’s contention
that “the intimacy that broadcast TV sets up is . . . made qualitatively different by the
sense that the TV image carries of being a live event,” Visible Fictions: Cinema, Televi-
sion, Video, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 136.
58. Brunsdon, “Text and Audience,” p. 125. Cf. Andrew Ross’s distinction between
“everyday life . . . [and] everyweek life. For most people there is no such thing as every-
day life, but rather weekly cycles of work and leisure, both in and out of the home,”
“All in the Family: On David Morley’s Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic
Leisure and Philip Simpson’s (ed.) Parents Talking Television,” Camera Obscura, no. 16
(January 1988): 169.
59. Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach,” p. 141.
60. Caughie, “Adorno’s Reproach,” p. 145. In the context of the soaps themselves,
cf. Martha Nochimson’s contention that “the dailiness of the gap [between episodes]
insures a less hierarchical, less linear relationship among story lines,” No End to Her,
p. 35.
61. Heath and Skirrow, “Television,” p. 15. See also Williams, Television, pp. 89–96;
and Tulloch’s claim that “television drama texts are defined as much by the regime of
watching as by their conditions of performance, production and circulation, and have
effect as part of the domestic routine,” Television Drama, p. 228.
62. Dorothy Hobson discusses this same issue in Crossroads, pp. 26–32.
What Is This Thing Called Soap Opera? 31

63. Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 27.
64. The export of U.S. soaps to Europe and of British serials to the United States is
well known, but Alessandra Stanley describes a less familiar example of cross-cultural
soap watching in “Russians Find Their Heroes in Mexican TV Soap Operas,” New York
Times (March 20, 1994): Al, 8.
65. See Raymond Williams, Television, pp. 32–43. See also John Hartley’s comment
that “the semiotic allegiances of the viewer . . . are both local and global,” Tele-ology:
Studies in Television (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 13; his discussion of viewer demand
for locally produced soaps in the essay “Local Television,” in the same volume, p.
195; and Edward Buscombe, “Nationhood, Culture and Media Boundaries: Britain,”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 3 (1993): 25-34, especially his remarks on
“supra-national” versus locally and regionally produced and oriented programming
(pp. 25–26).
66. For another point of difference between British and U.S. serials, see Christine
Gledhill’s discussion in “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and
Melodrama” of the BBC’s specific choice of the realistic over the melodramatic mode
when developing its first serials, p. 117. See also Allen, “Bursting Bubbles.”
67. For discussions of these series, see Sasha Torres, “Melodrama, Masculinity and
the Family: thirtysomething as Therapy,” Camera Obscura, no. 19 (January 1989): 86–106;
Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home,” Screen
31, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 147–59; and Judith Mayne, “L.A. Law and Prime-Time Femi-
nism,” Discourse 10, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1988): 48–61. On viewers’ intense invest-
ment in them, see “Why We Are Still Watching ‘thirtysomething,’” Entertainment
Weekly, no. 12 (May 4, 1990): 78–87; and Lewis Cole, “The Stuff of Real Life,” The Nation
(April 29, 1991): 567–72.
68. Geraghty, “The Continuous Serial,” pp. 13–16.
69. Ellis, Visible Fictions, pp. 154–59.
70. Raymond Williams cautions in Television against confusing “the cultural impor-
tance of the serial, as an essentially new form,” with the high-culture “ratification” it
receives when, in contrast to its frequent use in soap opera, it appears in such series as
Masterpiece Theatre (p. 61).
71. Gledhill, “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melo-
drama,” pp. 112, 122.
72. For some critics, this cycle of interruption is part of what marks soap opera
as a peculiarly “feminine” form of discourse. See for example Brown, “The Politics
of Soaps,” and Mary Ellen Brown and Linda Barwick, “Fables and Endless Genealo-
gies: Soap Opera and Women’s Culture,” Continuum 1, no. 2 (1988): 71–82. In contrast,
Deborah D. Rogers argues, in “Daze of Our Lives: The Soap Opera as Feminine Text,”
Journal of American Culture 14, no. 4 (Winter 1991), that “the fragmented form of soap
operas enhances audience receptivity to conservative messages that reinforce stereo-
typical behavior in women” (p. 29). Other considerations of “feminine discourse” on
television include Jackie Byars, “Reading Feminine Discourse: Prime-Time Television
in the U.S.,” Communication 9, no. 3–4 (1987): 289–303; and Fiske, Television Culture, pp.
179–97.
73. Judith Mayne analyzes this resonance in “L.A. Law and Prime-Time Lesbian-
ism,” paper presented at the first annual conference, Console-ing Passions: Television,
Video, and Feminism, April 1992, Iowa City, Iowa.
74. Brunsdon, “Crossroads,” p. 78.
75. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas, p. 15.
76. Porter, “Soap Time,” p. 786.
77. Gledhill, “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melo-
drama,” p. 114; Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas, p. 74.
32 Telenovelas

78. It may also be one of the most successful, as Allen contends in Speaking of Soap
Operas. “In the soap opera advertisers and broadcasters have found the ideal vehicle
for the reinforcement of advertising impressions and the best means yet devised for
assuring regular viewing” (p. 47).
79. For comments by various industry executives on the notion of “appointment
television” and the declining importance of being number one in the overall ratings,
see Thomas Tryer, “The Fall Season: Network Preview,” Electronic Media 10, no. 35 (Au-
gust 26, 1991): 16, and Thomas Tryer and William Mahoney, “Sagansky: CBS Poised for
a No. 1 Season,” p. 30; and Bill Carter, “NBC Thinks Being No. 1 Is Too Costly,” New
York Times (January 20, 1992): C1–2.
80. Brunsdon, “Crossroads,” p. 81.
81. Cf. Meaghan Morris’s contribution to the “Spectatrix” issue of Camera Obscura,
no. 20–21: 241–45. See also Mimi White’s discussion of soap operas in her Tele-Advising:
Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1992), pp. 15–18.
82. Annette Kuhn, “Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory,” in
Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, p. 343.
83. During the 1991–92 season, for example, ABC’s Roseanne was frequently the
number one show among both male and female viewers aged 18 to 49 (and the number
two show overall, behind 60 Minutes). While only special broadcasts like the Academy
Awards pushed the sitcom out of first place among those women, sporting events tele-
vised on one of the major commercial networks regularly ranked number one among
men in the same demographic group. During the week of April 6 through April 12,
1992, for instance, Roseanne had a Nielsen ranking of number one among women aged
18 to 49, while CBS’s broadcast of the NCAA Basketball Championships and the re-
lated special, “Prelude to a Championship,” ranked number one and number two
among men aged 18 to 49. See “Prime-time Demographics for April 6–12,” Electronic
Media 11, no. 16 (April 20, 1991): 40.
84. Cf. Christine Geraghty’s claim that “in their themes and presentation,” the pro-
grams she identifies as soap operas “seem to offer a space for women in peak viewing
time,” Women and Soap Opera, p. 2.
The International Telenovela Debate
and the Contra-Flow Argument:
A Reappraisal

Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers

INTRODUCTION
In the 1960s and 1970s the debate over unequal international communication
flows and structural inequalities was often held in terms of dependency and
media imperialism. These concepts referred to a complex set of neo-marxist,
analytical approaches and tools with the common belief that, as Tomlinson
(1991: 7) put it, “a form of domination exists in the modern world, not just in
the political and economic spheres but also over those practices by which
collectivities make sense of their lives.” Over the past few decades, however,
it has become clear that these critical concepts in the powerful centre of the
world communication system were often turned into too deterministic mod-
els of unilateral cultural flow, meaning and impact. In the field of television
for instance, one saw a prolific development of local production industries in
some Third World countries; an ever more complex pattern of international
programme flows, with strong examples of contra-flow from the South to the
North, including dependencies in the North; and the arrival of some Third
World programme providers who became huge players in the global market.
The general diagnosis was, as Golding and Harris (1997: 5) wrote in their
polemic introduction to the reader Beyond Cultural Imperialism, that “the term
cultural imperialism began to limit rather than illuminate discussion” over
dependencies of the post-colonial periphery. Referring to one critic of the cul-
tural imperialism frame, Golding and Harris (1997: 5) summarized some key
shortcomings of this critical frame in practice:

Firstly it overstates external determinants and undervalues the internal dynam-

ics, not least those of resistance, within dependent societies. Secondly, it con-

Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers: “The International Telenovela Debate and the
Contra-Flow Argument: A Reappraisal,” first published in Media, Culture and Society, Vol.
22, Issue 4, 393–413.
34 Telenovelas

flates economic power and cultural effects. Thirdly, there is an assumption that
audiences are passive, and that local and oppositional creativity is of little sig-
nificance. Finally, there is an often patronizing assumption that what is at risk is
the ‘authentic’ and organic culture of the developing world under the onslaught
of something synthetic and inauthentic coming from the West.

One of the most frequently cited examples in this deconstruction of the cul-
tural imperialism thesis has been the case of Latin American television fiction
programmes, especially telenovelas.1 For many authors in the field of global
communication, this typical Latin American version of daily soap grew into
an illustration of the potential of Third World cultural industries for resistance,
alternatives and even contra-flow (for example, Tomlinson, 1991: 56-57; Reeves,
1993: 64-67; Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1993: 121, 130; Sinclair et al., 1996: 13). The
hard facts of increasing production, the huge local success and the worldwide
exports of telenovelas gave rise to what could be called an evolving international
telenovela debate. On the one extreme of the debate some scholars claimed a
revision of the cultural imperialism and dependency thesis, even going as far
as launching ideas about a “reverse cultural imperialism.” For other, especially
critical scholars, such a revisionist framework tended to overestimate the range
of the changes in global production and contra-flow. At this extreme of the de-
bate, critical arguments stressed the remaining validity of the dominance the-
sis, notwithstanding the changing global media.
In the first, more theoretical part of this article we examine the main ar-
guments in the international telenovela debate, presenting them at different
analytical levels and within theoretical frameworks. In the second, empirical
part we concentrate on the range of the contra-flow argument, presenting a
telenovela flow study to the European television market of the mid-1990s.

THE INTERNATIONAL TELENOVELA DEBATE

In the international telenovela debate many conflicting arguments have
been used to assess the validity of the original cultural imperialism thesis. The
debate deals with hard structural and political economic arguments about the
control of the local broadcasting system as well as with ideas about local re-
sistance to foreign products or the success of telenovelas. Depending on the
ideological framework, different interpretations or arguments are given at vari-
ous levels of the debate. In the following theoretical overview we would like to
discuss the range of these contrasting arguments at six analytical levels within
two polarized frameworks (critical vs revisionist) (see Table 1). It has to be ac-
knowledged that these frameworks represent extreme positions while in the
actual discussion mixed, nuanced positions have to be identified.
One of the key problems in the whole debate is that many arguments often
refer to different levels, provoking a lack of analytical clarity. On the one hand,
arguments from a more revisionist framework tend to stress the levels of local
production and reception and exports, while a more critical framework empha-
sizes the U.S.-inspired and controlled broadcasting system. A related problem
deals with the rapidly changing global and regional Latin American commu-
nication context. This implies that the strength and range of certain arguments
The International Telenovela Debate 35

TABLE 1
Main arguments of polarized critical and revisionist frameworks in the
international telenovela debate

Levels of analysis Critical frame Revisionist frame

Broadcasting system Copy of U.S. commercial Commercial drive of local

model entrepreneurs
Structural control Historical strong U.S. capital Withdrawal of U.S. control
control Growth of Latin American
Recently: renewed U.S. par- media concerns
ticipation, competition and Latin American partici-
concentration pation in U.S./European
companies
Local production/ Historical huge U.S. inflow Substitution and replace-
inflow of foreign Substantial inflow in ment by Latin American
(U.S.) fiction “small” countries production
Recently: renewed U.S.
import
Programme format Copy of U.S. consumerism Roots in Latin American
and ideology and capitalism melodrama tradition
Instrument for social status Localized genre
quo
Recently: neutralization of
L.A. values in telenovelas
for export
Reception Passive audience Active audience
Illusory relief Creative decoding
Recently: audience studies
obscure underlying power
analysis
Outflow of Marginal contra-flow Substantial contra-flow
Latin American Recently: possible decline of Reverse cultural
programmes export success imperialism

must be evaluated within their specific historical context. In the following dis-
cussion of the various levels we try to include this historical dimension.
Before treating the various arguments on the levels of software import and
export, it is necessary to deal with broad structural influences, one level being
the broadcasting systems in Latin America. Authors such as Lee (1980: 93) and
Sinclair (1990: 350) noted that the Latin American broadcasters’ adoption of the
commercial television system might be the biggest U.S. influence of all. Even
revisionist authors recognize that the structure of the Latin American televi-
sion and telenovela industry is clearly North American in style and organiza-
tion (Antola and Rogers, 1984: 200). But equally they stress that the option for
the commercial rationale behind the local broadcasting systems was not only
the result of the historical dominance of the U.S. networks. Authors such as
Straubhaar (1984: 222) repeatedly stressed that one should not underestimate
36 Telenovelas

the tremendous drive for profit maximization of the local entrepreneurs since
the 1950s. The nature of the broadcasting industry which evolved was a result
of the overall domestic forces of each country (Fox, 1997a: 130).
A second structural level relates to capital control over the Latin American televi-
sion industry. Since the 1970s there has been a structural withdrawal of Northern
American networks and other corporate organizations in the sector so that their
political economic influence gave way to, as Sinclair (1986: 98) put it, “a general
Latin American pattern of initial US-investment and subsequential withdrawal.”
Even severe critics such as Muraro (1987: 18) recognize the structural change in
the direction of a latinoamericanización with big Latin American corporations and
investors controlling local cultural industries. It is generally acknowledged that
telenovelas as a genre function as the key engine of their economic growth and
success (for example, Marques de Melo, 1988). In addition, big Latin American
corporations such as Globo and Televisa took the structural expansion one step
further, developing foreign structural strategies. These international exporters
tried to sustain their programme distribution by gaining direct control over or
participation in foreign broadcasters, even in Western countries such as Italy,
Portugal, Spain and the United States. Televisa and Venevisión, for example,
participate in Univisión, a U.S. television network targeting the Spanish-speak-
ing population. For Televisa this was in fact a re-entry into the United States
since they initially founded the network (Sinclair, 1996: 53-54).
Since the late 1990s, however, new developments in the Latin American
market have called for a reassessment. Several U.S.-based global channels,
providing satellite and cable services in Spanish or Portuguese, have entered
into competition with Latin American companies—successfully crossing the
language barrier—and thus affecting the comparative language advantage of
the Latin American concerns. In their international ventures, Latin American
corporations such as Televisa are equally confronted with foreign partners
(Sinclair, 1998: 7-11). An emerging pattern could be, as Fox (1997a: 3; 1997b:
39) recently predicted, the decline in economic power of the domestic Latin
American media monopolies.
The inflow of foreign programmes constitutes a third level in the discussion.
Several authors reported how, in different Latin American countries, the
growth of national and regional television industries led to the substitution
(Straubhaar, 1984: 229-34; also for example, Antola and Rogers, 1984) or even
complete displacement of U.S. imports (Straubhaar and Viscasillas, 1991). In
this respect, it has been claimed that Latin America is probably the only large
region in the world where the huge television flow from the United States has
been reduced substantially, and where local entertainment is so successful in
dominating prime time. This is mainly the case in Brazil and Mexico, where
huge corporations such as TV Globo and Televisa rely on an industrial base
for (fiction) production in many ways similar to North American examples,
and where they have been able to exploit the comparative language advantage
of (respectively) Portuguese and Spanish (Sinclair, 1996). Nonetheless, smaller
countries with a less developed television production industry still rely heav-
ily upon U.S. imports. USA-based corporations have been (Varis, 1985) and
clearly remain the most important non–Latin American programme suppli-
ers for the region, especially in the wake of the 1990s explosion of U.S. satellite
channels (Fox, 1997c: 187).
The International Telenovela Debate 37

A fourth, more difficult, level deals with ideological questions about local
programme format, its norms and content. Here quite contrasting arguments
have been raised about the cultural values and authenticity of the telenovela
texture. On the one hand, several critical authors have repeatedly indicated
how the telenovela as a genre is inspired by U.S. soap models, and how it is
deeply permeated by Western capitalist values such as consumerism and the
embellishment of class conflicts (Muraro, 1987). Oliveira (1990: 119) looks at
the creolization of local culture as a negative concept, referring to the imperi-
alist effects of Western capitalist (production) values on the style and content
of Third World cultural products. Telenovelas are seen as commercial fiction
programmes inspired by U.S. soap models, spiced up with Third World de-
corum. Oliveira (1990: 129) claims that in “most Brazilian soaps the American
lifestyle portrayed by Hollywood productions reappears with a brazilianized
face.” The external cultural imperialism has been replaced by an internal one,
led by local military and political economic elites, which are keen to justify
the social status quo. This quite dogmatic critical analysis has been revised
by a long strain of authors, who argue that telenovelas are deeply rooted in
historical forms of authentic local fiction. It goes from Straubhaar (1984: 221),
who speaks of a “Brazilianization” of television content and values, to Mar-
tín-Barbero (1993) describing it as the television version of the traditional
Latin American melodrama, to, more recently, Trinta (1997: 284) claiming that
the telenovela is a “creative version of a possible Brazilian national story.”
Recently however these claims about authenticity in telenovelas have been
challenged by new critical voices on the telenovela “made for export.” Several
authors point here to the hybridization and neutralization of the telenovela
content for export objectives. Its contingent cultural and national characteris-
tics tend to dissolve into a universal export-formula (Mazziotti, 1996: 113).
This discussion on the format has been intensified by the wave of research
on the audience reception of telenovelas in their home countries.2 A wide stream
of audience-oriented studies emerged, displacing earlier critical assumptions
about passive, alienated audiences (for example, see Oliveira, 1990: 119), and
stressing the importance of local and oppositional creativity. Vink (1988) is a
well-known scholar among those who drew upon audiences and their daily
use of telenovelas. Stressing the possible subversive character of the telenovela
production, text and the reception of it, Vink refutes the ideas of alienation
and status quo. He concludes that “novelas might offer the working-class
audience models of social change, at any rate of resistance to repression”
(1988: 247). In their overview of studies about telenovela audiences, McAnany
and La Pastina (1994) draw attention to methodological insufficiencies, which
might make telenovela audience studies susceptible to more fundamental cri-
tiques on optimistic views about the emancipatory value of telenovelas. In
more general terms it has been claimed that an overemphasis on reception
studies can obscure the analysis of the underlying power structures (Hallin,
1998: 164). For critical scholars such as Oliveira (1990: 122, 125) the historical
analysis that audiences would find the telenovela only an illusory relief from
the harsh reality of daily life, remains quite valid.
The final and one of the strongest arguments in the deconstruction of the
dominance thesis deals with the worldwide export of telenovelas. The pattern
in which mainly Mexican and Brazilian television industries expanded their
38 Telenovelas

activities over their national boundaries, was raised as the ultimate disproof
of the traditional critical frames. In the early 1980s for example, TV Globo
became an important exporter of telenovelas, distributing its entertainment
programmes to over 50 countries around the world. For Straubhaar (1984: 237)
it is clear that “while dependency theory offers a useful perspective,” it fails
to “look closely at the internal dynamics of the Brazilian situation to see how
factors once contributing to dependency may have changed to favour greater
autonomy for Brazilian television broadcasters and programmers.” Similar
arguments have been often repeated by other scholars such as Vink (1988: 31),
for example, who argued that Globo’s export success disproved “one of the
main arguments of the cultural imperialism thesis, which views the Third
World countries as innocent victims of Hollywood invasion.” This export ar-
gument has been strengthened by the audience success of these programmes
in foreign countries such as (then) communist Poland, where some 28 million
or 85 percent of the national audience followed the adventures of the slave girl
Isaura (Mattelart and Mattelart, 1987: 15). In Spain, the Venezuelan telenovela
Cristal broke all the rating records in the history of public broadcaster TVE
in 1990 (RTVE, 1990: 281), while in Portugal a session of the parliament was
interrupted to allow the members to watch Gabriela (Mattelart and Mattelart,
1987: 15).
One of the earliest and most provocative refutations of the cultural impe-
rialism concept in analysing Latin American television industries came from
Rogers and Antola (1985). These scholars launched the explicit concept of “re-
verse cultural imperialism,” albeit without a thorough theoretical argumen-
tation. This concept has often been criticized in academic circles, especially
as a case of ideological revisionism in international communication research
and theories. A prolific writer here has been Sinclair (for example, 1993, 1996,
1998) claiming that the new contra-flows from countries such as Brazil and
Mexico must be seen in the fullness of global communication realities. Con-
centrating on Globo’s international activities and on Televisa’s exports to the
United States, Sinclair (1993: 131) came to the conclusion that:

The suggestion sometimes made that Televisa’s incursion in the US-market or

Globo’s export to Portugal and Italy are forms of reverse cultural imperialism is
a canard, based on cynicism at worst or ignorance at best.

Sreberny-Mohammadi (1993: 130) has raised similar concerns against the

“reverse cultural imperialism” concept and the contra-flow argument. Put-
ting Globo’s activities in a global perspective, she wrote that “the exemplar
of Rede Globo and Brazilian cultural production as a counter to ‘cultural im-
perialism’ as a net exporter of cultural products is cut to size.” The point is
that contra-flow from the (so-called) South to the North, and other revisionist
arguments, tend to put too much weight on marginal contra-movements so
that the real power structures in global communication may be disguised.
For critical scholars such as Schiller (1991: 22) and Roach (1990: 295-96) the
whole revisionist question is even part of a larger ideological project or politi-
cal agenda to undermine the idea of capitalist expansion.
The International Telenovela Debate 39

The actual developments of the Latin American television landscape in

the late 1990s, as indicated by Fox (1997a, 1997b) and Sinclair (1998), tend to
put the optimistic voices into a new perspective. The future of the telenovela
export might very well be less bright than foreseen. Growing competition on
the home front with U.S.-based companies, and the increasing concentration
of delivery systems for the Latin American region (for example, the merger of
the U.S.-based satellite hardware manufacturer Hughes Electronics Corpora-
tion and satellite system operator Panamsat) tend to affect the comparative
language advantage (Sinclair, 1998: 11) and “erode the bargaining power of
Latin America’s TV exporters” (Fox, 1997b: 39). This weakened position on
the international television trade market might very well result in a decline of
telenovela exports.
One of the major flaws in the international telenovela debate, however,
concerns a primary shortage of empirical data in the range of the contra-flow,
especially the flow to Europe. It is also difficult to determine the validity of
the data, especially when they originate from Globo’s and other corporations’
marketing files. In the second part of this article we will draw upon a large-
scale comparative flow study of Latin American fiction exports to Europe, in
order to shed some new light on the telenovela debate.

THE RECEPTIVE EUROPEAN TELEVISION SCENE

AS A CRUCIAL CASE
In this second, empirical part, we examine the export of Latin American
fiction to Europe as a crucial case in demonstrating contra-flow movements
in global communication. This case is important because the European tele-
vision scene has been a huge, highly receptive and economically important
market for Latin American production centres. The available literature on
the European activities of such producers as the Brazilian Globo and Ban-
deirantes, the Mexican Televisa or the Venezuelan Venevisión and RCTV is
relatively poor, but it indicates that the United States and Europe are by far
the two most important core export markets (for example, Marques de Melo,
1988; Sinclair, 1990; Mazziotti, 1996; de la Fuente, 1997). Globo’s European ad-
venture began in 1975 with the export of the successful series Gabriela to Por-
tugal, and since that time it has used Latin southern Europe as the attractive
entrance to the rest of Europe. In the 1980s for example, the export figures for
Globo grew from U.S. $3 million in 1981 to some U.S. $15 million four years
later. More than half of it came from Globo activities in Italy, France and Por-
tugal (Marques de Melo, 1988: 45; Mattos, 1993: 65). The Mattelarts (1987: 15)
might be slightly overestimating the inflow when they claim that “in Europe
[in 1983] only Albania and the [former] Soviet Union did not programme tele-
novelas.” Nonetheless, Globo and Televisa managed to penetrate most of the
Western European countries. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K.,
Ireland, Denmark and Iceland are among the countries where, at least at some
point in the 1980s, telenovelas appeared. This means that also historically,
Europe has been an important market for the globalization activities of Latin
American audio-visual corporations.
40 Telenovelas

The influx of telenovelas clearly gained momentum in the 1980s, when the
Western European television scene went through the paradigmatic shift of
the demolition of public broadcasting monopolies, all under the umbrella of
more competition, rational management and straight commercial influence.
The central programming category in this all became, more than ever, long-
running fictional material with the capacity to attract a large audience for a
longer time. If possible, cheap foreign, mostly U.S., material was used. It is
in this (by now) historical context of European broadcasters confronted with
an expanding broadcasting time and tied by financial restraints, that Latin
American telenovelas entered the wider Western European market. The tele-
novela corresponded well to the profile of cheap serial entertainment, perfect
to fill new afternoon or early evening time slots (Mazziotti, 1996: 40). As de
la Fuente (1997: 45) recently argued, telenovelas became the programming
executive’s dream come true, especially in emerging or growing markets, be-
cause they were relatively inexpensive while they held a captive audience
for an extended period of time. A case in point has been Eastern Europe,
where telenovelas were only sporadically broadcast in the 1980s, with the ex-
ception of Poland and Yugoslavia. It is remarkable how, since the fall of the
Iron Curtain and the former communist regimes, commercial considerations
have dominated most of the broadcasting policies (Jakubowicz, 1994: 13). This
emergence of commercial television boosted the demand for serial entertain-
ment, including growing telenovela imports.
Besides historical and economic reasons in relation to telenovela exports,
Europe has also been an important case in relation to efforts in gaining
structural influence on a foreign market. Several big Latin American media
concerns tried for some time to gain a foothold in Europe through their par-
ticipation in broadcasting projects—as a strategy to secure a steady outlet
for programme sales. Since 1992, Globo has participated in the Portuguese
commercial broadcasting company SIC. Televisa has been present in the Eu-
ropean market since the end of 1988 through its satellite channel Galavision,
and as such has been active all over Europe, albeit with an emphasis on the
Spanish market. In Spain the Mexican company is also one of the main part-
ners of Plataforma Digital, a project for digital television.
Another trend indicating the special attention of the Latin American
media concerns for expanding strategies towards Europe, is situated at the
level of co-production. This strategy has been well co-ordinated since the
1990s, especially towards Spain and Italy (Akyuz, 1994: 21). Fadul (1993: 20)
even speculates about the intense influence of the telenovela formula on the
local production in these countries.
The latter also converges with the fact that in several European countries
within the Latin language and cultural sphere, there has been a positive cul-
tural connotation stimulating the purchase and scheduling of telenovelas. In
France for example, the “Journées de la Télévision Brésilienne” (Days of Bra-
zilian Television) were held in 1985 in the prestigious Parisian cultural temple,
the Centre Pompidou. Screenings and debates were organized in the presence
of the progressive French Secretary of Culture Jack Lang. These events were
seen by the press as a significant cultural labelling and legitimation of the
The International Telenovela Debate 41

telenovela (Bouquillion, 1992: 102). In Spain, where telenovelas gave rise to

lively press debates, cultural personalities like Gabriel García-Márquez were
brought into the arena (Guaderrama, 1993: 10).
All this means that European television has been an important market for
Latin American fictional material for historical, economic and cultural rea-
sons. However, while regional telenovela flows have been well documented
(for example, Antola and Rogers, 1984; Varis, 1985), it is difficult to find em-
pirical material for investigating the intercontinental flow of Latin American
television products—crucial for the question of contra-flow from the South
to the North. There have been several national case studies on the telenovela
export success and activities in specific European countries, 3 but overall data
are barely available.
In this article we present data about the flow of Latin American fiction
programmes to Europe in 1995. Using a questionnaire sent to the research,
purchase and programming departments of public and private television
broadcasters in the wider Europe, we draw the map of telenovela imports. The
data in this article relate to 71 companies (48 public and 23 private) in 30 coun-
tries, including Northern (for example, Sweden, Norway), Central and Eastern
(here referred to as Eastern, for example, Bulgaria, Russia), Southern (for exam-
ple, Greece, Spain), Northwestern (for example, Germany, the Netherlands) and
Celtic–Anglo-Saxon European countries (for example, Ireland and the U.K.).
Using these questionnaires, we not only examined the volume and quantita-
tive importance of the Latin American contra-flow to Europe, we also tried to
find out how these fiction programmes were scheduled, what kind of audience
response they received, and why exactly they were purchased.

MARGINALITY AND CULTURAL BOUNDARY

Studies about programming trends since the onset of multi-channel com-
petition indicate how fiction has become an extremely useful, time-absorbing
and multi-functional programme category. Besides the role of the attractive
prime-time block-buster, it functions as an appetizer in the early evening, or
even as a cheap filler during off-peak periods (for example, morning, after-
noon, late evening). As such, it has been acknowledged that extending drama
purchases could bring in foreign, even exotic, narratives other than those
produced by local and U.S. cultural industries. Although this did happen in
a first period of deregulation with huge imports from Japan, Australia and
Latin America, the main trend, however, is one of bipolarization. This means
that in (Western) Europe, most local broadcasters tend to produce more do-
mestic drama, while they increase U.S. purchases. These main tendencies
also come through the data in our survey.
The key question in this article, however, deals with the issue of the South-
North contra-flow in relation to Latin American fiction. From an overall Euro-
pean perspective, several indicators show the limited and, in some European
regions, even absent contra-flows. First of all, there is the poor overall flow of
Latin American fictional material. Its share of 3.2 percent is nothing compared
to the enormous flow from the United States (58%). Of course it is important
42 Telenovelas

to differentiate among the European regions. As such, Southern Europe is by

far the top region for telenovelas with an import rate of 8.2 percent, followed
by the emerging Eastern European market (4%) and Northwestern European
broadcasters (2.3%). With the exception of Latin countries such as Italy, Spain
and Portugal, these are indeed quite marginal figures.
As such, telenovelas may be considered a minor or in many regions and
countries even a negligible category. However, it is quite remarkable that
Latin American drama producers did succeed in covering a lot of European
countries. In general, the Latin American production centres were able to sell
their products to more than one third of the broadcasting companies under
survey. In total some 79 telenovela series appeared on European screens in
1995, mostly broadcast by public service companies. But, in Northwestern,
Northern and Celtic–Anglo-Saxon countries telenovelas seem to have disap-
peared; when they survived, they maintained a marginal position. The ten
stations which have been scheduling telenovelas in these regions limited
themselves to one telenovela each. The few telenovelas that were broadcast,
in addition, were often reruns of series bought in the 1980s.
Also, the variety in telenovela series is limited with a striking predomi-
nance of Brazilian material. Out of 76 telenovelas, 43 originate from Brazil.
Mexico and Venezuela follow each with only 12 productions. The media con-
cerns from the three major production countries thus supply almost 90 per-
cent of the telenovelas to Europe. Moreover, in Northern and Northwestern
Europe Globo is the only producer present. It is also remarkable that popu-
lar Globo productions of the 1980s such as Sinha Moça (in Belgium, Portugal,
Hungary and Croatia) and Isaura (in Portugal and the Slovak Republic) still
remain at the top in West and East.
Besides the mere quantity in hours, shares and the number of telenovelas,
it is also important to look at how telenovelas were scheduled. Were they
prime-time material or just fillers in low-rate time slots? If we assume that this
distinction might roughly indicate the strategic importance of a programme
type (Varis, 1985), it is safe to say again that the Latin American share was rel-
atively unimportant. The survey indicated that the vast majority of telenove-
las were shown during the week, and only in a few cases continued during
weekends. In 1995 they were generally broadcast in morning, noon, afternoon
or late evening time slots. In most regions they were shown during the usual
soap time slots, mostly in hours with low audience ratings. While some tele-
novelas did appear in Southern Europe in prime-time slots, they were never
broadcast in the evening in Western and Northern parts of the continent. Not
surprisingly, this marginality in the schedule is reflected in the market share
in Northwestern Europe.
These quantitative indicators only underline the relativity of the “reverse
cultural imperialism thesis” or other claims dealing with a substantial, grow-
ing contra-flow from Latin America. Especially in the economically most
powerful parts of Europe, in the Northwestern, Northern and Celtic–Anglo-
Saxon countries, telenovelas faced marginal attention. The reasons for their
scarce success on these fronts are quite diverse, mostly referring to a mixture
of cultural boundaries, commercial and programming strategies. Following
The International Telenovela Debate 43

TABLE 2
Number of telenovelas (series) by company in Europe (1995)

Country Company Number telenovelas Percent

Belgium BRTN 1 1.3

Austria ORF 1 1.3
Switzerland DRS 1 1.3
TSR 1 1.3
Germany NDR 1 1.3
BR 1 1.3
ARD 1 1.3
WDR 1 1.3
MDR 1 1.3
Finland YLE 1 1.3
Spain TVE 10 12.7
ETB 2 2.5
Portugal SIC 15 19
RTP 12 15.2
Greece Megachannel 1 1.3
ERT 3 3.8
Turkey TRT 2 2.5
Lithuania TELE3 1 1.3
Estonia TV3 Estonia 2 2.5
Moldavia TVMoldavia 1 1.3
Hungary Magyar TV 4 5.1
Slovenia RTV Slovenia 1 1.3
Slovak Rep. Slovak TV 6 7.6
Bulgaria BNT 1 1.3
Croatia HRT 3 3.8
Rumania Rumanian TV 5 6.3
Total 79 100

the responses by programming and purchase directors there is, first of all, the
cultural distance, in particular the language boundary, the lack of cultural
proximity and knowledge of the world of telenovelas. This relates to the aver-
sion for subtitled or dubbed programmes. This reason is often mentioned as
a key factor for not purchasing and scheduling telenovelas, especially among
Celtic–Anglo-Saxon companies such as the Welsh S4C, responding that the
“audience in Wales shares the general British lack of enthusiasm for dubbed
or subtitled popular programming.”
The language problem and the preference for fiction with a higher degree
of cultural proximity, not only illustrate the importance of cultural distance
in television programme flows. They are also closely related to the commer-
cial rationale, often translated by scheduling executives as the ruling adage of
“giving the people what they want.” The German commercial channel Sat 1
bluntly claims that “our studies show that national, European and American
44 Telenovelas

formats are more popular,” while their public service competitor ZDF even
mentions that “if at all we broadcast foreign fiction they [sic] come from the
USA.” Other stations are more subtle in their strategies to cope with foreign,
non-U.S. material, such as the Norwegian TV Norge, responding that they
“are a commercial station so we opt for American and British films, no other
international film unless it was a big success at the movie theatre.”
So it seems that cultural differences, related to commercial strategies, the
preference for culturally closer material and the aversion for dubbed or sub-
titled fare are a major obstacle to the telenovela’s commercial success in most
parts of Europe. It is clear that, especially in the Northern, Northwestern and
Anglo-Saxon countries, telenovelas suffer from the harsh competition from
major local and U.S. production centres. Since the 1990s there has been a clear
trend in all Western European countries to refocus on domestically produced
and U.S. soap series. It also seems that the eulogies from Latin American
authors on the outstanding narrative and visual quality of telenovelas (for
example, Marques de Melo, 1988: 57) are no longer valid for most European
programming executives.

CULTURAL PROXIMITY IN QUESTION

Marginality or absence, however, is not the general pattern. It is clear that
Southern Europe shows a different picture. Many indicators show the im-
portance of Latin American fiction for the stations in these countries. In fact,
more than half of the Latin American imports in Europe in 1995 were broad-
cast by Southern European stations. Nearly half of them (46.8%) are shown
by three stations, that is, the Spanish TVE (n = 10), the Portuguese SIC (n =
15) and RTP (n = 12). It is notable that Brazilian companies are the major pro-
gramme providers (55.6 percent) with twice as many telenovelas as Mexican
and Venezuelan companies. The information on Italy is scarce but we do
know, as the RAI notes in the questionnaire, that commercial channels like
Mediaset, Rete4 and some smaller commercial stations regularly did (and still
do) broadcast telenovelas (see for example, de la Fuente, 1997).
Besides the huge quantities of imported telenovelas, it is clear that these
programmes also obtained a strategically important spot in the schedules.
Although in Spain Latin American series were often scheduled in lower rat-
ing time slots (for example, morning, afternoon, late night), they used to ap-
pear quite frequently during prime time in Portugal. Our 1995 data are in
line with other findings, such as those reported by Akyuz (1994: 16-17) about
Spain and Italy, where in 1994 6 out of the 10 top soaps were telenovelas.
Asked for the reasons for purchasing and programming telenovelas, the
executives mostly refer to cultural factors—in this case in an affirmative
manner. Here language and cultural proximity are seen as important factors
for commercial choice. The language factor is clearly illustrated for Portugal,
where we find almost exclusively Brazilian programmes (22 out of 27). The
Portuguese public broadcaster RTP scheduled telenovelas “for cultural rea-
sons; it appeals to the same values of the Portuguese, because of the same
Latin roots,” while the Greek commercial Megachannel was said to be satis-
The International Telenovela Debate 45

fied with its purchase because of “the similar culture and mentality with the
Greek.”
Cultural proximity also relates to the commercial rationale of audience suc-
cess, as examples in Spain and Portugal in the 1980s and early 1990s clearly
showed (see above). This euphoria, however, is not completely reflected by
the 1995 data. On the southern channels TVE and Megachannel the ratings
are low. In Portugal they are likely to be much higher since SIC claims in the
questionnaire to reach 60 percent of the market in prime time with telenove-
las, where “since 1975, it’s the most popular programme for the Portuguese
TV-audience.” The financial attractiveness of the cheap telenovelas can be an
argument as well. The Basque channel ETB schedules them “to fill the sched-
ule at a low price.”
However, there are indicators that the Latin image or the cultural advan-
tage shows some cracks. For Antena 3 spokeswoman, Françoise Sabbah (in
Akyuz, 1997: 52), “telenovelas are no longer seen as culturally relevant to the
Spanish public.” This seems to indicate that Spanish commercial companies
have explicitly chosen U.S. material above Latin American and no longer
engage in co-productions. In Italy co-productions continue, although the
popular home channel of the telenovela, Rete 4, has substantially reduced its
telenovela programming (Akyuz, 1997: 52).
A key reason for others not to purchase telenovelas is the poor quality. The
Italian RAI, for example, categorically refused telenovelas and did not find
them fit for the demanding image of a public service broadcaster. The Spanish
regional channel Telemadrid does not purchase them because most of them
are mere “culebrones” (Spanish nickname for telenovelas meaning snakes,
but obviously with a connotation of tearjerkers).

EMERGING MARKETS IN THE EAST AND THE COMMERCIAL RATIONALE

A completely different picture arises when we look at the Eastern part of
Europe, where the fall of the Iron Curtain and the introduction of the free
market system quickly changed the broadcasting system, heralding well-
known tendencies such as demonopolization and commercial programming
strategies. One of the most astounding findings of our enquiry refers to the
successful introduction of telenovelas in many of these former communist
countries. In fact, the study shows that more than half the Eastern European
channels (9 out of 15 in the enquiry) have telenovelas in their programme
schedule, and that they are well distributed in it. In these countries telenove-
las are clearly more than a flash in the pan, while most of these channels
(for example, the Hungarian Magyar TV, the Croatian HRT or the Rumanian
RTV) carried three or more telenovelas. The Slovak public broadcaster STV
scheduled six series of Latin American origin. In fact, nearly one third of all
telenovela imports in Europe (30.4 percent, or 24 series), are shown in these
markets.
The situation in Eastern Europe clearly illustrates the commercial strat-
egy of Latin American producers, who are keen to respond to the higher de-
mand for cheap entertainment. Globo, for example, explicitly chooses to gain
46 Telenovelas

a presence with telenovelas in these opening markets; though not profitable

in the short term, they prove to be highly profitable in the long run (Mazzi-
otti, 1996: 45). Programming and purchase departments in these parts of the
continent most often referred to the low price or the economic value as the
main argument to schedule telenovela series, followed by their seriality and
scheduling opportunities, technical qualities and content. As evidenced by
what happened in Western Europe in the 1980s, it is clear that telenovelas are
not the star prime-time category, but serve as cheap fillers for the expanding
broadcasting time.
The Eastern European case once again illustrates that commercial consid-
erations dominate the international flow of fiction. Following the U.S. pat-
terns of exploitation of international television markets, telenovela producers
sell their products at differential rates. This explains why a telenovela series
costs approximately U.S. $50 per hour in Estonia, compared to U.S. $1500 in
Switzerland and almost U.S. $3000 in Turkey. Given the precarious economic
situation in many Eastern European countries, telenovelas are mostly cheaper
than other types of foreign fiction. This market opportunity was reported by
most channels, especially by those in smaller countries such as Estonia (TV3)
or Lithuania (Tele3).
Eastern European purchase of telenovelas relates to an economic argument
dealing with the capacity to capture audiences for a longer time in specific
marginal time slots. This function is perfectly reflected in the performance of
these programmes with the audience. Given the off-peak broadcasting time
slots, the telenovelas’ ratings are usually quite low, although their market
shares tend to be often quite satisfactory. In several Eastern European coun-
tries, telenovelas manage to attract a good part of the viewers in low audi-
ence time slots, with the ultimate example of the Brazilian series O Pogador
de Promessas reaching an audience share of 80.7 percent in Hungary. In their
written comments, channels such as the Lithuanian LNK-TV summarized
that “the quality does not satisfy but it attracts the audience and advertising.”
The Estonian TV3 refers to “good ratings” too, while the Bulgarian BNT men-
tions “high ratings, audience interest, good prices, alternative for soap opera.”
And Tele3 from Lithuania summarizes: “High ratings, popularity among the
audience and good sales of adtime.”
But again, one should be careful about the future of telenovelas in Eastern
Europe, given the parallels with Western European programming tendencies
of the 1980s. The main question here is whether the Latin American wave will
last or disappear in the East too, given the further commercial development
of the broadcasting scene and the subsequent rise of U.S.- and domestically
produced fiction.

CONCLUSION
This article started with the observation that Latin American telenovelas
can be seen as a test case in international communication theory and research,
illustrating alternatives in global communication flows. Since the mid-1980s
an interesting debate has been developed around the meaning of telenove-
The International Telenovela Debate 47

las, especially in their worldwide exports, for the analysis of global cultural
change. On the one hand, optimistic voices were raised about the end of “cul-
tural imperialism,” while others responded by questioning the range of these
revisionist arguments.
Drawing upon an empirical comparative enquiry of Latin American fic-
tion flows to Europe in 1995, this article supports the relative weakness of the
contra-flow argument. The overall European pattern of telenovela imports
has been related to marginality, or even, in some parts of Europe, dehydra-
tion. Mainly in the North and Northwest of Europe telenovela series are not
scheduled at all or have disappeared since the beginning of the 1990s. The
central argument here is that the audio-visual industry in those countries was
first keen to use telenovelas as mere fillers for the expanding broadcasting
time. But since the 1990s, competition has increased so much that program-
mers have tended to avoid “exotic” material and have fallen back on proven
fiction programming.
Telenovelas were relatively well represented in other parts of Europe. In
Southern countries we referred to broad cultural arguments dealing with
language and a sense of proximity with the world depicted in the telenove-
las, while in Eastern parts the success of telenovelas was due to their rela-
tive cheapness. But here again, the enquiry draws attention to the fact that in
these cases the telenovela phenomenon should not be overestimated and that
its future is not secure. A significant indicator in this direction may be that
Spanish commercial channels declared themselves to be no longer prepared
to schedule telenovelas at all, referring to their weaker quality standards and
poor audience performance. It seems that in these cases Latin American fic-
tion is defeated by material from the United States and from other big West-
ern production centres. Telenovelas may soon face the same hard competition
in the vibrant Eastern European television markets.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Europe was the most promising market for
telenovela exporters. Globo and other Latin American corporations, however,
appear to be less present in Europe than euphoric voices might have expected.
In the mid-1990s oversaturation and competition with U.S. fiction urged Latin
American media concerns to redirect their efforts to new markets such as
Asia and, in particular, Japan (Mazziotti, 1996: 41; de la Fuente, 1997: 45). But
Latin American fiction is still more important in Europe than, say, Japanese
or Australian imports. A key reason that may help telenovelas to stay in the
(near) future is the importance of Mexican and Brazilian programme pro-
ducers in their respective (huge) language regions. This position has been
intensified on a structural level because these corporations are attempting
to encroach upon the broadcasting system in countries such as Portugal and
Spain.
Returning to our theoretical opening, this article empirically supports the
analysis of scholars who firmly reject the thesis that the international activi-
ties of Televisa or Globo could be considered as a form of reverse cultural
imperialism (for example, Sinclair, 1993: 131). Of course, the new complex re-
alities of the 1990s can no longer be analysed with former tools and concepts,
often leading to dichotomous views about global cultural flow and influence.
48 Telenovelas

Although international television flows no longer fit in Nordenstrengs and

Varis’s metaphor of a “one-way street” (1974) and seem to make up a kind of
“patchwork quilt” (Tracey, 1988: 24; Sinclair et al., 1996: 5), it is important to
emphasize that they still are culturally influenced and both politically and
economically regulated. In this sense, the European findings hardly justify
euphoric arguments about a more balanced flow. The issue of the worldwide
flow of Latin American television programmes has strongly complicated re-
search and theories on global communication and dependency, but one may
not overemphasize its range. We should not forget that “the coming of age of
many Third World media producers and the localization of some media pro-
duction” are important, but as Sreberny-Mohammadi (1993: 121-22) continues,
“at the same time even stronger tendencies toward greater globalization and
conglomeratization can be discerned.”
In this sense it becomes clear that in the international telenovela debate
we have to disentangle the international activities of private communication
companies from their national governments’ interests. The frequently as-
sumed equivalence between them constitutes, as Sinclair (1990: 351) stated,
“a nationalised distortion of the transnational character of contemporary cul-
tural industries.” As a result, the telenovela phenomenon should not (only) be
treated as a case in the traditional North-South dialogue, but should equally
be firmly located in the debate around globalization strategies of late-capitalist
cultural industries. Here we can refer to the striking parallels between U.S.
and major Latin American corporations’ strategies to conquer overseas mar-
kets. In many respects, Globo and other commercial production centres use
quite similar strategies in producing, distributing, selling and marketing
their products as their Northern American competitors (for example, López,
1995: 273), while their success also rests upon the huge home market and the
language advantage (Sinclair, 1996).
Another caveat in discussions about the success of telenovelas and other
Third World media products, mostly stressing export arguments, is that vari-
ous other analytical levels should be taken into account. Reflecting upon our
own case study, it must be underlined that it relates to the outflow level, re-
futing former optimistic voices within a revisionist framework. As indicated
in the theoretical overview, however, one cannot escape the idea that certain
revisionist arguments at other levels are challenged by recent developments
too. A key issue in the debate will be how Latin American audiences and con-
cerns will face the strategies of and the harsh competition from other global
(U.S.) concerns.

NOTES
The authors wish to thank the Research Department of the VRT (Flemish Public
Broadcasting Company) for their financial and logistic support, with a special thanks
to Brigitta Parisis and Daniël Poesmans. They also thank Jay G. Blumler and Caroline
Pauwels for their stimulating remarks.

1. In Latin America this rewriting of the critical frame was paralleled by an inter-
esting theoretical revision of the twin concept of dependency/dominance in the work
The International Telenovela Debate 49

of cultural critics such as Martín-Barbero (1993) and García-Canclini (1995). See also
Schlesinger and Morris (1997).
2. For an overview and discussion, see McAnany and La Pastina (1994).
3. See for example, a special issue of Intercom. Revista Brasileira de Comunicação (1990,
issue 62/3) with case studies on the export of Brazilian telenovelas to countries such
as Spain, Yugoslavia and Belgium.

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Telenovelas and Soap Operas:
Negotiating Reality
from the Periphery

Christina Slade

INTRODUCTION
I begin with two anecdotes. In 1988, in Belgium, it was possible to watch
the Australian soap Neighbours in English, Italian, Dutch, French, Italian and
German in one week, delivered by CODITEL, the local cable company. From
the periphery of the global communication network, an Australian soap was
flooding the heartland of Europe. Images of Australians and the Australian
way of life were shot through with the mores of a Neighbours-style commu-
nity. My own neighbour, an aristocratic Belgian, sent her child in to borrow
tomato sauce, explaining later that she knew that all Australians had tomato
sauce, and all sent regularly to their neighbours for such things. A way of
breaking the ice perhaps.
The other anecdote concerns a Mexican family travelling in Indonesia in
the early 1990s. The young child of the family, María Mercedes, shared her
name with the immensely popular Mexican telenovela starring Thalía (Ari-
adna Sodi Miranda). As the mother called to her child, crowds of normally
restrained Javanese descended wanting to talk of the telenovela of Mexico
and of love. They knew the name María Mercedes and knew the society from
which the name came. The French-educated and somewhat restrained Mexi-
can couple were taken aback.
Anecdotes like this are universal. Many are apocryphal. In one version it is
the Romanian sitting of parliament which is delayed for the final episode of
a Mexican telenovela, in others the Egyptian, or Russian senior leaders who
pause for the show. What the anecdotes underline is the extraordinary suc-
cess of the genre of soaps—or of the family of genres that includes soaps and
telenovelas. It is interesting that they are produced in the periphery, not in the
great centres of production in Europe or the United States.

Christina Slade: “Telenovelas and Soap Operas: Negotiating Reality from the Periph-
ery,” first published in Media International Australia, vol. 106, num. 2 (2003): 6–17.
52 Telenovelas

A GLOBAL PRODUCT
The global success of Australian soaps is a familiar story. But the Latin
American telenovela genre has also had its share of attention. In 1996 Ien Ang,
quoting Vink (1988) and Mattelart and Mattelart (1990), cites the success of
telenovelas as an instance of the localisation of global cultural products such
as the American daytime soaps:

Telenovelas became so popular in that part of the world that they gradually dis-
placed American imports from the TV schedules and became an intrinsic part
of local culture. (Ang, 1996: 155)

But that is the wrong way around. The major producers of telenovelas,
Brazil and Mexico, chart their own paths and in neither country was the U.S.
daytime soap the model. As Thomas Tufte puts it:

The telenovela genre has developed as a complex cultural product with generic,
social and cultural roots far back in Latin American history. (2000: 2)

He argues the case for Brazil. In Mexico, likewise, Televisa telenovelas were a
home-grown product, and never replaced a diet of American daytime soaps.
As the leading Televisa producer Gabriel Vazquez Bulman put it in an inter-
view with Rosalind Pearson:

If you go back to the origins of the telenovela, Mexico in the 1940s had a great
tradition of comics and cheap cartoon books . . . known as ‘folletines’ . . . you
didn’t need to read to understand them. . . . Later came the radionovelas which
were directly descended from the folletine and later . . . the telenovela. Tele-
novelas based on the same stories that were in the folletines years ago in the 30s
and 40s, are called ‘telenovelas de folletin’. That is why the Mexican telenovela
is very distinct from the European or US soaps. (Pearson, 1999)

Mexican telenovelas created a form which was itself very exportable. The
same was true to some extent in Australia. Neighbours was never a poor man’s
Coronation Street. Each national style has colonised the markets of the world in
its own right. It is not that the global product has been localised, but that the
local product of the periphery has invaded the global producers.
That was the insight underlying the conference entitled “Telenovelas and
Soap Operas: Negotiating Reality from the Periphery.” The conference took
place at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University
in Canberra early in 2002. The premise of the conference was that it was worth
examining the international success of the telenovela/soap opera industry in
Latin America and Australasia. Australian soaps from Neighbours to Home and
Away have had remarkable international success. Latin telenovelas, such as Los
Ricos también Lloran (The Rich Also Cry), Mirada de Mujer (A Woman’s View)
and Yo soy Betty la Fea (I Am Ugly Betty), are shown across the Mediterranean.
Telenovelas and Soap Operas 53

In 1960 a formal legal structure was instituted in Mexico: La Ley Federal

de Radio y Televisión. The law made explicit the public service role of tele-
vision and distinguished between commercial and non-profit channels. In
1968, President Díaz Ordaz attempted to open the television market to com-
petition, selling Channel 8 and Channel 13 to commercial competitors of the
Azcárraga family. Channel 8 was bought by the Garza Sada family company
Grupo Alfa de Monterrey. By 1972, however, Telesistema Mexicana (Channels
2, 4, 5) and Grupo Alfa (Channel 8) combined, and soon afterwards the son
and heir of the family empire, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, was able to buy out
Grupo Alfa. This new monolith in the industry was named Televisa. Under
President Echeverria, the Mexican government was far more interventionist,
promulgating a law on 4 April 1973 which gave the state the role of approv-
ing content and allowed commercials on state and non-profit television. From
this time on, government censors sat in through the filming of telenovelas.
The very close links between Televisa and the presidency, however, meant
that there was little friction.
In 1961 Telesistema Mexicana had expanded to San Antonio, Texas and
the Spanish International Network (SIN) was set up. By 1976, the company
now named Televisa was globalising, acquiring 20 per cent of the United
States–based Spanish International Communication Corporation. SIN grew
from controlling 16 U.S. channels in 1979 to 240 in 1983. In 1986 the FCC ruled
that Emilio Azcárraga Milmo controlled SIN and, as he was not a U.S. citizen,
he was forced to divest himself of the company. In 1988 he bought Galav-
isión International in Europe, in 1991 acquired 49 per cent of Megavisión in
Chile and in 1993 bought Red Bolivia. By this time, Televisa was the largest
Spanish-language network in the world. It rested, however, on immense bor-
rowings which, with the financial crisis in Mexico in 1994, put pressure on the
company.
In July 1995, there was a landmark meeting between the heads of the family
television empires from the periphery, held in Mexico City. Emilio Azcárraga
Milmo from Televisa, Rupert Murdoch of News Ltd and Fox Television and Ro-
berto Marinho of TV Globo met together with a representative of the U.S. Cable
company TCI to establish and divide up the cable business in Latin America
(Fernández and Paxman, 2000: 455). This was the high point of the Azcárraga
empire. By the end of 1997, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo had died and his empire,
now in the hands of his son Emilio Azcárraga Jean, was divesting. By 1998, the
Argentine television company Clarín (owned by another Latin media family
named Noble) was the largest earning Spanish language net work.
Daniel Mato (2001) describes the process whereby Spanish-language tele-
novela production was moving to Miami, where a transnational Spanish
style was emerging. The stories written on the periphery, in a language from
the periphery and very often performed by actors of the periphery, have
now so successfully invaded the centre that production has moved. Mato
traces the fortunes of Televisa over the last years, and the rise of competitors
not just in Miami but also in Colombia, where the highly successful comic
telenovela Yo soy Betty la Fea was produced, and Venezuela. The heyday of
Televisa’s domination of the Spanish telenovela is over.
54 Telenovelas

TELEVISA TELENOVELAS
The mainstay of Televisa was, from the very beginning, the telenovela.
Valentin Pimstein, a Chilean expatriate producer, joined the younger Azcár-
raga, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, in the 1950s. Colgate Palmolive signed on with
Pimstein, and Proctor and Gamble with another of the young Azcárraga’s off-
siders, Ernesto Alonso. Pimstein developed the formulaic telenovelas based
on the Cinderella, Cenicienta, plot line, which served to carry the advertising.
Alonso began the habit of buying scripts: the first telenovela, El Otro y Pecado
Mortal (1960), was written by a Cuban (Fernández and Paxman, 2000: 68). By
the mid-1960s, the mini-microphone created by the technician Alberto Nolla
Reyes in 1951 was small enough to be worn in filming. Rehearsal times were
cut drastically. Televisa could produce in its studios and transmit up to five
telenovelas a day. Twenty telenovelas were produced a year, with some 17 stu-
dios, 250 actors and 100 musicians on the permanent Televisa staff (Fernán-
dez and Paxman, 2000: 136).
Emilio Azcárraga Milmo was quite explicit about the role of the telenovela.
He is quoted as saying:

Mexico is a country with a large class of people who are screwed. Television’s
responsibility is to bring these people entertainment and distract them from
their sad reality and difficult future. (Quiñones, 1998: 42)

Emilio Azcárraga Milmo’s role as a gatekeeper of the production of Televisa tele-

novelas during the heyday of Televisa’s power ensured that the lack of realism
persisted in Mexican telenovelas long after it had disappeared in the soap operas
of, say, Australia or Brazil. Emilio Azcárraga Milmo drew on a code of values
originally made explicit by his father for the radio network: “la superación per-
sonal, la integración familiar y la unidad nacional”—personal improvement, fam-
ily integration and national unity (Fernández and Paxman, 2000: 192).
The conventions governing the Televisa telenovela were very strict: no
smoking, no poverty, no abortion, no politicians, no one of Indian descent,
except as maids or labourers. One formula became known as the “María”
telenovelas. Predominantly fair heroines, maids in the houses of the rich,
played out Cinderella stories by marrying the son of the house. Another
formula was first used by the telenovela writer, Fernanda Villeli, in the 1960
telenovela Senda Prohibida. It was a reverse fairytale. The younger mistress
of an older man, typically a young woman who has come to the city from
the pueblo, is finally rejected in favour of the wife (Fernández and Paxman,
2000: 77).
Throughout this period, Televisa was the largest producer of telenovelas
in the world. From the actresses and crew through to the studios and the
production houses, Televisa had complete control. It owned each stage of the
process of producing and distributing telenovelas. It was an enormously prof-
itable business. With a monopoly of commercial television in Mexico, cheap
labour costs and an industry that was both horizontally and vertically inte-
grated, Televisa’s telenovelas were a cash cow. Indeed, Fernandez and Pax-
Telenovelas and Soap Operas 55

man (2000: 218-19) argue that it was on the back of the success of the telenovela
Los ricos también lloran that the globalisation of Televisa was possible.
In 1993, the government under President Salinas sold two of its stations
to Televisíon Azteca, which was to become an alternative commercial net-
work. Televisíon Azteca, drawing on an independent production company,
ARGOS, challenged the ratings of Televisa by producing soap operas of star-
tling relevance. No longer reverential about government and politicians, the
new telenovelas literally described what was happening in the country. Days
after political events occurred, they appeared in a fictionalised form in tele-
novelas such as Nada Personal. Drugs, AIDS, teenage pregnancy and political
assassination proliferated in plots. Mirada de Mujer, the story of a wealthy,
respectably married woman of a certain age, María Inés (Angélica Aragón),
who herself took a younger lover on being abandoned by her husband, was
the most notable of the new wave of telenovelas.
Angélica Aragón, who attended the conference, spoke at the showing of
Mirada de Mujer and talked on the directors’ panel. She has worked in the
telenovela industry both as one of Mexico’s best-known actresses and most
recently as a director. She talked of her experience in Mirada de Mujer. The
importance of the telenovela was that it revealed social issues which were at
the heart of the Mexican experience. Yet viewers, accustomed to the Televisa
formulas, reacted violently. The direction of the plot was sometimes influ-
enced by the fury of the public reaction. For example, when María Inés’ elder
daughter was pregnant, she decided to have an abortion, although this was
still illegal in Mexico. The public reaction proved to be so violent during the
week this was screening that the producers chose to let the daughter have a
miscarriage instead.
The producer of the series, Epigmenio Ibarra, was well aware of the force
of the telenovela and argued that this was as it should be. He said:

[It] was envisaged as a ‘mirror of society’ . . . to talk of the disintegration of the

family is not to foster disintegration, but to encourage discussion of the causes
of disintegration. We hoped to initiate debate with the soap opera, to provoke
polemic, reflections. (Reforma, 1997: 9E)

Angélica Aragón talked in her introduction to the showing of Mirada de

Mujer of the immense power of the telenovela to structure social expecta-
tions. In her role as an independent woman, she was able to provide a model.
But, as she explained later in the directors’ panel, she has not been able to get
funding for telenovelas with an explicit social message. The complexities of
the industry, and its competing pressures, undermine the possibilities for
social action.

THE WRITERS’ AND DIRECTORS’ PANELS

The panels reported in the three sets of transcripts drew on writers, direc-
tors and actors to talk of their experience of the industries in their countries.
56 Telenovelas

It is illuminating to discover just how the interweaving of specific constraints

and practices in the industry determine what is made, and how messages are
delivered. For instance, in the writers’ panel, Cuauhtémoc Blanco Arias, the
head of the writing team for Televisa, explains how Mexican telenovelas are
written. A single writer is responsible for the entire nine months of episodes,
which are then adjusted and tweaked by producers, directors and actors. But
the plot line is the responsibility of one writer. He explains the enormous
burden of writing, but also the individual control each writer has. The indus-
try in Brazil has a similar respect for writers. However, as Felicity Packard, a
writer for Home and Away and MDA explains, the structure is quite different
in Australia. A story editor works with a team to set out broad plot lines, and
then freelance writers are contracted particular episodes to write. The param-
eters of writing, down to the number of location shots, the style of dress and
the availability of particular actors, are set in advance.
Cuauhtémoc Blanco insists on the importance of fantasy in the writing.
He argues that the stories which take the fancy of the middle classes and
lower middle classes of Mexico—the serving women, the housewives—are
essentially escapist. In a similar vein, Greg Haddrick, of the immensely suc-
cessful Home and Away, showed an episode in which there was a marriage and
explained that, while a long-running series like Home and Away cannot have
too many weddings, they do create a marvellous feeling. He tells a cautionary
tale about an attempt to create social relevance in the script, introducing a gay
couple (carefully modulated so that the young viewer would think that they
were just good friends); critics’ views were overwhelmingly positive, but the
viewers switched off. Social criticism simply does not sell.
A partial counter-example to this claim is given by Gillian Arnold, who
talked of the SBS innovation Going Home. This “reality soap” is filmed on a
train with daily commuters discussing real-life events from that day’s news-
papers. A mix of characters of ethnic groups, and of different types, react as a
community in a commuter train. The mix of truth and fiction is heady, and in
fact excellent television.
Peter Dodds from Neighbours explains just how restrictive production re-
quirements are. The structures for pay for actors dictate that only a few actors
can be used in more than two or three episodes a week. The cost of location
shots puts a limit on the number of scenes that can be filmed outside the stu-
dio. The delay in production—three months between production and show-
ing of episodes—means that the close political commentary of Mexican and
Brazilian telenovelas is not possible.
Angélica Aragón describes a very different industry structure. Her actors
are generally on contract, with filming schedules set up daily. Sets are built as
required, with very short lead times. The ready availability of labour means
great flexibility but, she argues, very little expertise in the production. She is
attempting to imbue a greater sense of respect for actors and producers and to
create what she calls a “holistic” approach to filming. That, of course, is costly:
actors would stay for longer periods with space for developing characters. But
some of the profits of telenovelas should, she suggests, be fed back into the
industry.
Telenovelas and Soap Operas 57

THEORISING SPECIFICITY
While Jorge González Sánchez talks from a Mexican perspective, his cen-
tral argument applies equally to the Australasian case. In order to understand
the phenomenon of the telenovela, he argues, we have to see the institutional
forms that are used in the production of melodrama. The particular institu-
tional factors in the Mexican case—the dominance of Televisa, for instance,
and the development of the nine-month format—determine how the melo-
dramas and stereotypical characters are portrayed. These forms must then be
seen in the complex social structures in which they are interpreted and read.
He offers a model of the complex and layered interaction of production, text
and social readings of telenovelas.
González traces the aetiology of difference in the soap operas and tele-
novelas, in the melodramatic traditions and the industry that produces them,
and in the audiences that interpret them. With such difference, is there any
value in analysing telenovelas and soaps under one umbrella? The Socratic
question becomes urgent: what do they have in common? In Felicity Pack-
ard’s words, talking of the shared project of Latin and Australian writers of
telenovelas and soaps, they share an underlying trope: “to create order out
of chaos.” Perhaps we can do a little better: they share domestic settings, ro-
mance, extended story arcs, melodrama. But these are far more universal than
the genre of soap, and the ways in which those features play out depend cru-
cially on local cultures.

THE PLEASURE OF VIEWING

What is the pleasure of viewing, and how do we explain the global attrac-
tion of the soap and telenovela? For Martín-Barbero:

The full meaning and pleasure [of telenovelas] are found not just in the text
but more in the discussion of the family, neighborhood, work place and friend
networks. (2000: 156-57)

He talks of the role of telenovelas in the collective imaginations of different

groups of viewers, manifested in discussions between viewers or their role as
the focal points in personal histories. My own argument is similar: soaps and
telenovelas are part of the texture of daily discussions, and their attraction
lies, I suggest, in the fact that we can use the fictional narrative as a sound-
ing board for ethical issues that are difficult to discuss as first-person issues.
Discussion about Mirada de Mujer certainly had this flavour. There is ample
evidence of debate about Mexican telenovelas over the generations. The fol-
lowing short excerpts of dialogue, from a transcript of young Mexicans dis-
cussing telenovela, are typical:

M: I got up at seven in the morning, and set the alarm, to see [the soaps] and I
could never see them from the beginning—I always stayed asleep. I don’t
know . . . and we weren’t allowed to watch—we went to a Catholic school,
and telenovelas were forbidden, but my grandma was much more lax, and
58 Telenovelas

she lived nearby and ever since I could think I watched telenovelas and
knew them by heart, and all my friends came here to see the telenovelas—
which were absolutely forbidden, but tele was always very important . . .1

Here M talks of the social importance and the allure of the telenovelas, and
the social function, not only with her friends but also with a grandmother.
The spice of the forbidden is also a common theme when kids talk of watch-
ing telenovelas. Later in the same discussion, the kids talk of a telenovela they
had seen years before:

F: No, no, Live a Little was Angélica Aragón.

A: Who they put in gaol in Argentina
M: And who appeared 30 years later . . .
F: My brother watched all the telenovelas and was always acting and when
he said something like in the novela . . . he was forbidden to watch for a
month.2

The telenovelas are a basis for talk, for discussion of, say, historical events in
Argentina. They also provide models of ways of behaving and talking—how-
ever unsavoury. Here the brother repeats a phrase which I have not attempted
to translate, and was forbidden to watch for a month. Despite the range of
myths about telenovelas, men can be as immersed in soaps as women even in
Mexico. As the sister goes on to explain:

F: He became mad . . . he was mad about the telenovelas, and it was terrible
. . . terrible, since he never liked football, he never went out. Now he is
more sophisticated, but then he was always watching telenovelas. 3

The attraction of telenovelas and of soap operas is at least in part the attrac-
tion of shared stories, of fiction which allows identification and which can be
used as models, or as the basis of talk with friends. However, if this is true,
why do Latin telenovelas and Australasian soaps travel so well? If soaps and
telenovelas derive their attraction from the fact that they produce a sounding
board for the lives and moral dilemmas of the viewers, as Martín Barbero and
I argue, then it would appear to follow that the closer the narrative is to the fa-
miliar, the more successful it is. The rise of home-grown soaps in Taiwan and
Eastern Europe would be readily explained, but the success of Latin telenove-
las in Eastern Europe or Australasian soaps in Europe would be a mystery.
An element in the success of the Latin telenovela and the Australasian soap
seems to be precisely the very difference of the societies they depict.
Mato argues: “The success of telenovelas, to a great extent, depends upon
the possibilities of audience identification with the characters, stories, actors
and actresses.” The localised forms of the genre allow such identification. But
he goes on to note that the rise of the market in Miami shows the elision of
local differences, of the marked regional accents of Mexican telenovelas, for
instance. Yet he argues that the basis of production is national, and the local
product is still immensely important. How is it that a localised product sells
so well, if it is identification with the audience that drives the viewers to keep
watching?
Telenovelas and Soap Operas 59

One answer can be found in Harrington and Beilby (1995), whose book
about soap fans is subtitled Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Every-
day Life. They argue that, far from being confused about the reality of soaps,
fans make clear distinctions between the personal histories of the actors and
actresses and of the characters they portray. Fans are interested in discuss-
ing both narratives: that of the soap and that of the real lives of characters.
Fans develop a complex and active sense of agency as they discuss soaps
and negotiate the rituals of fandom. Perhaps most telling is the remark in the
conclusion:

Viewers enjoy the fictional world of soaps not because they lack fulfilling lives
themselves—the real and fictional are not so clearly separable. Instead, soap
operas offer viewers the chance to stand on the boundaries between multiple
worlds and see real life as connected to, and informed by, a variety of perspec-
tives. (Beilby and Harrington, 1995: 180)

It is here that we find a clue to the extraordinary global success of the tele-
novela and the Australasian soap. Viewers become involved not so much by
identifying with the characters of soap operas and telenovelas as by seeing
their own lives through the lens of similarities and differences in the lives
portrayed. We are accustomed to—and have analysed exhaustively—the
pleasure of watching Dallas. The huge success of Discovery channel docu-
mentaries shows the attraction of the landscape and animals of distant coun-
tries. What the success of telenovelas and Australasian soaps shows is that
domestic difference is also attractive. Telenovelas and soaps have succeeded
in markets in which the lifestyle is utterly unfamiliar. The attraction is the
mix of the different and the familiar.
To examine this claim properly, we need a thorough study of fandom
across national boundaries. We need to examine how telenovelas and soaps
from unfamiliar cultural backgrounds are discussed, as viewers talk of their
own lives relative to the lives of the characters of the soaps. But this is another
project.

NOTES
1. M: no yo me levantaba a las siete de la mañana ponía el despertador para verlo
completo y nunca pude verlo desde el principio, siempre (risas) siempre me quedaba
dormida, este . . . no sé como que, a mi de chiquita, a todas mis amigas, les prohibían
la, iban en una escuela de monjas, les prohibían las telenovelas, yo tenía un abuelo
demasiado consentidor, que vivía aquí arriba, que (risas) que desde que tengo uso de
razón vi novelas y me las sabía de memoria, entonces como que, todas mis amigas
venían aquí para ver las telenovelas, que estaba súper prohibido, pero si como que la
tele siempre ha sido así, muy importante . . .
2. M: no, no, no . . . Vivir un poco era la de Angélica Aragón.
A: que la meten a la cárcel en Argentina
M: y que aparece 30 años después
F: oye, mi hermano veía todas las novelas y siempre actuaba y cuando le decías
algo ponle te actuaba como novela, (modula la voz) ‘maldito bastardo’, mi hermano así
me insultaba, ‘maldito bastardo, malnacido’ y mi hermano le prohibían ver novelas
porque cuando se portaba mal le castigaban, ponle un mes sin ver novelas, entonces
no podía ver.
60 Telenovelas

3. F: se volvía fanático, mi hermano se volvía fanático de las novelas y era terrible y

siempre como que mi hermano nunca le gustó el fütbol, ni salía, ni así y entonces . . .
ahora es todo culto pero antes veía novellas. Thanks to Daniela Rivera for permission
to use all three extracts.

REFERENCES
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ledge, London.
Bielby, D., and C. Lee Harrington. Forthcoming. “Opening America? The Telenovela-
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Fernández, C., and A. Paxman. 2000. El Tigre: Emilio Azcárraga y su Imperio Televisa.
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cias Territoriales, y Producción de Mercados y Representaciones de Identidades
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Mattelart, M., and A. Mattelart. 1990. The Carnival of Images. New York: Bergin and
Garvey.
Mazziotti, N. 1996. La Industria de la Telenovela. La Produccíon de Ficcíon en América La-
tina. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Mejia Barquera, F. 1998. “Del Canal 4 a Televisa,” in O. M. Martínez, ed., Apuntes para
una Historia de La Televisión Mexicana: Revista Mexicana de Comunicación, pp. 19–99.
Pearson, R. 1999. Interview with Gabriel Vazquez Bulman of Televisa. Mexico City, 20
May.
Quiñones, S. 1998. “Telenovelas: Sexy Soaps Reflect a Changing Mexico.” US/Mexico
Business, December, pp. 41–45.
Quiroz, M.-T. 1996. “Telenovela delirium.” Variety, October, p. 61.
Reforma. 1997. “Encuentran sus ‘miradas’,” 17 September, p. 9E.
Sinclair, John. 1999. Latin American Television: A Global View. London and New York:
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Tufte, T. 2000. Living with the Rubbish Queen: Telenovelas, Culture and Modernity in Brazil.
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Vink, N. 1988. The Telenovela and Emancipation: A Study on Television and Social Change in
Brazil. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute.
Romancing the Globe

Ibsen Martínez

It was too late for Marimar. By the time she found out that her long-lost father
wanted to leave her his vast fortune, she had fallen hopelessly in love with
Sergio. The object of her affection was handsome, young, and rich—and the
same man who had saved her from the lecherous Nicandro. But, sadly for
Marimar, her lover’s intentions were not pure; Sergio was using her to get
back at his own family.
Marimar’s saga, captured in the eponymous Latin American soap opera,
kept millions of people around the world glued to their television sets for 148
emotionally charged episodes. Produced and originally screened in Mexico
in 1994, Marimar became a global phenomenon. It helped propel Mexican pop
artist Thalia Sodi, who played the lead role, to global stardom. In the Ivory
Coast, it was reported that mosques issued the call to prayer early so that
an enthralled population wouldn’t miss an episode. When Thalia visited the
Philippines, she was received by the president and attracted crowds that ri-
valed those for the pope.
The success of Marimar is far from unique. Accounts of the global impact of
Latin American soap operas, or telenovelas, are now legion. In post-communist
Russia, the Mexican hit Los Ricos Tambien Lloran (The Rich Also Cry) became
the country’s top-rated show; roughly 70 percent of the Russian population,
more than 100 million people, tuned in regularly. Latin American telenovela
stars often find themselves mobbed at airports in places as distant as Poland,
Indonesia, and Lebanon. In postwar Bosnia, U.S. diplomats intervened to en-
sure that the Venezuelan show Kassandra could stay on the air in the midst
of a tug of war between Bosnian Serb factions for control of the media. In
Israel, the Mexican novela Mirada de Mujer (The Gaze of a Woman) was broad-
cast with both Hebrew and Russian subtitles to ensure that recent Russian
immigrants wouldn’t miss an episode. And in the United States, the Latin
American shows have become top sellers on Spanish-language networks,
which have themselves outpaced English-language networks in some major
markets, such as Miami and Los Angeles.

Ibsen Martínez: “Romancing the Globe,” first published in Foreign Policy, vol. 151 (Nov.–
Dec. 2005): 48–56.
62 Telenovelas

In all, about 2 billion people around the world watch telenovelas. For bet-
ter or worse, these programs have attained a prominent place in the global
marketplace of culture, and their success illuminates one of the back channels
of globalization. For those who despair that Hollywood or the American tele-
vision industry dominates and defines globalization, the telenovela phenom-
enon suggests that there is still room for the unexpected. Indeed, the success
of telenovelas is often celebrated as an example of reverse cultural imperial-
ism or, as one academic memorably called it, “Montezuma’s Revenge.”
But the story does not end there. Telenovelas have ridden the currents of
cultural globalization to astonishing success. Now, they are experiencing the
complications that come with being part of the cultural establishment. They
have spawned local imitators, eager to put a familiar face on tried and true
story lines. And their success is luring some of the world’s largest entertain-
ment companies.

TOBACCO AND TOOTHPASTE

It is ironic that telenovelas, one of Latin America’s most successful exports,
originated in what is now its most closed society: Cuba. But, in fact, the small
island-nation played a vital role in launching the genre. At the end of the 19th
century, Cuba was still a Spanish colony and cigars were a lucrative export.
The budding cigar makers’ guilds achieved a major improvement in work-
ing conditions by creating a new job, the lector de tabaco. A worker with a
flair for the dramatic would, from a platform in the factory, read novels in
installments during the tedious hours of filling, rolling, and shaping tobacco
leaves. Nearly all the books were Spanish translations of European social re-
alist novels: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot,
and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
With the dawn of the radio age, serialized melodrama soon took to the
airwaves and became known as culebrones (serpents), an allusion to their habit
of extending themselves indefinitely if they captured a big enough audience.
It was only a matter of time before the “radio novel” expanded into the vi-
sual realms, and exiles from the Cuban Revolution helped transform the bur-
geoning taste for serialized novels into the modern telenovela. When Fidel
Castro stormed to power in 1959, many Cuban producers, directors, actors,
and writers scattered to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and
other parts of Latin America. It was a period of cultural ferment throughout
the region. “People and scripts moved around Latin America in the 50s and
60s,” says Joseph Straubhaar, a communications professor at the University of
Texas. “It’s been an export genre for a long time.”
After a period of jostling, Televisa in Mexico, Venevisión in Venezuela, and
Globo TV in Brazil emerged as the leading producers of telenovelas. Dur-
ing the 1960s, the novelas began to claim the top spots on national television
stations. They replaced imported U.S. television shows and movies, turning
huge swaths of the population into dedicated viewers. But it was only a par-
tial declaration of cultural independence. U.S. companies sponsored many of
the shows and sometimes even had a hand in drafting story lines and themes.
Colgate tied a fabulously successful promotion to one of the first Brazilian
novelas, Em Busca da Felicidade (In Search of Happiness), and the early Mexican
Romancing the Globe 63

show Senda Prohibida (Forbidden Path) was branded as “your Colgate novela.”
The persistent corporate influence led many Latin American academics to de-
ride the shows as “agents for the creation of a capitalist and consumerist in-
ternational global village . . . engineered by the U.S. and U.S-allied interests,”
according to Marina Vujnovic, a researcher at the University of Iowa.
Still, telenovelas were always distinct from U.S. soap operas, and most ob-
servers now see them as cultural hybrids. Unlike their North American counter-
parts, telenovelas have a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Most air daily for
a period of between four and six months and culminate in a climactic episode
that rights all wrongs. (In comparison, the U.S. soap opera Guiding Light first
aired in 1952 and is now the longest story ever told on television.) A success-
ful show might spawn a spinoff or sequel, but in most cases, audiences must
regularly acquaint themselves with new characters and plotlines. And while
U.S. soap operas air during daytime hours with women as their target audience,
Latin telenovelas are often prime-time shows, aimed at the whole family.
Telenovelas share key ingredients with their North American cousins. Ro-
mance and intrigue are, of course, never in short supply. “There is always a
Cinderella in a novela,” says Helena Bernardi, director of marketing and sales
for Brazil’s Globo TV. Colombian telenovela producer Patricio Wills describes
the genre as “a couple that wants to have a kiss and a writer who doesn’t
allow them to for 200 episodes.” The physical allure of telenovela casts and
the balmy locations where they film haven’t hurt either.
But the context in which the romance, intrigue, and beauty play out is
distinct from the soap operas of the United States. “It’s the journey, it’s the
struggles, it’s the obstacles,” says Ramón Escobar, an executive at the Span-
ish-language network Telemundo. And often, those obstacles are poverty,
class conflict, and institutional instability, something U.S. soaps ignore. “[U.S.
soaps] do not have a historical, political, or social framework, like unemploy-
ment or inflation,” says Globo’s Bernardi. Indeed, one of the leading theories
for the global success of novelas is their comfort with characters who are not
affluent and are sometimes even poor. The place of struggling women, in par-
ticular, is a well-worn telenovela plotline. Simplemente María (Simply Maria), a
classic telenovela that has been remade in several Latin American countries,
features a poor girl from the countryside who arrives in the city and struggles
to make a living as a seamstress. “Simplemente María is the founding myth,”
says Venezuelan telenovela writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka. “For many years
most telenovelas were nothing but variations on its plot and themes.”
That focus is not surprising given the poverty that is endemic among Latin
American women. Almost half of the 90 million people in the region’s female-
headed households live in poverty. Women are more likely than men to fall
on hard times, and they are more likely to make up the poorest of the poor.
In urban areas, 48 percent of women lack their own income (only 22 percent
of men do). And so characters such as Maria are often condemned by the
scriptwriters to live in the most extreme poverty until a sudden twist of fate
restores them to their rightful place. In many cases, the twist comes in the
form of an unexpected inheritance, which is still seen as the way to get rich in
most Latin American countries.
Plots that rely on such reversals of fortune resonate in cultures accustomed
to economic uncertainty. Latin America is one of the more economically
64 Telenovelas

volatile regions in the world. Argentina’s recent history provides ample evi-
dence that losing everything is a persistent worry, even in relatively well-
off societies. During that country’s 2001 economic crisis, half the population
went to bed as middle-class bank depositors and woke up all but destitute. In
this environment, people rarely find succor from the government or the jus-
tice system. This institutional weakness in many parts of Latin America may
explain why law and order themes—so popular among U.S. viewers—have
limited appeal abroad and never took hold in telenovelas.
If novelas often draw on the harsh realities of life in parts of Latin America,
their plotlines still generally devolve into sentimental fairy tales. Happy end-
ings are all but certain. The emotion and melodrama of the genre beg the
question of whether they are anything more than distractions for the disaf-
fected. Telenovelas endure withering criticism from Latin American elites,
who are often embarrassed to see them as one of the region’s most successful
cultural exports. Arturo Uslar Pietri, a prominent Venezuelan novelist and
essayist, expressed what many Latin American elites still feel when he de-
scribed telenovelas as “the opium of the poor.”
Condemning the genre as a whole, however, glosses over what a tailored
commodity it has become. As scripts and templates were swapped and sold
within Latin America, local tastes and tolerances came into play. Over time, na-
tional producers developed their own distinctive styles that departed from or
modified the traditional story lines. Mexican novelas became known for their
melodrama. Brazilian novelas leaned toward hard-hitting social realism and
even tackled contentious social issues, including biotechnology, sex, drug use,
and ethnic relations. It was a style that didn’t always go over well in other parts
of the region. The edgy Globo TV novela Angel Malo (Bad Angel) underwent a
thorough cleansing before appearing on screens in far more conservative Chile.
As the Latin networks hit their stride in the 1960s and 1970s, they began
exporting content to the growing and relatively affluent Latino population in
the United States—the richest Hispanics in the world. The U.S.-based network
Univision, for example, has imported hundreds of telenovelas from Mexico,
Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. In 2004 alone, it paid $105 million in licens-
ing fees to the Mexican network Televisa. For its part, Brazil’s Globo TV has
exported dozens of novelas to networks in Portugal. Culturally, the success of
Latin telenovelas with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities was
not surprising. But what happened next was a twist worthy of a novela script.
Somehow, the often sneered-at melodramas leapt out of their cultural zones
and raced around the globe.

CONQUERING THE EAST

When communism fell, television executives in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union faced a crisis. For decades, turning the television dial
brought viewers nothing but state-approved programming. In other words,
they had no shows that people actually liked to watch. Nor did these former
communist-controlled networks have the budgets to purchase U.S. or Euro-
pean programming wholesale.
Romancing the Globe 65

The makers of telenovelas saw an opportunity. “Telenovela producers were

visionary enough to offer [eastern European] stations very good deals,” says
Patrick Jucaud, general manager of DISCOP, an organization that promotes
telenovelas in the region. “These stations didn’t have any money . . . and Latin
American companies were the first ones to help them get started.” The quality
was relatively high given the price. Telenovelas, after all, attract the top acting
talent in Latin America. Rather than being a résumé builder, as is the case with
American soaps, a telenovela spot is often the apex of a Latin American actor’s
career. And recurring themes—rising from poverty, coping with economic
hardship—seemed to resonate in countries struggling to emerge from state
socialism. “When you’re looking at countries that are rapidly industrializing,
rapidly urbanizing, with all the attendant stresses and strains on the family
and personal relationships, something produced in Brazil or Mexico may be
a lot more relevant to Russians in the 90s than an American sitcom, which is
frothy and all about L.A.,” says Straubhaar, the University of Texas professor.
Telenovelas conquered Russia in a matter of weeks. Discussing the early
success of The Rich Also Cry, the Moscow Times wrote “when the film started,
streets became desolate, crowds gathered in stores selling TV sets, tractors
stopped in the fields, and guns fell silent on the Azerbaijani-Armenian front.”
Without breaking a sweat, Los Ricos outperformed the imported U.S. soap
Santa Barbara, which ran at the same time in much of Russia. Central and
eastern Europe also fell to the novela charm. A Escrava Isaura (Isaura, the Slave),
a historical Brazilian telenovela about the slave trade, received top honors in
Poland. In some cases, telenovelas even sparked civic activism. Townspeo-
ple in the Serbian town of Kucevo—so overwrought that they hurdled the
boundary between reality and fantasy—drafted a letter to the Venezuelan
government pleading the case of the title character in the hit show Kassandra.
In the Czech Republic, restaurants that did not have televisions reportedly
emptied out when the Venezuelan show Esmeralda aired.
This large-scale expansion into central and eastern Europe represented a
new leap forward for the industry. And as international revenue poured in,
production at the leading studios became more lavish. In 1995, Brazil’s Globo
TV—which claims to have sold telenovelas to more than 120 countries—
opened a brand new facility with Hollywood-quality technology. High-end
Globo episodes can now cost as much as $100,000. The quality of the pro-
grams produced by the telenovela powerhouses has become a principal sell-
ing point.
The realization that telenovelas could succeed beyond their cultural
spheres ramped up competition in the industry. Production companies that
once focused on their national markets found themselves in competition for
foreign-market share. Lesser-known telenovela producers dove into the ex-
port market in search of fast money, leading to occasional charges of unfair
pricing and “dumping” of content. Brazilian and Mexican leaders Globo TV
and Televisa, for example, were startled when Argentine and Colombian
novelas met with international success.
Some themes covered in telenovelas, to be sure, have fallen flat outside of
Latin America. The show Clase 406, for example, touched on issues including
66 Telenovelas

drugs and rape. “We could never put it on the air in [eastern Europe]—never.
We really tried and we couldn’t,” said Claudia Sahab, Televisa’s director of
sales for Europe, at a recent industry seminar. The steamy sex scenes in some
novelas have roused the censors in more conservative countries, forcing stu-
dios to produce edited versions. Program executives in Indonesia pulled the
popular show Esmeralda off the air because a particularly devious character
bore the name of the prophet Muhammad’s daughter.
Some observers of the industry worry that shows deemed “too local” have
been sanitized so as not to risk international revenue streams. But for the
major telenovela producers, the domestic market is still the main course, and
export revenue is gravy. “[Telenovela producers] get their investment back
quickly on the domestic market which allows them to make money on the
international markets,” says Thomas Tufte, a European academic who stud-
ies the industry. The most serious challenge to the dominance of Latin tele-
novelas is not watered-down content but the hungry new players entering the
market.

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS

”Local always wins,” is a mantra of the entertainment industry, and pro-
ducers in eastern Europe, Russia, and Asia are eager to prove it. Whereas five
years ago overseas networks gobbled up ready-made telenovelas, many are
now dropping that business model in favor of developing their own local pro-
ductions for export. The Philippine network ABS-CBN, for example, exported
its own telenovela-style dramas to Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, and Malay-
sia in 2004. Taiwanese novellas—often called “chinovelas”—have had suc-
cess throughout Asia and have been particularly popular in the Philippines,
where Spanish-language novelas had long ruled. “Now we have something to
compare the Spanish novelas to,” a Philippine professor told the local press.
“These new shows deal with conflicts that Filipinos can relate to, like going
out with friends and getting into trouble.”
Some small networks in eastern Europe have opted to simply hire away
scriptwriters from Latin America. Alicia Carvajal, who worked as a telenovela
writer and director for almost 20 years, was stunned when the Croatian net-
work HTV offered her a job. “Why me?” she asked. “I don’t even speak Croa-
tian!” But her success with the hit show La Duda (Doubt) convinced Croatian
executives that she did speak the international language of melodrama. And
so Carvajal, still based in Mexico City, went to work on Villa Maria, a show
touching on the fall of communism in the former Yugoslavia. It aired simulta-
neously in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia and has already netted several honors.
In some cases, established Latin American producers enter into coproduc-
tions with local studios in an effort to foster local influences without forfeiting
profits entirely. Brazil’s Globo, for example, has reportedly considered forging
ties with Indian producers, creating the possibility of an alliance between the
developing world’s two largest entertainment industries. In other cases, outside
production companies pay licensing fees for the rights to a script, which can
be adapted to the tastes of the local audience. The Colombian megahit Betty la
Romancing the Globe 67

Fea (Betty the Ugly), for example, caught the eye of Michael Grindon, president
of Sony Pictures Television International. He persuaded Sony’s Hindi channel
to license the program and air a local version. According to Nyay Bhushan, an
Indian correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter, the remake “has spawned a
merchandising and marketing bonanza.” Sony also teamed up with a Russian
studio to produce Poor Anastasia, based loosely on Betty la Fea.
Sony’s emergence as a player in the telenovela world heralds the arrival of
the entertainment industry’s big guns—and a potentially important shift of
cultural flows. “The biggest and most important producers in the world have
become interested in the telenovela,” says Carlos Bardasano, vice president
of the Cisneros Group and president of Venevisión Continental. No longer
willing to see Latin American production studios reap all the profits, major
conglomerates have begun to produce their own telenovelas. In 2003, Euro-
pean giant FremantleMedia teamed up with NBC-owned Telemundo to film
La Ley de Silencio (The Law of Silence) in Houston. Telemundo, the second larg-
est Spanish-language network in the United States, has decided against im-
porting shows from Latin America (as its competitor Univision does). “Now
[telenovelas] move north to south,” says Ramón Escobar, the Telemundo ex-
ecutive. “That’s creating a tremendous amount of competition in the inter-
national market.” The network is banking on the multinational flavor of its
shows—it uses actors from all over Latin America—and the glimpses of La-
tino life in the United States that it can offer. Another hint that the cultural
currents may be shifting is the success of ABC’s Desperate Housewives in parts
of Latin America. Argentine and Chilean networks are vying to make local
versions of its provocative premise, and a half dozen other regional networks
may soon follow.
For the moment, U.S. and European media conglomerates are still minor
characters. Telemundo’s novelas, for example, have not yet seriously chal-
lenged the Mexican novelas shown on Univision. Globo TV’s reputation as
the world leader in high-quality telenovelas is undiminished. But the indus-
try is changing fast, and the entrance of the world’s media giants into the fray
may soon test the theory that the global appeal of telenovelas derives from the
economic and cultural environment in which they were born. Is there really
something unique about the Latin American experience—or can their suc-
cess be duplicated by Hollywood studios? Will the Latin American networks
maintain their hard-won empire, or will the rich relatives from abroad snatch
away their success? Will the torrid affair between novelas and Czechs, Filipi-
nos, and Russians continue? Or will the long-distance relationship fall apart?
The story, as always, is to be continued.
Understanding Telenovelas as a
Cultural Front: A Complex Analysis
of a Complex Reality

Jorge González

The social phenomenon of televised melodramas, called telenovelas in Span-

ish, can be taken as a perfect example of a complex symbolic form in con-
temporary societies. Every day, all over the world, millions of people from
all social groups watch Latin American telenovelas. There are a number
of differences and nuances between Latin telenovelas and their electronic
“cousin,” the soap opera. Nevertheless, the two genres are closely related. In
this brief paper, I will stress only some traits of a major theoretical and meth-
odological framework that I call cultural fronts (González, 1997, 2001) which
serves to analyse and bring into partial scientific visibility this global and
local phenomenon.
The cultural fronts approach gives us a more detailed look at the socio-
cultural phenomenon of telenovelas. At least three interwoven social pro-
cesses are involved. Telenovelas:

• construct symbolic commonalities between different social agents and

cultures;
• create and re-create a set of different possible worlds;
• enact symbolic struggles for defining elementary human cultural elements
within those possible worlds.

MELODRAMA AS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Contemporary melodrama typically narrates tales in which, after a num-
ber of problematic events, misunderstandings and sufferings, the main
character—a hero or a heroine (who is normally a good and tender-hearted

Jorge González: “Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front: A Complex Analysis

of a Complex Reality,” first published in Media International Australia, vol. 106, num. 2 (2003):
84–93.
Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front 69

young woman)—comes to a happy ending. The audience are well aware of

the outcome. But they want to know how that ending will be produced and
delayed—what forms of suspense will delay the resolution of the problem
until the very end. That has been the structure of melodrama throughout
Latin American cultural history. At least in the twentieth century in Mexico,
that cultural genre has taken and used several formats, from comic books to
television, including music like the corridos, photo-novels, radionovelas, mov-
ies, popular theatrical plays and television. With the technical possibilities of
electronic transmission and formatting, both of radio and then of television,
there has been an evolution of the genre in terms of the length and the organi-
sation of the production of these melodramas.
Telenovelas as serial melodramas have evolved particularly into a style of
content that appeals to larger audiences. A normal melodramatic plot pro-
duced in a film can last at most two hours. A story sung and narrated through
a corrido can last at most four or five minutes. In radio and television, the de-
velopment and resolution of the plot can last six months or, in the case of soap
operas, several years. This process implies the construction of an interesting
relationship of fidelity with the audience. They follow every single detail of
the slow development of the plot every day. Because of these specific histori-
cal traits, in order to understand telenovelas we have to deal with at least
three main topics of interest: the process of their production; the specificity
of the discourse and texts of telenovelas; and the process of social reading and
interpretation.
It should be noted that telenovelas are a complete industrial product,
produced by large and complex media corporations like Televisa (Mexico),
TeveGlobo (Brazil), Venevisión (Venezuela), Caracol (Colombia), more recently
TV Azteca (Mexico) and some others. Thousands of professionals (writers,
actors, technicians, scene directors, musicians, editors, advertisers) work ev-
eryday in specialised production crews and corporate departments to create
and sell telenovelas all over the world. Since 1970, the international market
for telenovelas has grown. First it spread into the Spanish-speaking coun-
tries of Latin America, following the common cultural market of Spanish-
narrated fiction, especially into the radio and music (1930s), cinema (1940s)
and publishing (1950s) industries. Since then, the telenovela has spread to a
wide range of countries and cultures.
Joe Straubhaar (1998) has studied different processes of “cultural prox-
imity” behind the understanding of success of this kind. It is clear that the
strongest single international market for Mexican telenovelas is the massive
Spanish-speaking population of the United States (more than 20 million peo-
ple). What is striking about this is that it is a rare example of an industrial
global product coming from the periphery of the world system to be sold in
the “centre.” It is in part a slight counterbalance of the “normal” flow North-
South of technology and industrial fiction as evidenced by the movie indus-
tries (Hollywood), music (MTV) and television series such as Friends, South
Park, National Geographic, Bay Guardians, Queer as Folk, The Sopranos and Japa-
nese cartoons. The development of first local and then global success by pe-
ripheral media industries is itself a major topic, as Sinclair (1998) has pointed
out. Here we examine how very different tastes and symbolic ecologies have
70 Telenovelas

adopted and adapted a wide range of symbolic forms, especially the serial
fiction of possible worlds provided by telenovelas.
Behind this phenomenon lies a complex process that leads us to consider
communication as a complex cultural experience. As shown in Figure 1, we
can identify at least two different strategies that link media corporations and
social audiences. Strategies of organisational anticipation are confronted by and
negotiated with social strategies of multicontextual interpretation.
Let us begin with organisational factors. It is necessary to deal with a
multidimensional set of actions, interactions and representations that con-
verge in different strategies of organisational anticipation. This kind of an-
ticipation actually operates as a clear symbolic vector, oriented and specified
before, during and after a complex internal process of conflict, struggle and
negotiation occurring at different levels in the organisation. Anticipation is
considered and produced as a vector—that is, a strength with specific insti-
tutional orientation—implying that there are a number of negotiations of
power relationships within one organisation. In television, interest groups
and specialised production areas such as News, Special Events, Magazines,
Series and Sports are constantly struggling for the best programming time,
advertising fares, merchandising and budgets, and for increasing the limits
of tolerance of the corporate risk allowed to each area. If the production is not
earning enough (that “enough” marks the fixed and negotiated limit into the
corporation normally defined by quantitative ratings and share), that prod-
uct is simply terminated.
It seems clear that this set of internal power relationships produces a num-
ber of micro resistances and micro strategies that finally have to be “tuned” in
order to capture the precious bio-time of the audience. Under these conditions,
there is room for almost any symbolic tactic to gain audience attention (nudes,
violence, reality shows, sex, vivid colours, slang, easy listening and viewing,
superstars, instant mosaics of forms, sounds, linguistic textures and fashions).
On the lower side of Figure 1, we can see an unranked cluster of arrows.
Each arrow represents a rich variety, but not organised strategies of interpreta-
tion. Interpretation presupposes anticipation. The process of social interpreta-
tion can be understood as deriving from strategies of anticipation within the
social networks. Audiences must be able to anticipate and recognise the se-
lected symbolic form. The ability to do so is linked to social position, social tra-
jectories, social networks established over time and so on. The very complexity
of those factors, together with ethnicity, language and social conditions such as
migration, make it almost impossible for the corporate vector to fit exactly with
the audience anticipation. Hence a wide and variable zone of symbolic struggle
and resistance emerges. Two processes can be identified: audience anticipation
limits the specific symbolic forms that institutions can produce; on the other
hand, there is a clash between corporate strategies and the rather disparate and
non-convergent strategies used as people interpret the program.
The multidirectional arrows also represent diverse processes of non-or-
ganised social interpretation and elaboration of the symbolic vectors in so-
ciety. Those forces should not be considered as vectors, because they do not
Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front 71

Figure 1: Communication as a negotiation of complex strategies

have any centralised direction, but anyway tend to create and re-create con-
vergent social identities. Within the cultural fronts approach, we can relocate
these two processes as strategies of centring and decentring social meanings
and creating and re-creating commonalities between very different social po-
sitions in a given society. This is a complex process.
First, cultural fronts are multidimensional, rather than one-dimensional,
objects. They are subject to an infinite game of interactions and retro-actions,
instead of changes in a unique variable. Second, by grounding the model in
complexity, we admit:

• the recognition of the solidarity of phenomena, instead of the isolation and

separation of them;
• a high degree of uncertainty and fuzziness, instead of clear boundaries;
• confronting clusters of contradictions, instead of certainties.

The alternative simplistic picture implies:

• a view which reduces the factors and loses the multiplicity of levels of rela-
tionships and dimensions of connectivity of the object;
• poor elaboration that normally implies a miscasting of problems.

Again, I am not pretending to offer here a complete and documented view of

the telenovela phenomenon, but only to point out some of the richness that
lies beneath an oversimplistic (mis)understanding of this symbolic and com-
plex process.
We consider three different levels and dimensions of telenovelas as a sym-
bolic and complex form: telenovela production; telenovelas as complex texts;
and telenovelas and their social readings and appropriations.
72 Telenovelas

UNDERSTANDING TELENOVELA PRODUCTION:

LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
We propose five levels of analysis implying five different sets of observ-
ables in the process of production of telenovelas:

1 Professional producers. Detailed ethnographic studies of different telenovelas

production crews are required to identify the specificity of the professional
tasks required for creating a telenovela. But, in order to describe this set of
processes adequately, we need to identify another level of analysis that oper-
ates as the corporation link of all the single production crews.
2 Production control. In this stage, we need to identify the relationships that unify
all the organisational production of telenovelas. Again, the ethnographic de-
scriptions of this level should produce thicker descriptions of rules, limits,
risks, assignments, reports, decision-taking, budget and resources distri-
bution and the maintaining of a sort of professional ideology or “ethics” and
constructed meaning of what represents a successful production from the
corporation point of view.
3 Organisational context. We need historical documentary information and in-
depth interviews with actual and former decision-makers to estimate the
relative weight of telenovela production vis-à-vis broader television products.
4 Cultural field of production. We can focus first on “popular” entertainment and
second on the complete field of specialised cultural production. Some of the most
prevalent prejudices and myths against the telenovela phenomenon come as
a result of claims of cultural agents and producers in specific socio-historical
spaces, such as a nation.
5 The world market of television fiction. We identify different flows and export of
telenovelas as against other forms of serial fiction bought by different com-
panies or countries.

UNDERSTANDING TELENOVELAS AS A COMPLEX

SYMBOLIC FORM
The very text of the telenovelas as a symbolic form necessitates discussion of
four dimensions of its form and content. Telenovelas are always a human narra-
tive and should be, at least, plausible and believable in real social life. The primary
form of the telenovela is the script that must be interpreted by the director and
actors with the help of a number of professional techniques and tools that de-
fine a fourfold scheme including narration, meaning, argumentative logic and
proposed social actions. We will follow a classic exploration of the telenovelas
as a symbolic form through its syntactic structure, its semantics, its argumenta-
tion logics and its pragmatic resolution of conflicts and interactions.
A stylistic analysis of telenovela television form tends to identify a certain
style of narrating using an audio-visual language (two-shots, close ups, me-
dium shots), including the kind of camera movements (zoom in and out, trav-
elling, panning, dolly in), the accents and special marks (musical accents and
themes designed for each character identification and for the enhancement
and recognition of key scenes and parts, produced and codified for the an-
Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front 73

ticipation of the telenovela’s viewers). Over almost five decades of TV drama,

there are some rules and audio-visual grammar that identify the genre.
A semantic analysis of the plot will give us a clear understanding of the
processes and changes underlying the narration process. Using the tools of
the semiotics of narration, we can identify the syntax and meaning of the
transformations that are in the core of the story. Thematic and semantic roles
are to be connected with the syntactic structures of the different elements of
the specific telenovela story.
An argumentation analysis of the plot, including findings of the stylistic and
the semantic levels, will give us the specific logic of arguments that are pre-
sented as meaningful in the plot. We will try to identify certain paths of ar-
gumentation presented in the telenovelas. Describing the key arguments and
establishing their proposed connections will produce a configuration map in
which all the argumentation logics of the telenovelas are displayed.
Using the tools of the pragma-linguistic analysis as a fourth approach to the
specificity of telenovelas, we will describe the taxonomy of social situations
(including at least actors, actions, time, space and goals) presented and nar-
rated in the telenovelas. This analysis begins with a demography of the fictional
participants and with an ethnography of the social situations. There is also a limited
set of social situations “preferred” by telenovela writers: poor and beautiful
but tender women, rich men, bad stepmothers, good priests, incidental doc-
tors, faithful servants, decadent aristocrats, interacting in rich mansions, large
haciendas, including limited classes of objects and social positions that can be
perfectly described using the social tools of a demographic and ethnographic
analysis. By identifying the social situations presented and solved in the plot
of the telenovelas, we have a powerful tool for relating the three previous lev-
els in order to produce and offer a thicker description of the specific symbolic
form of the telenovelas. This in turn links to production decisions.

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INTERPRETATIONS OF TELENOVELA

Probably the most intriguing and fuzzy area of the telenovela phenome-
non is the way in which social agents relate symbolically with this industrial
and cultural product. The key point is to describe and identify at least part
of these dispersed arrows that describe the social strategies of anticipation
and interpretation of the social situations presented, narrated and solved in
telenovelas. In order to attain that goal, we employed a twofold strategy. First,
we undertook a quantitative study to establish features and properties of tele-
novelas in Mexican society. Second, an ethnographic study was carried out to
examine the ways in which different Mexican households relate to television
and telenovelas in their everyday life. Through a quantitative survey analysis,
we produced a social description of the most elementary figures of the phe-
nomenon. The first attempt was organised in six Mexican cities from the east
coast to the west coast (Veracruz, Puebla, México, León, Guadalajara and Co-
lima) (González, 1992).1 Once we had a first sketch of the social relevance and
distribution of the cultural practice of following telenovelas, we made a de-
tailed ethnographic analysis of households in which watching television and
74 Telenovelas

telenovelas was a common practice of everyday life. We tried to determine the

relative weight of the habits of watching telenovelas in the household routine.
We devoted 10 months of detailed participant observation to that. One of our
most important findings both in the survey and in the ethnography was that
the cultural experience of the telenovelas does not “begin” with the episode
and does not end with the the conclusion of the single daily showing. All the
evidence points towards an extended universe of telenovelas.
That ubiquity of telenovelas showed the cultural genre as one of the most im-
portant symbolic forms used in everyday social life. The detailed observation
of households found that viewing telenovelas was the most important time
when the whole family was together. In spite of the normal prejudices held
towards telenovelas, we found complex reactions. At times, people surrender
to the intrigue and plot, and at others experience forms of critical distancing.
We also found that many women who normally invest their lifetime in serv-
ing others treat watching a telenovela as a time that is sacred, untouchable
and not negotiable. Moreover, they compared characters in the telenovelas
with themselves in terms of emotional attitudes, dressing styles or manners.
In effect, there are a number of processes of appropriation, social use, con-
sumption, interpretation and shared meaning going far beyond the simplistic
statements about this genre (Covarrubias et al., 1992).2

FIVE SOCIAL AND “SCIENTIFIC” MYTHS

As a result of the research, we challenge five myths about telenovelas,
based on unconscious ideologies. The ideologies have led to the scientific in-
visibility, not only of telenovelas but of a number of key cultural practices.
The ideologies have the following traits:

• socio-centric, claiming that the real culture is only the culture of a dominant
social class. The lower classes have bad or no taste at all;
• ethnocentric, claiming that the only valid and prevalent values and behav-
iours are those of Western (European and American) lifestyles;
• youth-centric, disqualifying cultural practices of the elderly;
• andro-centric, claiming that the only valid attitudes and cultural practices
are male-oriented.

Given this ideological framework, we can easily understand prejudices against

telenovelas:

• “Just for small towns and provincial taste.” Our study showed that telenovelas
are watched in very big cities by just over half the population; as the size of
the city diminishes, the preference percentages rise to almost 80 per cent.
Telenovelas have an intense urban vitality.
• “Just for women and aged people.” Forty per cent of men interviewed admitted
to watching telenovelas; even those 60 per cent of men who denied watch-
ing knew a great deal about them.
Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front 75

• “Just for lazy people.” Unemployed and retired people are those who watch
fewest telenovelas. Fifty-five per cent of active students and almost half of
professionals and employees are regular viewers.
• “Low taste of the poor.” Sixty-three per cent of the interviewees of high-class
status were constant viewers.
• “Canned ideological food for the ignorant.” Our data showed that, although the
less formally educated people are indeed the ones who watch most tele-
novelas, better-educated people are also watching.

From this evidence, it is clear that—at least in Mexico—telenovelas are a trans-

class cultural phenomenon. We call them a cultural front, a space in which
different social agents struggle to define and redefine specific commonali-
ties: ideas about the meaning of love, good living, honour, fidelity, cruelty,
betrayal, hate, fate, beauty and sexual relationships, all of them linked to dif-
ferent elaborations of basic elementary human drives and necessities. They
provide the very core of constructed identity.

TOWARDS A MODEL OF DEEP INTERPRETATION OF

TELENOVELAS AND SOCIETY
Our model for the study of telenovelas has prompted us to design and
pursue a complex strategy for a complex object. Various and different levels of
partial analysis and information inform the specificity of each area. We have
identified the three main elements of the process, but now, in order to get a
deeper understanding of the phenomenon, we have to work with the relations
between each area.
Figure 2 shows the lines of relating our three different approaches to tele-
novelas in a model of deeper interpretation. Once we have identified vari-
ables of the three main areas of inquiry—that is, Production (P), Text (T) and
Readings (R)—a Deep Interpretation (DI) can be constructed by defining the
relationships and links between the elements (P, T, R).
Using that second-order relationship, finally we can establish a renewed
and deeper gaze over the single elements (P, T, R) that integrate a higher level
of interpretation of the object. We can follow those second-order relationships
through a matrix of logic contingencies, as Figure 3 shows.
The first-order information defined the specificity of the three elements
considered (PP) Production, (TT) Text and (RR) Social Readings. Now we can
develop a set of six second-order levels of questions and observables:

1 PT: influences from production to the text.

2 PR: flows coming from production over the social readings.
3 TP: effects of the text over the production.
4 TR: constraints from the text to the social readings.
5 RP: retro-actions from the social readings to production.
6 RT: interactions coming from the social readings to the text.
76 Telenovelas

Figure 2: A model for deep interpretation of telenovelas

That framework can be further completed when we take a third-order level of

inquiring by following the flows in triads between P, T and R like this:

1 PTR: threads from Production to Text yielding Social Readings.

2 PRT: threads from Production to Social Readings yielding Text.
3 TPR: threads from Text to Production yielding Social Readings.
4 TRP: threads from Text to Social Readings yielding Production.
5 RPT: threads from Social Readings to Production yielding Text.
6 RTP: threads from Social Readings to Text yielding Production.

Figure 3: Matrix of contingencies for deep interpretation of telenovelas

Understanding Telenovelas as a Cultural Front 77

Through this model, we now have 12 different logics, or theoretical relation-

ships, constructed over our first three elements. We can find empirical ex-
amples for any of these threads and by so doing will increase our abilities to
question the object.
It is clear that we need to produce and facilitate a number of different re-
sources and observables in order to completely fulfil the whole model. And
probably we will never get all the information needed, but at least we can
use the DI model to understand in a more complete and complex way a very
complex and relevant socio-symbolic practice like telenovelas in society.

CONCLUSIONS: RETHINKING TELENOVELAS

We can identify a vital symbolic process in multiple social networks, con-
stantly creating clashing flows and social appropriations of the telenovelas as
a cultural experience. Some can be understood as strategies of resistance which
yield the description of telenovelas as a cultural front. Telenovelas demarcate
a symbolic border between cultures that points towards different appropria-
tions of those meanings by social groups and classes. The social definitions
of these common social meanings between contrasted social agents open the
symbolic space of telenovelas as a struggling arena in which different social
modes of interpretation are in a symbolic contest for defining and redefining
common social meanings created and re-created by means of the elaboration
of transclass symbolic formations. That struggle in a cultural front is always
over a symbolic occupied territory that different social agents try constantly to
reoccupy by means of their own elaboration of the commonalities present
in the front. The clash and turbulences of different forces trying to void and
re-fill a specific symbolic occupied territory mark the historic success or fail-
ure of more or less organised social agents. Following these guidelines, we
can conclude for now that, in Mexico, the television industry has become the
central “giver” of fame, charisma and social “visibility” (symbolic capital) in
society. Telenovelas are a very complex reality that deserves a very complex,
collective and comparative approach for understanding an interesting trait of
twenty-first-century globalisation.

NOTES
1. It should be said that this first study, conducted in 1985, initially had no official
support from Mexican research agencies, because by that time the subject was consid-
ered “not scientifically relevant.” Later on, I will talk about the social prejudices that
created a scientific invisibility of kind of objects.
2. More recently, during the 1990s and using an approach of discussion groups, a
network of young scholars studied the changes in the format of Mexican telenovelas
analysing the enormous success of a different telenovelas (Mirada de Mujer) produced by
Argos and broadcast nationwide by TV Azteca. In that telenovelas, the main character
(María Inés) and the whole plot showed a very different way of producing and under-
standing telenovelas, especially by contesting the “normal” roles assigned to married
women. The study focused on the social representations from the readings and appro-
priation of Mexican women touched by this telenovelas (Covarrubias et al., 2001).
78 Telenovelas

REFERENCES
Covarrubias, Karla, A. Bautista, and Ana Uribe. 1992. Cuéntame, ¿en qué se quedó?, tele-
novelas y familias en México. Mexico: Editorial Trillas.
——— 2001. “Hacia una nueva cultura televisiva: La telenovela Mirada de Mujer en la
percepción de los públicos colimenses. Resultados de investigación.” Estudios sobre
las Culturas Contemporáneas, Epoca II, vol. VII, pp. 89–126.
González, Jorge. 1992. “The Cofraternity of (Un)finishable Emotions. Constructing
Mexican Telenovelas.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, vol. 11.
——— 1997. “The Willingness to Weave: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Fronts and Net-
works of the Future.” Media Development, vol. 1, no. XLIV.
——— 2001. “Cultural Fronts: Towards a Dialogical Understanding of Contemporary
Cultures,” in James Lull, ed., Culture in the Communication Age. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, John. 1998. “Geolinguistic Region as Global Space: The Case of Latin Amer-
ica,” paper presented to the IAMCR 21st conference, Glasgow, 26–30 July.
Straubhaar, Joseph. 1998. “Cultural Capital, Travel and Cultural Proximity in the Glo-
balization of Television,” paper presented at “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” con-
ference, June/July 98, Tampere, Finland.
Opening America?
The Telenovela-ization of U.S. Soap Operas

Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington

The global market for syndicated television programming remains the focus
of considerable debate by media scholars and policy leaders concerned with
television’s impact on national culture. A central theme in this debate is the
dominance of the United States in the international marketplace (Norden-
streng and Varis 1974; Varis 1986). However, a burgeoning line of scholarship
challenges the theoretical and empirical relevance of the cultural imperial-
ism thesis for understanding the state of the television industry worldwide
(see, e.g., Pool 1977; Antola and Rogers 1984; Hoskins and Mirus 1988; Sinclair,
Jacka, and Cunningham 1996). According to Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham
(1996), television’s appeal is resolutely local, not global, and it circulates largely
through exchange within geolinguistic regions. Moreover, they observe, as
television programming crosses borders not only do audiences generate un-
anticipated meanings, the product undergoes a dynamic process of “cultural
syncretism” that modifies genre conventions almost beyond recognition.
“The resulting situation is not the passive homogenization of world television
which cultural imperialism theorists feared, but rather its heterogenization”
(Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham 1996, 13). A comprehensive understanding
of these local adaptations calls for a middle-range theoretical approach (Cun-
ningham and Jacka 1994) that foregrounds practices by the industry through
which programming is made available to audiences.
The United States is the undisputed leader in exported television, and that
fact has tended to suppress inquiry into the ways in which its dominance
in the global arena is affected as the industry adapts its products for export
(Bielby and Harrington 2002) and as the products are consumed by audiences
in other countries (Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham 1996). Moreover, while
research on the export of U.S. television programs has focused almost exclu-
sively on their “one-way flow,” relatively little scholarly attention has been
devoted to the reverse: how programming from abroad fares in the United

Authors’ Note: This article was prepared for publication in 2002.

Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington: “Opening America? The Telenovela-ization of
U.S. Soap Operas,” first published in Television and New Media, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 383–99.
80 Telenovelas

States. As part of a larger project on the international market for exported

television, our analysis examines the impact of Latin American telenovelas on
the U.S. daytime soap opera genre. In particular, we consider how shifts dur-
ing the past decade in the demographics of the U.S. population and changes
in practices and tastes of television audiences have affected how the U.S. soap
opera industry has adapted to competition from other countries. Our analy-
sis contributes to the theoretical and empirical “opening up” of the cultural
imperialism approach by considering how the U.S. television industry is in-
fluenced by program trends from abroad.

THE SOAP OPERA GENRE

Uniquely capable of drawing a large and loyal viewer base, serial narratives are
argued to be a global cultural form in that they are “a narrative mode produced
in a variety of countries across the globe” and are “one of the most exported
forms of television viewed in a range of cultural contexts” (Barker 1997, 75).
While Americans are most familiar with seriality in the form of daytime soap
operas, there is such a diversity of serial forms worldwide that the genre itself
is increasingly difficult to define. Most commonly, serials are divided into two
main types based on the presence or absence of narrative closure. Open-ended
storytelling is associated with serials produced in the United States, Great Brit-
ain, and Australia, while closed-ended serials are more characteristic of Latin
America, India, Japan, China, South Africa, and elsewhere (Allen 1997, 112). Se-
rials can also be divided thematically and/or structurally. O’Donnell (1999, 4–5)
suggests that one type of serial engages primarily with emotions or melodrama
(such as Mexican, Venezuelan, and U.S. serials) while others engage more ex-
plicitly with political and social issues (such as Brazilian and Colombian seri-
als). Finally, Liebes and Livingstone (1998, 153) argue that three prototypical
forms or models can be applied to different countries’ soaps: dynastic soaps
(focusing on one powerful family), community soaps (focusing on a number of
equal, separate families and characters), and dyadic soaps (focusing on roman-
tic entanglements, disentanglements, and re-entanglements).
These distinctions between forms or models do not imply, of course, that
the serial genre (or any genre) has a fixed set of conventions or impermeable
boundaries. Genres are not fixed and immutable. Rather, genres evolve and
new ones appear “by transgressing the formulae of their predecessors” (Cun-
ningham, Miller, and Rowe 1994, 14). Genres are socially constructed through
relationships between artists and audiences in specific social, historical, and
ideological contexts, and they are modified as they are produced and received
(Fiske 1987; Griswold 1987; Taylor 1989).l Explains Gledhill, “we find a sliding of
conventions from one genre to another according to changes in production and
audiences. This sliding of conventions is a prime source of generic evolution”
(1997, 357). In this article, we explore factors contributing to, and implications of,
one such evolution: the “telenovela-ization” of U.S. soap operas.

WHY EVOLVE? THE U.S. INDUSTRY CONTEXT

U.S. daytime soap operas air five days per week, fifty-two weeks per year,
are only rarely repeated by their home networks,2 and can remain in produc-
Opening America? 81

tion for decades.3 Since their transition from radio to television in the 1950s,
soap operas have been a reliable source of revenue for the U.S. television net-
works. Despite their continued low cultural status (because they target the
female audience and are regarded as women’s texts), soaps’ enduring popu-
larity and resulting profit-making potential have consistently paid for other
less popular or more expensive forms of network programming. Indeed,
soaps have arguably been the single best “deal” in the history of American
television, “serving large audiences at comparatively low costs and provid-
ing an impressive yield for its investment” (Matelski 1999, 2). During the past
two decades, however, changes in the paid labor market, increasingly limited
leisure time, expanded channel capacity, the growth of the Internet, and the
growing fickleness of American viewers (among other factors) have contrib-
uted to rapidly dwindling domestic audiences for the genre (Allen 1996). The
decline in viewership was particularly noticeable in the 1990s. Since 1991,
soaps have lost 33 percent of their viewers, and there are 27 percent fewer
women between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine (daytime soaps’ target
audience) watching today than in 1994 (Baldwin 1999).4 From an all-time high
of nineteen soaps on the air in the 1969–1970 television season, there are cur-
rently only ten airing.
Initially, industry members responded to the slide by blaming factors out-
side the industry. A key target was the months-long, live coverage of the O. J.
Simpson preliminary hearing and murder trial in the mid-1990s, which pre-
empted most daytime serials for the duration of the proceedings. If not the
O. J. trial, it was the explosion of daytime talk shows; if not talk shows, then
the lure of the Internet was blamed for soaps’ decline (Foulk 2000, 27). But as
ratings continued to fall through the late 1990s, the industry recognized that
the lost audience was not going to return and that new strategies were needed
to restore its ability to generate revenue for the networks.
Some shows now market merchandise tied to storylines, others have devel-
oped online support, and almost all have slashed production costs.5 But per-
haps the most significant adaptation of consequence to the genre is the courting
of the Spanish-speaking audience as a way of bringing in additional revenue.
TV Guide’s resident soaps critic, Michael Logan, succinctly notes, “The Hispanic
population has surpassed 35 million, and that vast audience, already nuts for
telenovelas, has American soap programmers drooling” (Logan 2002, 36).
As has been well documented, the history of U.S. television is character-
ized in part by a strong resistance to foreign programming and is “informally
closed” to television from other cultures (Allen 1996, 124; see also Barker 1997;
Cunningham and Jacka 1994).6 Network television continues to be “resolutely
monolingual,” with virtually all programming directed toward an English-
speaking audience (Allen 1996, 124). However, a viewing revolution has taken
place in the United States during the past decade. Largely as a result of the
expansion of the cable industry, the proportion of the television audience tra-
ditionally commanded by the major broadcast networks plummeted. In the
1970s, the share of primetime viewership held by ABC, CBS, and NBC stood at
more than 90 percent; by August 1998, that percentage was around 47 percent
(Lowry 1998). With the plethora of channels now comprising the multichan-
nel media universe, American audiences have an astonishing array of special-
interest networks from which to make viewing choices. The rise of Univisión
82 Telenovelas

as the largest Spanish-language cable network in the U.S. (with Telemundo as

its chief competitor) is widely attributed to the long-standing neglect of La-
tino and Latina viewers by the major U.S. networks. Despite efforts to diver-
sify programming in the past few years, telenovelas remain a staple at both
Univisión and Telemundo, airing mornings, afternoons, and evenings, and
earning consistently high ratings (Barrera and Bielby 2002; Lopez 1995). As
such, U.S. networks’ burgeoning attempts to woo Latino and Latina viewers
face stiff challenge from Spanish-language cable channels.7

EVOLVING THE GENRE

The format of the U.S. daytime soap opera genre, which is structured as
open-ended narratives that never achieve closure, has remained unchanged
since its inception in 1930 (Intintoli 1984; Cassata 1985; LaGuardia 1974).
Despite its well-defined characteristics, however, the genre is hardly static.
While its basic narrative premise has not changed—soap storylines are struc-
tured around the creation, development, and dissolution of increasingly com-
plicated social, familial, and romantic relationships (Allen 1985, 74)—it has
undergone “distinct shifts in character, style, and setting” during the past de-
cades (Patterson 1995, 104). Some of these changes have resulted in subgenres,
such as soaps that specialize in medical dramas (e.g., ABC’s General Hospital
and the defunct The Doctors) or those that incorporate supernatural elements
(e.g., NBC’s Passions and the defunct Dark Shadows). Changes have also oc-
curred in lighting and camerawork, such as the unprecedented “prime-time
look” of The City (ABC) before its cancellation in the mid-1990s. Most notably,
the overall focus of daytime soaps has evolved since their early days to cele-
brate heterosexual romance, marriage, and family life. Indeed, contemporary
U.S. soaps have evolved into the best example of what Liebes and Livingstone
(1998, 153) refer to as the dyadic model of the serial genre:

a destabilized network of a number of young, densely interconnected, mostly

unigenerational, interchanging couples, with past, present and future romantic
ties, continually absorbed in the process of reinventing kinship relations.

Soaps’ preoccupation with romantic coupling, decoupling, and recoupling

has rendered them particularly resistant to depictions of “otherness” of any
kind, whether racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious. As Allen notes, “The prob-
lem of including [differences] in soaps is not of working them into plot lines,
but of dealing with the paradigmatic consequences of their entry into the
community of the soap opera world” (1985, 7).
To understand the significance of the networks’ current focus on woo-
ing Latino and Latina viewers, some historical context is useful. Until 1980,
the only racial groups represented on daytime shows were African Ameri-
cans and whites (Cassata and Skill 1983). Although ethnically differentiated
groups—such as Poles, Jews, and the Irish—were explicitly incorporated into
One Life to Live (ABC) when it premiered in 1968 and Ryan’s Hope (ABC) when
it debuted in 1975, Latinos were not introduced as central characters until
Opening America? 83

1984, when the soap Santa Barbara debuted on NBC, with a Mexican American
core family. In the 1990s, ABC’s All My Children and One Life to Live introduced
core Latino characters, families, and plots, a move that proved popular with
the viewers. However, scholars and industry critics (as well as some audience
members) considered the characters stereotypical, despite their expanded
presence onscreen and best of intentions by head writers (see, e.g., Jenrette,
McIntosh, and Winterberger 1999). From a production standpoint, as noted
above, narratives that incorporate a multiracial or multiethnic tapestry of
characters and plots make writing more complicated because of the added
challenge of preserving authenticity in a multicultural context (Allen 1985).
Without a demonstrable effect on ratings, then, such adaptations are rarely
perceived as worth the expense and extra effort. From the industry’s point of
view, attempts at multiculturalism were not worth sustaining until the erod-
ing economics of the daytime industry literally forced it to search for addi-
tional avenues to expand the audience.
The 2000 U.S. Census revealed that the Hispanic or Latino and Latina
population grew by nearly 60 percent in the past decade, with more than 32
million Hispanics currently living in the United States. In total numbers, it
has almost caught up with African Americans, the largest racial-ethnic mi-
nority group in the United States, and it is expected to surpass them by 2005.
The rapid growth of the Hispanic population, half of which is younger than
twenty-seven years old, has, in turn, attracted the attention of advertisers
seeking to capture the purchasing power of the burgeoning Latino market
(Hassell 2001). Responding to the gradual loss of daytime’s key demographic
audience (women between eighteen and forty-nine years old), at the present
time, there are three notable, ongoing developments in network attempts to
grow the Hispanic daytime audience.
First, NBC’s Days of Our Lives and Passions began closed-captioning their
shows in Spanish in July 2001 (Soap Opera Digest 2001a, 14). A second, more sig-
nificant development is the simulcast of Bold and the Beautiful in Spanish and
English, from May 2001. This marks the first time a network has used a second-
ary audio program (which provides Spanish translation) for a daytime serial;
the move will make Bold available to almost half the Latino homes in the United
States (Calvo 2001). Bold’s executive producer and head writer, Bradley Bell,
made his intentions behind this development explicit when he stated in a recent
soap fan magazine, “We’re hoping to be the first to capitalize on introducing [the
Hispanic] market to American soap operas” (Soap Opera Digest 2001c, 6).
The decision to simulcast the show in both English and Spanish coincides
with the addition of a new central Latino character, “Antonio,” who is tied
to the core family through marriage to one of their daughters. Whether this
character will truly amount to a breakthrough in nonstereotypic ethnic rep-
resentation remains to be seen, but the critical reaction in some corners has
been quite positive. For example, Soap Opera Digest Editor Lynn Leahy admit-
ted in a recent column that while she was initially skeptical of the Antonio
storyline, “It would appear that B&B, which has never tried to be more than a
classy, highly entertaining diversion has found a way to remain that . . . and
then some” (Leahy 2002, p. 22).8
84 Telenovelas

The third and perhaps most significant development within the U.S. day-
time industry has occurred on ABC’s half-hour soap Port Charles, which de-
buted in 1997 as a spin-off of the network’s popular and long-running General
Hospital. Faring poorly in the ratings since its premiere, cancellation rumors
were swirling when Port Charles shifted to a twelve-week story-arc format in
March 2000.9 The first “book,” titled Fate, was told in three chapters: “Desire,”
“Deception,” and “Destiny.” When the second book, Time in a Bottle, debuted,
the show had dropped the chapter format but offered something new to U.S.
daytime television by thematically linking the story to popular musician Jim
Croce’s song by the same name. Subsequent books have also been named for
popular songs—Tainted Love (sung by Soft Cell), Secrets (Madonna), and the cur-
rent book, Superstition (with pop reggae band UB40)—with the songs featured
in primetime promotional spots. According to one editorial, “Using musical
themes was a brilliant marketing tool, that resulted in record downloads of the
corresponding theme songs from MP3 song-swapping services” (“SOC Names
Port Charles Best Soap of ‘01,” [Link], December 20, 2001).
Although widely regarded as introducing the telenovela-ization of U.S.
soaps, Port Charles’s twist on the genre was clearly driven by a need to stanch
the declining daytime audience and its own poor ratings. In this instance, the
change in format was an attempt to capture distracted, short-attention-span
viewers with story arcs that capitalize on popular themes and remain apart
from the overall show rather than an effort to adapt the genre to the tradi-
tional story interests of Latino and Latina viewers. Although Latin Ameri-
can telenovelas air complete narratives in 100 to 120 episodes, their storylines
characteristically “tend towards the romantic and melodramatic with an em-
phasis on upward social mobility usually through romantic attachment, and
they are expected to have a happy ending” (Patterson 1995, 105).10 But Port
Charles stories have been anything but tales of upward mobility, romance, and
happy endings; the two most popular books to date, Tempted and Tainted Love,
featured vampires, time travel, and other supernatural elements. After creat-
ing buzz within the industry and a guarantee to air at least through summer
2002 (Dawn 2002, 49), the latest ratings show that the short-arc format has
helped Port Charles. As of February 2002, Nielsen ratings show a 10 percent
improvement over last year in the key demographic of eighteen- to forty-nine-
year-old women (Freeman 2002).11 In regard to the telenovela-ization of the
show itself, a nonscientific poll in Soap Opera Digest reported that 72 percent of
viewers “loved” the story-arc format while 28 percent “hated” it (Soap Opera
Digest 2001d, 58-59).

AUDIENCE CONSIDERATIONS: REVOLUTION OR COMPROMISE?

In 1997, when anticipating the shift to short-term arcs by Port Charles, former
president of ABC daytime Patricia Fili-Krushel observed that “the best cure
for the audience’s attention deficit is also the oldest: compelling stories. . . . On
the other hand, a plot can’t move so slowly that frequent viewers get bored”
(Schmuckler 1997, 13). In the same vein, Mickey Dwyer Dobbin, former head
of CBS daytime, now executive in charge of production at Proctor & Gamble
Opening America? 85

Productions, stated, “Many people don’t want to get hooked on a new show,
so maybe we should be thinking about [the telenovela] form—doing a story
over a thirteen- or twenty-six-week period” (Schmuckler 1997, 13). In what is
perhaps a preview of how the entire ABC lineup will change as a result of Port
Charles’s success with the short-term arc, Felicia Minei Behr, senior vice presi-
dent for programming at ABC daytime, says that the network plans to bring
the new format to all its shows in the coming year (Soap Opera Digest 200lb, 6).
Indeed, on February 11, Ms. Behr announced that One Life to Live will be the
next ABC soap to experiment with the novela format by year’s end (Freeman
2002). However, the adaptation of the new format to the hour-long One Life
to Live is expected to be more of a challenge because of the greater number
of characters and subplots and its decades-long history (see below). With an
eye toward those challenges, Ms. Behr and Angela Shapiro, president of ABC
daytime, plan to withhold conversion of the other ABC hour-long serials, All
My Children and General Hospital, until the waters are more fully tested with
One Life to Live (Freeman 2002).
As for Port Charles, despite its increase in the key audience demographic of
eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old women (Freeman 2002), it remains the low-
est-ranked soap currently on the air. In still another attempt to avoid cancel-
lation, the show recently shifted to a more cost-effective production schedule
common to prime time—taping two episodes a day for six months and then
going on hiatus for the rest of the year. While this will reduce production
costs, it jeopardizes the show’s ability to tweak story-lines in response to au-
dience feedback as stories unfold, thus potentially undermining the estab-
lished give-and-take relationship between the soap opera industry and its
loyal and vocal audience (see Harrington and Bielby 1995). Shorter-arc sto-
rytelling does have an upside, however: “at least plots will be wrapping up
every few months. So, if reaction is negative, viewers will not have to watch
something they don’t like for long” (Soap Opera Digest 2002, 10). Speculation
about the possible cancellation of Port Charles is still widespread in the indus-
try (Soap Opera Digest 2001e, 5; Pursell 2001).
Revenue problems aside, the adaptation of the telenovela format within
the United States is predicted to have genre-altering consequences. These
changes are not necessarily positive in the opinion of some industry ob-
servers and long-time audience members. Former Soap Opera Weekly critic
“Marlena De Lacroix” (in real life New York University journalism instructor
Connie P. Hayman) raised several concerns shortly after Port Charles debuted
its telenovela format. As she put it, “It’s apparent already that the people
behind the show aren’t so much revolutionizing the art of soap operas as
they are compromising it” (De Lacroix 2001, 12). Hayman bases her criti-
cism on considerations that are central to the U.S. serial format. One is that
soaps’ endless middle and five-days-per-week airing schedule allow stories
to be told in real time. Says Hayman (or De Lacroix), “Since soaps are experi-
enced day-to-day, they mimic real life, strengthening viewers’ feeling that a
soap’s story is real” (p. 12). She argues that Port Charles’ fast-paced plots feel
“surreal,” and viewers are “clobbered over the head with key turning points
at least once a week” (p. 12). Traditionally, U.S. soaps incorporate key plot
86 Telenovelas

transitions once every thirteen weeks or so. A result of this slower pacing is
that it holds the audience (and attracts new viewers along the way by word of
mouth), which continues to watch to follow the incremental buildup to reso-
lution. The payoff for the audience lies within that resolution, which entails
multilayered significance through its outcome. But there is an additional ben-
efit to the audience of the U.S.’s form of the genre, according to Hayman: “one
of the aspects of traditional soap opera that keeps the audience coming back
is consistency in both story and character” (p. 12). Hayman suggests that one
of the compromises from the change in format for Port Charles has been the
rewriting of history and of character to come up with “ubermelodramatic”
events for the sake of story. Hayman continues, “Reinterpreting history is
a writer’s prerogative, but it has a serious downside: It makes viewers feel
deceived” (p. 6). For long-term viewers, those most familiar and comfortable
with the established conventions of the U.S. form of the genre, the modifica-
tion of the traditional soap opera form might be a hard sell.
In addition, there are real costs and complications associated with intro-
ducing a different genre form into a long-running and established genre con-
cept. One problem that may not have been fully anticipated by the industry is
that character and plot developments of the short-term arcs need to be reinte-
grated with the long-term bible for the show, and continuity of character has
to be balanced against the requirements of the short-term story. The editors at
[Link],12 who proclaimed Port Charles the best soap opera of 2001,
suggest that while storytelling in early books was disjointed and somewhat
belabored (as Hayman argued above), later books maintain the story integrity
and character consistency familiar to U.S. soap viewers:

To assume . . . that every three months means something entirely new on Port
Charles is a mistake. There are common threads that transcend each book and
the continuity level is extremely high. New stories are set up during the course
of each book so that by the time the next story arc rolls around, there’s already
a new story brewing, one that the viewer has already been lured into watching.
([Link]

It is perhaps too early to say whether the telenovela-ization of U.S. soap op-
eras is a genre adaptation or a new competing subgenre. Whether this genre
form takes hold in the U.S. context depends, obviously, on whether network
executives view it as a business success in terms of ratings and revenues. In
the absence of clear markers of business success, the experiment in bringing
telenovela-like elements into U.S. soaps will be abandoned. On the other hand,
the networks can afford to alienate segments of the loyal viewership if the in-
novations bring in new audience constituencies in large enough numbers. It
is a difficult balancing act for the networks, since critics and loyal viewers are
invested in the genre and are closely monitoring any radical departures from
established convention. Whether that segment of the audience is expendable
cannot be known until after the fact, and it is especially difficult to introduce
changes that both remain true to what established audiences seek and ad-
dress the demands of a changing marketplace.
Opening America? 87

REFORMATTING PLEASURE AND THE PORTABILITY

OF THE SOAP GENRE
There are at least two significant issues at stake with the widespread refor-
matting of U.S. soaps: one speaks to viewer/fan pleasure, and the other speaks
to the global market for exported television programming. First, we believe
a move to short-term story arcs requires scholars to retheorize the meaning
of pleasure in open-ended serial narratives. Our concern is not so much with
casual soap viewers but with long-term dedicated fans of the genre. As we
argued in “Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday
Life” (Harrington and Bielby 1995), viewer and fan must be understood as con-
ceptually distinct categories; fans make an affective investment in the genre
that speaks to central issues of play, creativity, and personal identity. A key
source of pleasure for dedicated U.S. fans is soaps’ ability to act as “transitional
objects,” allowing them to play with the boundaries between internal and ex-
ternal, between the “real” and the “nonreal” (Harrington and Bielby 1995).13
The U.S. soap industry—its directors, writers, actors, and fans them-
selves—have a long-standing investment in cultivating and maintaining this
form of emotional boundary playing, which seems threatened by telenovela-
ization. The praise of Port Charles from the editors at [Link] (as
noted above) is heartening in that it appears, to some viewers at least, that a
relatively new show (Port Charles is only five years old) can switch to short-
term story arcs without losing character and narrative consistency. But what
about shows with a thirty-, forty-, or fifty-year legacy? To transform charac-
ters, communities, and narratives that were designed to go on endlessly (as
real life does) into twelve-week segments risks a central source of pleasure
and identity available to U.S. soap fans for more than seventy years. With-
out question, Port Charles has been an interesting experiment; the telenovela-
ization of One Life to Live, if it occurs as predicted, should give us greater
insight into audience considerations surrounding genre reformatting.14
A second issue at stake with the proposed reformatting is its impact on
the exportability of U.S. soaps to the global syndication market. One of the
biggest drawbacks to the export potential of U.S. serials is their open-ended
format. While providing a large pool of episodes for buyer selection, with
long-running, domestically successful products, the text literally becomes un-
wieldy to export. How many episodes constitute the story? Importing markets
prefer programs without a long history, and in the United States, this typically
applies only to cancelled programs or recent entrees into the daytime lineup.
Of soaps currently airing in the United States, CBS’ The Bold and the Beautiful
is by far the most popular globally. Not coincidentally, it has a relative short
history in the U.S. context (first airing in 1987) and is a half-hour program.
Port Charles, while still garnering fairly dismal domestic ratings, seems well
poised to enter the global market: like Bold, it is a half-hour show, it has a very
short history, and most importantly, its reformatting could allow each book to
be exported as a self-contained package. We question whether the telenovela-
ization of Port Charles speaks to a recent trend in the U.S. daytime industry
to prioritize global audiences over local ones. While a full discussion of this
issue is beyond the scope of this article, there have been several indications
88 Telenovelas

that as a result of declining domestic profits, network decisions are increas-

ingly oriented to the global marketplace. For example, in 1999, NBC debated
whether to cancel Sunset Beach or Another World to make room in the sched-
ule for its new show, Passions. While both shows drew low ratings, Beach had
been on the air a mere two years, while World was one of the grande dames
of U.S. daytime television, with thirty-five years on the air. NBC elected to
cancel World but gave Beach a six-month extension before finally canceling it
in December 1999. U.S.-based fans were outraged over this decision, confused
as to why Another World, given its legacy, was not granted the extension. How-
ever, a major difference between the new shows was the substantial foreign
sales of Beach, which NBC coproduced with Spelling Productions. NBC had
no financial stake in Another World, which was owned by Proctor & Gamble.15
A question for future research is, How might the reformatting of U.S.-based
soaps enhance their export potential?

CONCLUSION
What makes opening America to imported programming or new program-
ming concepts such a challenge? Hoskins and Mirus (1988) observed in writing
about the cultural discount factor that in any given country, the audience’s prefer-
ence for familiarity is paramount. Our research conducted on the U.S. soap opera
audience demonstrates clearly that storytelling that portrays emotional authen-
ticity, that relies on elements of melodrama as a stylistic form, and that unfolds
in “real time” is crucial to audience pleasures. Our research on the international
market for television points also to the importance of technical quality, visual
style, and other aesthetic considerations in attracting audiences. Another factor
related less directly to audiences and more to the industry itself is the sheer dif-
ficulty of introducing innovation of any sort. In an industry where the costs of pro-
duction are considerable and the commissioning or purchase of new programs is
made in a business context of ambiguity and uncertainty, industry decision mak-
ers demand that any new product be framed as familiar or otherwise knowable
in some way. Moreover, increasingly, because of industry deregulation that took
effect in the United States in the 1990s, any imported series or concept competes
with a network’s ownership stake in its own shows and in keeping them on the
air as long as possible to sell them to the domestic (and international) syndication
market (Bielby and Bielby, 2003). In short, even when the genre properties of an
import are familiar and production quality is excellent, the American television
industry has its own interests at heart, which in this case is a bottom line in which
revenue flows accrue to the established stakeholders. However, as we see with the
telenovela-ization of U.S. soaps, even the otherwise closed American industry is
willing to open up when confronted with opportunities it perceives as potentially
improving the bottom line.

NOTES
1. Consensus between creators and audiences over genre boundaries is probably
greater in television than in any other area of popular culture, in part because of the
industry’s aversion to the risks that accompany innovation and in part because of the
Opening America? 89

audience’s preference for familiarity when seeking popular entertainment (Bielby and
Bielby, 2003).
2. Networks will occasionally repeat so-called classic episodes when certain seg-
ments of the market anticipate scheduled preemptions, such as during NCAA basket-
ball playoffs or during coverage of the Wimbledon tennis tournament (see Harrington
1998). SoapNet, the twenty-four-hour soap opera cable network launched by Disney/
ABC in January of 2000, shows same-day repeats of all four ABC-owned soaps (Port
Charles, All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital), as well as NBC’s Passions
and CBS’s As The World Turns and Guiding Light.
3. For example, ABC’s General Hospital is currently celebrating its thirty-ninth year
on the air, CBS’s As The World Turns has been airing for forty-six years, and in June
2002, Guiding Light celebrated its fiftieth birthday on radio and television—the longest
story ever told.
4. Despite declining ratings, however, soaps continue to be profitable in the domes-
tic market. An average hour-long show costs $60 million per year to produce, and the
most popular earn $150 to $200 million per year (McAvoy 1999).
5. In the past decade, for example, networks have begun licensing soap memora-
bilia, such as coffee mugs, T-shirts, key rings, and specially produced videotapes de-
voted to favorite villains or memorable weddings (Bellafante 1995, 74). They have also
begun promoting soap operas on prime-time television in the hopes of attracting new
viewers. Port Charles (ABC) premiered in a two-hour primetime movie-of-the-week
format, and it is now typical for a show’s twentieth or twenty-fifth anniversary to be
commemorated with a prime-time special; such exposure would have been unthink-
able even a decade ago. More recently, CBS increased exposure for its daytime lineup
through an arrangement with American Airlines to feature CBS soaps in its in-flight
magazine (Stanley 2000), and ABC’s All My Children and Revlon have agreed to a deal
“in which the cosmetics company will be the focal point of a three-month storyline in
exchange for buying several million dollars’ worth of advertising time on the show”
(Soap Opera Weekly 2002, 5; see also Flint and Nelson 2002).
6. The lack of imports on U.S. television is typically blamed on American viewers’
rejection of low(er) production values, slow pacing, unfamiliar settings and accents,
and dubbing and/or subtitling (Allen 1996; Antola and Rogers 1984; Cunningham and
Jacka 1994).
7. As Barrera and Bielby (2002) point out, while considerable scholarly attention has
focused on the study of telenovelas within their countries of origin, far less is known
about their reception in other cultural contexts. Through an analysis of interviews with
novela watchers in the United States, they find that telenovelas are much more than
“entertainment” for viewers. Rather, they “assist Latinos who reside in the United States
in recreating and maintaining a strong cultural bond to Latin America” (Barrera and
Bielby 2002, 13). Through the visual representation of Latin American styles, the use
of the Spanish language, and the unique scenery and storytelling devices, telenovelas
allow viewers in the United States to “remember” or “revisit” Latin America.
8. Bold and the Beautiful also hired Erik Estrada to play Antonio’s father in fall 2001.
Well known to American viewers for his role in the classic 1970s primetime series
Chips, Estrada also appeared on the Mexican serial Dos Mujeres, Un Camino (see www.
[Link]/erik-estrada/person/20070/[Link]).
9. In a departure from the new model, the show’s fifth story arc, which debuted
December 3, 2001, was only four weeks long.
10. This is an overgeneralization, of course. As noted earlier, telenovelas differ sig-
nificantly in theme, structure, and realism, depending on country of origin.
11. In fact, the soap genre as a whole is experiencing a small but promising rebound;
ABC’s overall soap lineup, for example, is up 3 percent during the past season in the
eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic (Diliberto 2002, 30). These ratings are obviously
90 Telenovelas

important to the network and to the stabilization of the industry more broadly, but they
also point to networks’ increasing success in appealing to the youth market. Says Felicia
Behr of ABC, “PC [Port Charles] has grown enormously; I think it’s [up] 340 percent in the
last year in the 18-24 demographic. . . . We’re interested in bringing in young viewers,
because every day in the 18-49 demographic somebody reaches their 50th birthday and
goes out of the demographic. So we’re interested in bringing in somebody at the 18-year-
old level to balance off the people that are falling out of that ever-precious demographic
advertisers want” (quoted in Diliberto 2002, 31). The ability to appeal to the younger
audience’s taste may speak to an important transformation of the genre.
12. Founded in 1995, [Link] is one of the Internet’s first all-encompassing
Web sites for U.S.-based soaps.
13. Noted psychologist D. W. Winnicott (1971) proposed three realms of life: “in-
ternal” reality, “external” reality, and an intermediate realm of experience that keeps
the inner and outer worlds separate yet interrelated. The intermediate realm is neither
“inside” nor “outside,” but in between. Winnicott links this realm to a specific stage
in child development (between four and twelve months) in which infants first become
capable of perceiving the self as both subject and object. This stage is characterized by
the appearance of transitional objects, which the infant becomes emotionally attached
to but is unable to realize are not fully “real” (such as a favorite blanket or toy). This in-
termediate realm, characterized by creative play and pleasurable affect, remains with
us as adults, though we learn to experience it privately rather than openly. In Soap
Fans, we proposed that soap operas are uniquely positioned to serve as transitional ob-
jects for adults: “While many genres aim at fictionalizing the real, serials are uniquely
situated to offer a fictional community to viewers who then, quite knowledgeably,
bounce the real off the fictional and the fictional off the real. If television programs
can act as transitional phenomena [as Lembo and Tucker (1990) first proposed], then
soaps are the easiest type of programming for us to use in this way” (Harrington and
Bielby 1995, 135).
14. As noted earlier, another source of viewer pleasure in the U.S. context has been
transformed by Port Charles’s shift to a six-months-on, six-months-off production
schedule. While mimicking the production schedule of primetime programming, the
shift also mimics one of the main limitations of prime time to engender the intense
audience loyalty characteristic of daytime: viewers’ inability to give ongoing feedback
to the unfolding narrative. As we argued in Soap Fans (Harrington and Bielby 1995),
the daytime industry in the United States deliberately cooperates with the secondary
press to foster and maintain a sense of participation on viewers’ parts: “we are all in
this together.” While obviously illusory to some extent, this sense of participation in
the storytelling process is a key element of fan pleasure and loyalty and will be trans-
formed through telenovela-ization.
15. For a full discussion of the issue see, Harrington and Bielby (2002).

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Engaging the Audience:
The Social Imagery of the Novela

Reginald Clifford

This article reports on a study that was conducted for the TV Azteca chain
in Mexico City and was used both to add to ratings data and also as a feed-
back mechanism for the development of new programs and modification of
programs as they were being run. It is derived both from commercial neces-
sities and theoretical perspectives. In this article, the focus is the telenovela,
the soap opera format that dominates Mexican and Latin American drama
programming.
Television is primarily a domestic medium that brings together the pri-
vate domestic space with the public sphere of leisure (Silverstone 1994, 176).
To grapple with the concept of audience, it is necessary to access everyday
life and construct the concept of audience from there. The study on which
this analytical model rests is rooted in grounded theory and on a research
methodology that combines some elements of Repertory Grid (Murdock and
Phelps 1973) and construct analysis together with an ethnomethodological
element. The knowledge generated from the field is developed by an analy-
sis of the social imaginary of telenovelas that involves metaphorical and se-
mantic analysis that is then, in turn, analyzed against genre theory, in this
case, melodrama. This enables both the establishment of the principles of the
telenovela as a subgenre and the parameters for their production according
to theme and time slot of melodrama-telenovela. These parameters are then
rechecked with the domestic ecology and demographic information available
to develop, maintain, or transform the themes and tones of the telenovelas
considered appropriate for the schedule.
By focusing on the triad of the social imaginary, a genre-based analytic
model, and ratings analysis, it is possible to create, maintain, and transform
(after Carey 1989) the telenovelas that we air. This, of course, is possible only
if this is approached as a team effort between production and channel. This
model is built on the assumption that both the TV channel and audience
are engaged in an emotional dimension that other genres do not reach. For

Reginald Clifford: “Engaging the Audience: The Social Imaginary of the Novela,” first
published in Television and New Media, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 360–69.
94 Telenovelas

example, the relationship of audience and channel in the process of being

informed and watching news programs is more rational in the way it relates
to and involves citizenship and social competence.
To engage an audience is a different approach than that suggested in
other metaphorical approximations of audience as a category, such as that
of reading, textual analysis, media consumption, uses and gratifications or
reception, although there is affinity for the latter. The concept of mass is re-
conceptualized, so that it is possible to distinguish the difference between
convergence for similar motives and needs and convergence for dissimilar
motives. The notion of mass as synonymous with heavy, dense, and perhaps
rather sheeplike mass behavior is replaced by the metaphor of mass being
gaseous. The image is of an audience in the thousands circulating and con-
verging for a variety of reasons on a particular program or, in an increasing
trend, to watch several at the same time. The metaphor of the audience behav-
ing as a gaseous mass is useful because it describes audience behavior as the
audience navigates its way through the time people give television viewing
and moving between channels and genres according to whim, mood, or need,
within the limitations of what is on offer. There are occasions when what is
offered successfully engages a large segment of the audience and channel
hopping slows, and there are occasions when surfing reaches high levels of
search, particularly during commercials and between programs. The inter-
views showed that people have a clearer idea of what they do not want than
what they do.
Telenovelas usually engage people in the intimacy of their home, the site
where Silverstone (1994) suggests that one community forms to view another;
it is the site of conflicts, rituals, and sharing in dimensions that are gendered,
generational, and class-oriented. It is, as Veronica Vazquez (1997) states, “life
itself.” It is a site where the emotions of everyday life are internalized and ex-
ternalized. Respondents frequently assert that a telenovela, particularly one
with tones of realism, provides a means for broaching a subject that families
enjoy discussing but may find difficult to raise. A son or daughter may want
to probe the parental limits placed on certain subjects such as sex, parental
control, drugs, or sexuality but does not wish to be perceived as being active
in transgressing them. Conversely, a parent may want to probe the world of
their children without appearing inquisitorial or nosey. This, for Mexico, is
where telenovelas take the central stage.
The launching day of a new telenovela is always a time for bated breath.
The jury is out, and the producer and broadcaster can only fidget until the
ratings return the verdict. The creation of the program is done with as much
care as possible. Innovation, if any, is calculated, and it is hoped that there
may be a plan B lined up to follow should things go awry. Producers pro-
pose and the audience disposes; producers feel that they have as much say
in how their programs will be received as viewers have in what is produced.
Yet there seems to be a bandwidth within which a common ground can be
“negotiated.” The producer may make changes and the viewers may increase
their attention. This bandwidth is the common ground where audience and
program engage in a dance that explores dimensions of character and narra-
Engaging the Audience 95

tive, where the stuff of commonplace and the sustaining of community occur,
where the emotions can be seen, and where the consequences of actions and
decisions about love and life may be explored vicariously.
Since the arrival of TV Azteca on the scene, the telling of stories in this
genre has acquired a new perspective, often called “realism.” All telenovelas
are now classified into two general kinds of melodrama: Cinderella style or
realist. The first is considered to be classic and inextricably tied up with Tele-
visa, while the second is viewed as the domain of TV Azteca.
The production of telenovelas is primarily focused on the Mexican mar-
ket, and then they are marketed elsewhere. In this sense, there are certain
“ground rules” involved in the order of things. For example, the Mexican
audience, particularly for primetime telenovelas, is intolerant of foreign ac-
cents and only slightly more tolerant of foreign actors. Tolerance is increased
as the accent becomes more mainstream Mexican Spanish. Another aspect
is the nature of the “contract” that the production puts on the table. In the
usual way, the overall premise of the story is established as soon as possible.
What follows, then, is the analysis of the social imaginary of telenovelas. As
mentioned earlier, telenovelas engage their audience as few genres do. The
producer, the plot, and the viewers are involved in a complex cycle in which
each agonizes over the other.

THE NOTION OF THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY AND

THE MEXICAN CONTEXT
In an effort to get closer to the audience and produce programs that would
be an attractive combination of trusted and tried melodrama with new ele-
ments that would give it a value-added advantage, a different approach in
research was undertaken. What follows is based on this research, in combina-
tion with genre analysis and day-to-day expert panel research. The approach
aims to define the “social imaginary.”
The model was based on an analysis of techniques known as ASBI (análisis
semántico basado en imagines; see Clifford 1998a; Clifford, Gomez, and Arango
1998), a qualitative technique derived from work done in the early seventies
by Graham Murdock and Guy Phelps (1973), which explored the role of mass
media in the lives of secondary school students. The study itself involved
a variety of methods, including a technique developed to explore people’s
constructs that was a version of the original Repertory Grid developed by
George Kelly, an American psychologist (Murdock and Phelps 1973). He sug-
gested that people classify and make sense of parts of their everyday world by
developing a repertoire of constructs. ASBI develops this technique further
by using photographs and one or two questions to start the interview. All
subsequent questions were based on comments made by the respondent. The
final product is a map or pattern of what I here call the “social imaginary.”1
The researcher would approach an individual, and on occasion a cou-
ple, and request permission for an interview. It was common to start with
one and find others, usually friends, joining in. This happened in parks
in provincial towns. Roughly, one in three or four requests resulted in an
96 Telenovelas

interview. The researcher then asked questions about whether informants

recognized particular telenovela stars and, if so, whether they watched the
telenovela and what they thought about the characters.
The process itself gave rise to fascinating insights into the attitudes peo-
ple held toward the telenovelas. In formulating the interview protocol, the
word used for acknowledging an image or recognizing a character was con-
ocer (know). Thus, the question, “¿A quien conoces?” (Whom do you know?)
was used. This turned out to have a class bias. The upper- and middle-class
respondents had little problem fielding these questions in general. To know
someone (conocer) implied having read about, heard about (from radio), or
seen on television. They would offer opinions on programs that they had
heard about. They were also more willing to extrapolate situations from a
telenovela to their own lives or to those of others whom they had never met.
For the working class, and particularly those whose orality (Ong 1982) was
very marked, to know (conocer) was something that could occur only through
personal experience. Thus, they would talk only about the telenovelas they
had personally seen.
Within the working class, there was the added hurdle of self-esteem. The
respondents would often state that they knew nothing and had nothing to
say. It was as if they could not fathom why a middle-class interviewer would
want to know anything from them at all, for what could they say that was not
already known to the researcher? If the suspicion that the point of the inter-
view was to discover that their ignorance could be overcome, the respondents
from this class would move away from the question-and-answer mode of in-
teraction into recounting personal anecdotes. In this way, this class made it
harder to be judged and was found wanting, and the richness of the interview
increased accordingly.
The total run for exploring this project was 1,490 interviews carried out in
seven cities in Mexico during February and March 1998 (Clifford, Gómez, and
Arango 1998). It was divided into three parts: news, telenovelas, and a category
of broad entertainment. Because each section was centered on television, the
actual interview tended to be accumulative. Regardless of which topic the re-
spondent was commenting on, he or she tended to lace his or her conversation
with comments that corresponded to other genres. A person commenting on a
telenovela might refer to news or entertainment at the same time.
Perhaps the first theoretical aspect that was produced by the fieldwork is
the consistency with which the respondents spoke about the world beyond
their own everyday experience. How the respondent has the world “figured
out” became a central aspect of the fieldwork. “Se me figura que así es” (That’s
the way I have it figured) was a common refrain. The social imaginary im-
pinges on the respondents’ everyday life in ways that are constant. When one
respondent said, for example, “Es que nosotros los Mexicanos somos así . . .
bien canijos” (That’s the way we Mexicans are . . . really astute and clever),
she not only projected a sense of self but also a sense of others. The social
imaginary articulates this broader sense of community and of civil society.
It is where the assumptions about others are located. At the same time, the
individual monitors parts of this social imaginary and leaves much of the
monitoring of different portions of it to others.2
Engaging the Audience 97

Consider an example. Someone joins the stream of people going to and from
work, and before long, that person will develop a sophisticated collection of
ideas and conjectures about the nature of traffic, its peak hours, the best routes,
and so on. This person has an imaginary map of the city, more or less corre-
sponding to how things are, derived from their own and others’ experiences,
their projections, and their beliefs. What and how a person imagines things to
be are key elements in the construction of social imaginary. The social imagi-
nary thus refers to the domain that is abstracted to generate a general set of
expectations about the social life that lies just beyond everyday experience.
Daily experience will either corroborate or often modify these general expec-
tations about the social world. In a sense, it is virtual knowledge of the world
that forms a background to the foreground of our everyday lives.
The fundamental methodological assumption is that by attending to how
people talk about social life, their perceptions can be mapped as they evolve.
For example, talk about adultery ranged from absolutes for the young adults—
those just starting out their own married life—to older adults whose under-
standing of ambiguous conditions of “understandable” adultery was a matter
of shades of grey rather than black and white, because they themselves were
well within the age range of midlife crises (Sheehy 1984). For them, adultery
provoked by an impossible partner or the feelings of despair brought on by
aging is understandable but lamentable. Understandable adultery was, how-
ever, not confused with justified adultery. In general, the female protagonist
must retain her virtue. She can give it only to the man she will eventually end
up with, the love of her life; otherwise she is tarnished and risks losing her
aspirational value. The moral constraints within melodrama of the telenovela
form the value core that audiences enjoy repeatedly.
This appraisal is derived from careful attention to the way people speak
about their relationships; it implies that change would manifest itself first in
naming and talking. If these assumptions of linkage between macro and micro
are correct, then the phenomena ascribed to them can be mapped and the rela-
tionships explored. At the same time, the inherent social conservatism is con-
stantly underlined by what is acceptable and what is not and for whom.

VIEWING HABITS
During the actual period of the research, TV Azteca aired Demasiado
Corazón, Mirada de Mujer, and La Chacala, and Televisa aired Desencuentro,
Huracán, Mi Pequeña Traviesa, and Esmeralda. Of these, Mirada de Mujer was
exceptionally successful and drew a group of viewers who claimed that they
had never before watched telenovelas. The Televisa product was more tradi-
tional and “Cinderella” in type.
Viewing habits differed throughout Mexico. In general, the interviewees in
the capital were most knowledgeable about television, including telenovelas,
even if they had not watched much. There is a monitoring of the domain that
permits the focusing of attention on some things while maintaining others in
view, even if not directly. Monterrey and Guadalajara are less given to wide
monitoring. And the rest of the cities varied in the range, fragmentation, and
specificity of their comments. In some places, such as Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the
98 Telenovelas

state capital of Chiapas, television viewing habits are somewhat less marked,
as they vie with other activities, notably, socializing outdoors in the evening
when the heat of the day has passed.
There are ranges of issues determining how people engage the telenovela
as a genre. Age, gender, and social class create general dimensions from
which people engage the telenovela. In principle, it is seen as woman’s genre.
Men seldom feel free to admit that they watch a telenovela, much less enjoy
one. They will often state that they relinquish the remote control so that their
partner can enjoy her telenovela, ostensibly showing love and caring by doing
so. This issue is less marked as one moves toward the upper class.
Viewing habits also vary along age and class lines. Middle- and upper-
class middle-aged interviewees classified channel 2 of Televisa as being for
servants, but only with respect to telenovelas—not news or entertainment.
The young shared this view but also expressed differentiation between the
Cinderella/realist divide. It would be appropriate to point out at this stage
that the Cinderella/realist issue is not totally polarized. Realism in telenove-
las has its limits, and it is really more of an issue of how credible the audience
finds the story, because the element of aspirational illusion cannot go miss-
ing in Mexican melodrama.
Audiences watch telenovelas for different reasons. Men claim to be more
attracted by a mix of love underscored by action and even violence. For mid-
dle-aged middle- and upper-class women, Mirada de Mujer was good because
it was more real and La Chacala was different. Younger women of the same
classes were more swayed by physical attraction and themes that evolved
around the issues facing young adults. In general, middle-aged women and
older still found the traditional telenovela of interest.
Another interesting class-related issue is that the young of the middle and
upper class pay less attention to the qualities of acting and more to the ele-
ments of music, fashion, and style. They seek out elements that are crucial to
their sense of glamour and excitement. Fanciful or realistic story-lines, the
audience is grateful when it can derive some element it can talk about and
value. Mirada de Mujer was greatly appreciated because of the excellent acting
and exquisite dialogues. Respondents would say, “When something like that
happens to me (referring to some particular event) or to someone I know, I
just hope I remember that line.”
The audiences of telenovelas are thus diverse. However, across the de-
mographic groups, the telenovela creates communities that, in turn, engage
vicariously in the vagaries of the television community. It is a site where anxi-
ety, security, emotional empathy, morality (as different from rational empa-
thy), and social competence are brought for exercise. The method used brings
out the classification system in people, so that together with the similarities
in why people congregate “virtually” around a telenovela, it is accompanied
by the differences as well. Similarities tend to congregate around elements of
gender, while differences tend to be expressed in class terms. But it is not so
simple. For example, the lower classes find it more difficult to express what
they wish to say, but then they will often encapsulate something in a mean-
ingfully laden way. In other words, they will often say less but mean more,
much in line with Basil Bernstein’s (1971) conceptualization of restricted codes
Engaging the Audience 99

versus elaborate codes. The middle and upper classes engage in more critique
and evaluation of the dimensions of emotion being explored, while the lower
classes bring moral issues to bear on the issue in question sooner.
A further element that was developed from the research was the clarity of
the sense-making process. This sense making is also a part of the larger nar-
rative that individuals develop to create their own narrative. Giddens (1991)
argues that the creation of romantic love is a recent phenomenon in which
the individual can engage in the ongoing story about the self: “The more
post traditional the settings in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle
concerns the very core of identity, its sense making and re-making” (p. 81).
Telenovelas participate in this process by working to create a set of expecta-
tions concerning everyday life clustered around operational, normative, and
aspirational expectations.3
The telenovela provides a larger “window” (as media do in general) to life
than is usually available in everyday life. The success is in the management of
expectations, especially the ones that the audience finds aspirational. This ex-
plains, in part, why recurring themes and outright remakes of telenovelas have
a particular fascination for audiences. Respondents claimed that they derived a
sense of security and certainty from the telenovelas they watched. Melodrama-
telenovela as a form of story telling is among the most predictable. In fact, every
effort is made so that this aspect is clear from the start. The leading couple falls
in love in the beginning so that the audience knows who ends up together; it
then becomes a matter of how they finally overcome all the obstacles in them-
selves and those placed in their way by the antagonists and villains. The tele-
novela becomes a cleansing process in which the heroes suffer and grow as a
result. This is the stuff of anguish in which uncertainty is wrung from every
situation to produce high tension and catharsis as subplots are resolved only to
resurface in further plots until the central plot ends in a grand finale.

NOTES
1. The process of interviewing people with this methodology is a combination of
simplicity and complexity. The simple part is to ask three or four basic questions. The
complex process consists in building the terrain as the respondent talks.
The simple part: The questions used in this technique are deliberately few, allowing
the respondent to talk freely about the topic of the research.
1. “Please separate those photographs that you can identify from those you cannot.”
2. “Of those that are left, identify the two most different photographs.” (The re-
searcher voices the name of each selection.) “Why are they different?”
3. “Of the remaining photographs, which are most similar to one photograph and
which to the other photograph? Or if neither, then what other category can be used to
classify them? Please comment.”
The complex process:
1. Responses generated varied by respondent, as each could elaborate on the differ-
ent categories that he or she established.
2. Building the interview from within. This is achieved by going over the different
comments made, and questions are then asked that extend or amplify what has been
100 Telenovelas

said by the respondent. The researcher typically asks for examples rather than explana-
tions or definitions that will tend to promote a more rational response.
2. The map of constructs that this technique generates can be split in two:
1. The personal experience of everyday life and a mapping of the dimensions and
flux of change in the social imaginary enable an understanding of the social mind-set
and the pragmatic exigencies at a given moment.
2. It allows mapping across time of how people change the way they talk about
things and the way social changes begin to unfold. As certain combinations of things
become thinkable and gain currency in a society, the stock of possible social options
grows. This provides a means of linking the macroworld to the microworld in social
terms while allowing us to explore the complexities of layering and sedimentation.
3. Operational expectations are the actual frontlines set that people use to navigate
their everyday lives (e.g., how they drive in traffic, how they behave at work, and how
they interact with family and in other social environments). They are very pragmatic
expectations that concern how an individual expects others to behave in very concrete
circumstances and prepares responses accordingly.
Normative expectations are those that involve behavioral norms—what is expected
from individuals, their roles, and their social locations. This is derived from Meads’s roles
theory and Garfinkel’s general ethnomethodological work (Collins 1994). They function
as giving guidelines about what ought to be. Aspirational expectations are those that re-
late to the longings and dreams that individuals have about what and how they wish
things to be. These expectations are not commonly found in everyday life, but they are
not entirely foreign either. They tend to be particular occasions such as weddings where
everyone can enjoy, if only vicariously, the glamour of the couple and the occasion. This is
most visible when the outlay is a material one, such as those that revolve around wealth,
stardom, and the winning of prizes. These involve the use of cars, clothes, and activities.
There are also symbolic aspirational expectations such as rites of passage.

REFERENCES
Bernstein, B. 1971. Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language. Vol. 1. London:
Routledge.
Carey, J. 1989. Communication as Culture. London: Unwin Hyman.
Clifford, R. 1998a. “ASBI, Análisis Semántico Basado en la Imagen.” In Técnicas de In-
vestigación en Sociedad, Cultura y Comunicación, edited by Jesús Galindo. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Clifford, R., R. Gómez, and O. Arango. 1998. Imaginario Social de las Telenovelas: Parte
dos, Ciclo uno. Coordinación de Asesores de Presidencia, TV Azteca. México City,
México: TV Azteca.
Collins, Randell. 1994. Four Sociological Traditions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Giddens A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Murdock, G., and G. Phelps. 1973. Mass Media and the Secondary School. London: Mac-
millan Educational.
Ong, W. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.
Sheehy, G. 1984. Passages. New York: Bantam Books.
Silverstone, R. 1994. Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Vazquez, V. 1997. La Vida Misma. Coordinación de Asesores de Presidencia, TV Azteca.
México City, México: TV Azteca.
PART II
CASE STUDIES
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Cultural Identity:
Between Reality and Fiction
A Transformation of Genre and Roles
in Mexican Telenovelas

María de la Luz Casas Pérez

In examining the way people use media, we surmise that media help in shap-
ing the world we live in. They give us ideas, offer interpretation or preferred
meanings, and help us make sense of reality. This is especially true of soap
operas or telenovelas: they help viewers relate to social situations. As some
researchers have stated, audiences are active and derive a variety of mean-
ings from telenovelas (McAnany and LaPastina 1994). Hereby, we state that
telenovelas also help construct cultural identity.
Examples will be given to demonstrate ways in which individuals focus,
give meaning, and relate to other members of their group or class, developing
a sense of cultural differentiation. These parameters are fundamental to un-
derstanding changing roles and social patterns on which, as discussed later,
telenovelas are believed to have certain influence (Kottak 1990).
In defining cultural identity, several notions arise, namely, those of cultural
expression, nationality, and national sentiment. These vary according to the
position and particular philosophy of culture. Culture, and cultural expres-
sion, will hereby be referred to as the basic ingredient of the notion of cultural
identity. As Paul Audley noted, “our culture is expressed not just in works
of art or entertainment, but in all forms of expression that reflect attitudes,
opinions, values and ideas, and in information and analysis concerning the
present as well as the past. Just as an awareness of our collective past is an
essential component of cultural identity, so too is an awareness of what is
happening now” (1983, xxi).
Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world-views,
activities, and settings, an ecology that fundamentally endures but also changes

María de la Luz Casas Pérez: “Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction: A Trans-
formation of Genres and Roles in Mexican Telenovelas,” first published in Television and
New Media, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 407–14.
104 Telenovelas

in routine communication and social interaction: “today familiar resources

ranging from food, language and religious rituals to TV programmes and pop-
ular music are combined by individuals and groups into distinctive cultural
repertoires or tool kits” (Lull 1995, 66). Television has become an important part
of daily routine. In some instances, and particularly for some people, life takes
place according to television programming (Lull 1998).

TELENOVELAS AND LIFE DYNAMICS

Statistics related to telenovela viewing in Latin America indicate that view-
ers are mainly women, although male audiences are increasing. Research
shows that audiences vary from Brazil to Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Peru,
and Mexico and that the purposes of telenovela production are also varied.
In Brazil, telenovelas helped the government spread a changing image of the
nation from rural-regional to urban-national (Kottak 1990); they also helped
women deal with birth-control issues (Population Communications Interna-
tional 1997);1 in Venezuela, telenovelas are a way of expressing female domi-
nation within the family (Barrios, as quoted in McAnany and LaPastina 1994).
In most of Latin America, telenovelas are the preferred show for women, used
as a way of communicating and as linkage among women of different genera-
tions (Covarrubias Cuellar, Bautista, and Uribe 1994).
Patterns of behavior are present in the way audiences deal with televi-
sion. Rituals—regular, constant family activities—are repeated to negotiate
encounters with television. Men are attracted to action movies; women prefer
slow programs in which they can pay attention to details (Muñoz 1992). Tele-
novelas are changing, as are the people who watch them and the way they
deal with whatever beliefs and values telenovelas reproduce. We may there-
fore assume that individual, cultural, and national identities are being trans-
formed by new patterns of consumption and production of media content.
In Mexico, telenovelas are a guaranteed media product. Ninety percent
of homes have at least one television set, and more than 80 percent of view-
ers indicate they watch television daily (Huerta Wong 2001). Changes have
occurred in themes, plots, and in the way characters deal with everyday
problems in telenovelas. Studies report men watching soaps more frequently
than before. Recent evidence in Mexico seems to contradict the masculine
hegemony of the television room (González 1994; Lozano and Martínez 2000;
Huerta Wong 2001), suggesting there is no clear evidence of male dominance
in the decision-making process.

MEXICAN CULTURAL IDENTITIES

AND THEIR PORTRAYAL IN MEDIA
Several observations can be made about cultural representations of lo mexi-
cano throughout the years. Those representations can be related to the emer-
gence of particular media as well. For instance, the representation of male
dominance in music and film in the forties exported a view of machos dressed
in mariachi clothes, happily singing while facing danger. Females would be
Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction 105

represented as companions of, or background to, the main characters, serving

much the same purpose as nice scenery or a fine horse.
For years, Mexican telenovelas consisted mainly of a love triangle in which
a young, beautiful, honest, and poor girl falls in love with a man, usually rich
and usually of a higher social class, and has to overcome all sorts of trouble
caused by an evil third party.2 Some sacrifice would usually be required. Lov-
ers would have to endure pain and sorrow to achieve true love, which would
be the dominant force for cultural cohesion, with marriage as the ultimate so-
cial mechanism for its legitimization. No sordid or deviant behaviors would
be presented, other than those of evil characters. Love and marriage would be
considered the basic components of social integration and stability.
During the eighties and nineties, Mexico gained presence through tele-
novelas around the world but also began to receive cultural influences through
media imports. Venezuelan and Brazilian telenovelas invaded Mexican TV
screens, giving viewers new choices, themes, and representations of love and
relationships.
With the North American influence for more explicit sex on the screen, a
decline in commitment among couples, less focus on marriage as the only
socially accepted institution for the legitimization of relationships, and more
acceptance of premarital sex, Latin Americans looked for alternatives. A cha-
otic world was not explainable through the stability of family as institution;
political and economic turmoil was not resolved through hard work; values
were in crisis. Telenovelas started to include all these elements, offering sex
appeal and visual cadence.
“As society changes, as fashions vary, as personal liberty fluctuates, as
freedom of expression increases, as democracy develops, as alternatives are
born, as justice is sought—then inevitably what we see on television is bound
to change too, to keep up with modern life and trends” (Pearson 1999). There-
fore, as the Mexican social context evolved, female telenovela characters began
to work outside the home and male macho patterns started to fade. Women
began to address issues related to domestic violence, male domination, and
other issues usually avoided within the genre.

A SMALL TOKEN OF CHANGE IN MEXICAN TELENOVELAS

Along with the factors described above, much of the impetus for change
came from shifts in the Mexican media conglomerates. In 1993, the Mexican
government sold part of its media enterprises in a package that included
newspapers, television frequencies, film theatres, and film production com-
panies. Among these was TV Azteca’s channel 13, a television station with
national broadcasting range. Its license was granted to Ricardo Salinas Pliego,
president of Televisión Azteca, today Televisa’s main competitor.
Salinas Pliego quickly understood that to compete, he must produce tele-
novelas, the highest rating programs on Mexican television, with new ways to
address the genre. He hired Epigmenio Ibarra, head of Argos Productions, to
produce a series of telenovelas that soon provoked comments from academia
and critics alike.
106 Telenovelas

Ibarra was trained in film narrative:3 he took the plot outside the stu-
dio, onto the streets. He made extreme changes in camera movements, dia-
logues, and themes. Characters were less fairy-tale-like and more like real,
flawed people. He brought previously ignored subjects such as revenge, bat-
tered women, and betrayal onto the scene. He even portrayed government
bureaucrats and police officers as telenovela characters, addressing issues
of political corruption that were not censored by the government as evi-
dence of openness and proof of the newly acquired freedom of expression
in media.4
Televisa kept its channel 2 (also with national broadcasting range) primar-
ily for the broadcasting of telenovelas, but it worked to diversify its audiences.
The genre evolved and became multitargeted: Televisa’s early afternoon tele-
novelas would be directed at children and young adults, late afternoon ones
at housewives, and late evening telenovelas would be directed at adults, both
male and female. The genre is still evolving, affecting the way Mexicans view
themselves.
The process described above can be illustrated by viewer responses to
two successful telenovelas in Mexico: one from Televisa and one from Az-
teca, emerging from data compiled in 2001 at the Tecnológico de Monterrey
in Campus Cuernavaca, Mexico.5 Episodes of Televisa’s Sin Pecado Concebido
(Conceived Without Sin) were examined alongside episodes of Azteca’s Lo Que
es el Amor (What Love Is). The treatment of new themes and subject matters was
examined by content analyses of episodes of both telenovelas,6 whereas issues
of preferred meanings and interpretation were drawn from focus group ses-
sions with regular relenovela viewers.7
The content analyses showed issues never accounted for in Mexican tele-
novelas, such as male impotence, baldness, homosexuality, AIDS, polygamy,
menopause, battering of women and children, home violence, and fear of
solitude, thus contrasting with strong male figures of earlier soaps and driv-
ing dramatizations more into reality and away from fiction. As to audience
interpretation, focus groups conducted with regard to both telenovelas indi-
cated that viewers saw a need for fantasy to remain true to the genre but also
that they prefer stories closer to reality. Audiences look for stereotypes, which
help to identify good from bad, but appreciate characters that are multifac-
eted, making plots more interesting.
The focus groups’ findings suggested that Azteca’s telenovelas appeal to
young, more educated viewers, whereas Televisa’s are popular with older,
less educated audiences. More educated people reported watching telenove-
las for entertainment and said that they do not believe the situations depicted,
whereas less educated people insisted that they themselves had had prob-
lems similar to those presented and found the information given them help-
ful. Others reported that the treatment of subject matter leads to controversy
within the household but that they watch anyway.
Some viewers who appreciated that telenovelas are now closer to reality
and less predictable also claimed that youngest family members were not al-
lowed to watch. Young viewers in the focus groups said that telenovelas gave
them a sense of fashion and trends. Some indicated that they offer culture,
Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction 107

showing new situations and providing interpretations of reality. A majority

insisted that telenovelas depict reality by presenting Mexican society as it is.
One woman mentioned that telenovelas “teach language and culture” and
that some behavior is imitated by younger viewers.

THE FINAL EPISODE: MEXICAN CULTURAL IDENTITY

IS CHANGING
Media texts are important components of evolving cultural texts written
by complex societies. This is particularly true nowadays because of the glo-
balization of culture and the dynamics of worldwide television production ex-
changes. In Mexico, the genre evolved in concert with political and economic
change. A large, developing country having to deal for the first time with
freedom of expression and democracy had to come to terms with the fact that
reality was more sordid and crude than television had hitherto depicted.
Television producers working with the assumption that after several po-
litical and economic crises, Mexico’s audiences doubted what they saw on
television came to the conclusion that viewers were mature enough to accept
reality with all its flaws. Political, economic, and cultural contexts were finally
represented through telenovelas and articulated and interpreted through lan-
guage and other highly elaborate modes and codes. New role models pertain-
ing to international and cosmopolitan societies were introduced to Mexican
audiences, ones now consisting of people from all genders and socioeconomic
backgrounds instead of just housewives.
New ways of establishing relationships, dealing with personal and social
crises, while still looking for love and affection, entered Mexican telenovela
plots. While still supporting family values, a wider range of social roles for
women have been established. Male characters are slowly moving away from
machista attitudes, confronting more active, outgoing women.
Finally, Mexican telenovelas still carry a dose of fantasy and fiction, but
they slowly resemble more real-drama situations. The hybridization of the
genre is bringing about a new kind of media product, one that is probably
unique in nature when compared to other soap operas in the world.

CONCLUSIONS
Cultural identity traits are interwoven with reality and fiction in Mexican
telenovelas. Mexicans seem to prefer greater doses of reality instead of fairy-
tale-type stories in new telenovelas; however, they remain faithful to the genre
conventions when trying to evade problems. For example, new role models
and patterns of behavior are being established for viewers—especially women,
shown as professionals working outside the home and dealing with situations
that were traditionally the province of the male. Nonetheless, stereotypes are
still used to generate preferred meanings (for example, handsome men and
women models promote desired patterns of beauty), and a basic element of
telenovelas in relation to Mexican cultural identity remains: poor, honest char-
acters suffer injustice at the hands of the elite, and love will prevail.
108 Telenovelas

Mexican telenovelas now avoid cultural references and colloquial terms

and language to enhance their usefulness for export as international prod-
ucts. Home consumption means that viewers are adopting a more cosmo-
politan, internationalized jargon. The traditional characteristics of Mexican
cultural identity—religion, language, national character, and history—are
slowly being mixed with new elements, thus appealing to a wider, more glo-
balized audience.
Mexican telenovelas today are deeply engaged in the overall issue of re-
flecting a complex, dynamic, yet conservative cultural community while
transforming identity into that of a more cosmopolitan, mature, liberal, and
modern society. Further research has to be conducted to generate more evi-
dence that will support these conclusions. However, the evidence so far avail-
able suggests that themes and subject matters, treatments of content, and
styles of production in the newest Mexican telenovela productions are begin-
ning to influence patterns of cultural identity.

NOTES
1. Carolina and Scarlet, the characters of the main Brazilian telenovela A Indomi-
nada (The Indomitable) openly discuss their views on sex and reproduction. This inter-
twining of educational information and drama is part of the success of this production
of Population Communications International/Brasil that has been designed to com-
municate sexual orientation and reproductive health information within the plot. A
study conducted by the University of São Paulo on this telenovela alone indicates that
telenovelas have contributed significantly to the reduction of birth rates in Brazil (Pop-
ulation Communications International 1997).
2. As pointed out by Katz and Liebes (as quoted in McAnany and LaPastina 1994),
audiences recognize the fictional nature of the genre and the functioning of its rules,
thus conceding that this formula is far closer to fiction than to reality; nonetheless,
viewers accept the deal and play along (see McAnany and LaPastina 1994, 837).
3. Ibarra was mostly trained as a journalist doing film documentaries. This ex-
plains in part why his treatment of telenovelas related more to reality than to fiction.
4. The first Argos productions set the path for a radical transformation in social
acceptance of certain subject matters, but the telenovela that truly transformed the
institution of marriage and opened sexual taboos for discussion was Mirada de Mujer.
5. A group of students and professors of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Campus
Cuernavaca, Mexico, carried out the study between the months of August and Decem-
ber 2001. Special thanks for this data must be given to Dr. Juan Ricardo Cojuc, Dr. Ilya
Adler, Silvia Soria, and their students.
6. The viewing sample for both telenovelas consisted of taped episodes from a typi-
cal viewing week (Monday to Friday), August 20-24. This particular viewing week
was selected considering that both competing telenovelas shared the same time slot
(which is considered primetime programming for each network), were at their peak
viewing, and reported high ratings at the time. Quantitative and qualitative content
analyses were applied to five episodes of each telenovela: five to Televisa’s Sin Pecado
Concebido and five to TV Azteca’s Lo Que es el Amor. Ten key scenes were selected from
each telenovela and carefully analyzed by three groups of students, leading first to the
individual identification of visual, verbal, and nonverbal units of content and mean-
ing, and then to discussion among groups at length. At the same time, four focus
groups were conducted to gather elements of interpretation directly from audiences.
Participants of a variety of sociodemographic characteristics were randomly selected
Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction 109

to participate, the only prerequisite being that they would be regular telenovela view-
ers. The bridge of comparison was thus created by the audience between the quantita-
tive part of the analysis and the qualitative ways of interpreting preferred meanings.
7. For a complete review on theory and critique of the genre, see Pearson (1999).

REFERENCES
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Toronto, Canada: James Lorimer and the Canadian Institute for Economic Policy.
Covarrubias Cuellar, K., A. Bautista, and B. A. Uribe. 1994. Cuéntame en Qué se Quedó:
La telenovela como Fenómeno Social. Mexico City, Mexico: Trillas.
González, J. A. 1994. Más (+) Cultura(s): Ensayos sobre Realidades Plurales. Mexico City,
Mexico: Consejo Nacional par la Cultura y las Artes.
Huerta Wong, J. E. 2001. “No le Cambies a mi Novela: Dominación y Negociación entre
Géneros en el Acto de Ver Televisión.” Paper presented at the annual conference at
the Universidad de las Americas, Bienal Iberoamericana de Comunicación: Global-
ización, tecnologia y culturas, Puebla, México.
Kottak, C. P. 1990. Prime Time Society: An Anthropological Analysis of Television and Cul-
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Lozano, J. C., and F. C. Martínez. 2000. “Consumo y Lecturas Negociadas de Noticieros
Televisivos en Monterrey, Guadalajara y México.” Paper presented at the Congreso
Anual 2000 de la International Communication Association, Acapulco, México.
Lull, J. 1995. Media, Communications, Culture: A Global Approach. New York: Columbia
University Press.
———. 1998. “Constructing Rituals of Extension through Family Television Viewing.”
In World Families Watch Television, edited by J. Lull. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
McAnany, E., and Antonio LaPastina. 1994. “Telenovela Audiences: A Review and
Methodological Critique of Latin America Research.” Communication Research 21
(6): 828–49.
Muñoz, S. 1992. “Mundos de Vida y Modos de Ver.” In Televisión y Melodrama, edited by
J. B. Martín and S. Muñoz. Bogota, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores.
Pearson, R. 1999. “Genre, Convention and Evolution: The Changing Face of the Mexi-
can Telenovela.” Master’s thesis, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
Population Communications International. 1997. A Indomindada. Available at [Link]
.[Link]/la/descripciones/lapdsbrasil/[Link].
Fact or Fiction?
Narrative and Reality
in the Mexican Telenovela

Rosalind C. Pearson

Telenovelas are to Mexico what soap operas are to England—an essential in-
gredient in the tradition, culture, and history of a country. The advent of tele-
vision, the tradition of radionovelas, and the taste for melodrama awakened
by the films of the Epoca de Oro period in the 1940s in Mexico gave the first
telenovelas a highly successful style and format. Audiences were immedi-
ately captivated, and today, Mexicans young and old carry on with this sixty-
year-old tradition, demanding an ever-increasing investment on the part of
the television companies to provide for the steadily growing consumption of
telenovelas.
Changes have inevitably occurred in the style and format of the typical
Mexican telenovela, but the basic ingredients of a love interest, complicated
family relationships, unreal dialogue, and the poor striving to be rich still
form the basis of the average telenovela. Its length varies from as little as three
months to occasionally, if successful, perhaps eighteen to twenty months.
During this time, a huge amount of activity takes place, including the de-
velopment of exaggerated and fantastic situations based on lies, gossip, and
apparently, unattainable desires. The changes in recent telenovelas lie most
obviously in the use of film techniques, development of narrative styles, and
moves toward more socially realistic treatment of subject matter.
As closed narrative texts, telenovelas differ from their Australian, English,
or American soap opera cousins. There are a very definite beginning, middle,
and end to every Mexican telenovela; what happens on the way through these
states in terms of narrative involves a style and treatment of subject matter

Author’s Note: The research at Tecnológico de Monterrey was carried out by three
groups of students under the guidance of Dr. Ricardo Cojuc, Dr. Ilya Adler, and Silvia Soria
during the August-to-December 2001 semester.
Rosalind C. Pearson: “Fact or Fiction? Narrative and Reality in the Mexican Telenovela,”
first published in Television and New Media, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 400–406.
Fact or Fiction? Narrative and Reality in the Mexican Telenovela 111

designed to make sure audiences are “hooked” enough to want to tune in

every day to watch the heroes and heroines go through disaster after disaster,
before somehow arriving at a happy ending. How close this treatment is to
reality is at issue here; how much telenovelas are based on fact or fiction, or
a mixture of both, is the question, and this article will attempt a discussion
of the narrative style and structure of the Mexican telenovela in relation to
the changes currently being experienced by the genre and in relation to how
“reality” is negotiated.

FACT VS. FICTION

The issue of “reality” is particularly pertinent at the moment, especially
with the advent of what is known as “reality TV.” Reality TV shows have
been seen in the United States, England, and other countries during the past
couple of years, and some of these shows have been imported and shown in
Mexico on cable television, with limited success. Now the home-made ver-
sion, a Mexican version of Big Brother (produced by Televisa, starting in March
2002), is going out on a national network, and it will be interesting to see how
this will impact telenovela audiences. In the meantime, the five or six hours
a day of telenovelas shown on two national television channels (Televisa’s
channel 2 and TV Azteca’s channel 13) are the staple diet for many millions
of Mexicans who will perhaps find it hard to abandon their handsome heroes
and beautiful heroines living out a semirealistic fantasy.
Telenovela scriptwriters can hardly be compared to Dickens or Balzac, but
what they do have in common is an attempt to get “under the surface of ide-
ology to reveal the ‘true’ relations between people and their source in class
struggles” (O’Sullivan et al. 1994, 258). If we take this literally, the “true rela-
tions” refer to the inevitable struggle between men and women, be it married
couples, boyfriends and girlfriends, brothers and sisters, mothers and sons,
whatever the combination, that in the Mexican telenovela is always the crux
of the action. Much of the resultant angst is due to “class struggles”: the poor
trying to be rich, a working-class fatherless son or daughter suddenly discover-
ing a rich father, the typical Cinderella-type story, The dominant ingredient in
any telenovela is the love story, but the smooth passage of this love interest is
always thwarted, traditionally by melodramatic tensions of infidelity, betrayal,
and lies, and more recently with the added tensions of politics and social issues.
The melodrama is still very definitely there, but it is a level of melodrama that
reflects perhaps somewhat more realistically the average Mexican’s daily life.
Telenovela scripts, or texts, are narratives that “can be seen as the devices
and strategies, the conventions and sequencing of events with characteriza-
tion, which constitute a story, be it fictional or factual” (Newbold 1995, 444).
A telenovela is a story, and every story has a narrative structure that is a very
important part of understanding texts, as well as being essential to the recog-
nition of genres. “Narratives are sequences of events, settings and characters
arranged in a logical order through time, the sequence being driven by cause
and effect” (Abercrombie 1996, 19). These events, settings, and characters are
immediately recognizable and identifiable as being of today, thus “the use of
112 Telenovelas

representational devices (signs, conventions, narrative strategies, and so on)

to depict or portray a physical, social or moral universe” (O’Sullivan et al.
1994, 257) is the basis of all telenovela narrative structures. We can therefore
talk about telenovelas offering a constructed reality or a reflection of real life.
Even for documentary filmmakers, it is difficult to depict reality without
imposing some form of subjectivity into the structure, but the telenovela as a
story is what is deemed fiction, and fiction gives us stories about a world, as
opposed to the world (Nichols 1991, 113), an imaginary world that allows the
characters to do things that we would not necessarily call realistic. Fiction
allows us to be tricked and entertained, intrigued and excited, tempted and
concerned. We recognize a world and its people, places, and things, but “the
resemblance is fundamentally metaphorical. . . . It is a likeness rather than
a replica” (Nichols 1991, 109). Fiction offers a version of events, settings, and
characters, but only insofar as they are useful to the narrative form and rel-
evant to the plot and subplots forming the story. The narrative is essential to
the unfolding of a story; as Ellis says, “the narrative is a tight organization
of actions and themes in a pattern of crisis, innovation and repetition that is
orchestrated to a particular resolution” (1999, 67). Nichols likens narrative to a
“black hole” where everything is drawn “within its ambit inward, organizing
everything from décor and clothing to dialogue and action to serve a story”
(1991, 142). If this is true, then reality has to take a back seat; the only thing
“real” about a telenovela is its loose connection to the world we recognize.
The language or dialogue used in telenovela narratives “can be interpreted
to refer to or reference the world” (Hall 1997, 22). The language used is the clue to
how audiences make sense of what they are seeing. Meanings are constructed
through “representation” that provides the “link between concepts and lan-
guage which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people or
events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events”
(Hall 1997, 17). Language is therefore used to convey meaning, but language,
in all its richness, is not able to accurately convey, reflect, or represent the real
world. Thus, language too helps in the construction of a world.
New telenovelas are often remakes of old stories, refritos, as they are called
in Spanish. The public often know what is going to happen in a story, but
what they do not know is how the story is to be narrated. The how includes
what Fiske refers to as “the cultural specificity or ideology of a narrative (that)
lies in the way this deep structure is transformed into apparently different
stories, that is, in which actions and individuals are chosen to perform the
functions and character roles” (1987, 138). This relates also to Solomon’s belief
that “the search for underlying patterns . . . can relate a particular cultural or
artistic experience to some universal truth about human nature or the society
we live in” (1995, 457). Television programs—and telenovelas are no excep-
tion—present a view of the world that is acceptable and in line with the audi-
ence’s expectations and beliefs, a view that is not questioned but assumed to
be the norm. Our common sense guides us, and that is why we accept what
telenovela characters do in a given situation; as Abercrombie says, “the world
of television texts is therefore a commonsense world in which much is taken
for granted” (1996, 32).
Fact or Fiction? Narrative and Reality in the Mexican Telenovela 113

The narrative structure of a text that involves the telling of a story is com-
monly acknowledged to represent the dominant ideology and rarely attempts
to upset the status quo of a particular culture. Good always triumphs over
evil, order over disorder, and in the language of telenovela, love wins out de-
spite crimes, murders, lies, treachery, and the like. The Virgin of Guadalupe
(the Mexican Virgin) has a strong role to play in this sequence of events, being
called on repeatedly to help the “good” characters win out over the “bad”
characters. Since in popular culture, “the narrative structure is likely to be
used in favour of the status quo” (Fiske 1987, 140), there is a feeling of comfort
and security engendered by these texts, particularly the Mexican telenovela.
The Bulgarian structuralist Todorov believed that “narratives are to do with
very fundamental ways in which societies see themselves” (Abercrombie
1996, 23), and the telenovela, with its closed-text format and its beginning,
middle, and happy ending, represents Todorov’s theory of narrative in which
a harmonious situation (the beginning) is disrupted (the middle) before the
reestablishment of harmony (the ending).
The narrative conveys a meaning that is part of the way a society sees it-
self, or as Fiske (1987, 142) says, there is an “interweaving of voices which are
shared by reader and writer and which cross the boundaries of the text itself
to link it to other texts and to culture in general.” We know that telenovelas
are fiction and that fiction takes us into an invented world, but we also know
that telenovelas are an accepted part of everyday life. The world created on
the screen is a recognizable one, even more so today now that telenovelas
have progressed to including more socially realistic themes. “The telenovela
is a text of our time, a product of our culture, a total example and expression
of our society. The telenovela portrays us, reinvents us, imitates us, reflects
us” (Galindo 1998, 152, my translation).
Telenovelas, as fiction, entertain; they are dramatic, funny, tedious, emo-
tional, occasionally horrific, exaggerated, and informative. Telenovelas, as
representative of reality, reflect everyday life in Mexico; they highlight social
issues such as drug abuse, domestic violence, rape, sex before marriage, inse-
curity in the streets; they inform and educate at the same time as entertain;
they enter our imagination and charge our emotions. They are a microcosm
of Mexican life and culture, with the drama of daily life translating into the
melodrama of telenovela life. Melodrama synthesizes the real with the unreal,
it pushes common occurrences into the realm of fantasy, and it provides a level
of emotional involvement for audiences that guarantees their participation in
the development of the telenovela. But as Gledhill points out, deciding “which
meanings, which definitions of reality, will win the consent of the audience”
(1997, 353) is all-important; that is the difference between success and failure.
The relation between the fictional and real worlds is necessarily compli-
cated, as complicated as defining realism. Fiske goes so far as to say that
“television [is] an essentially realistic medium because of its ability to carry a
socially convincing sense of the real. Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to
an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which
a sense of reality is constructed” (Fiske 1987, 21). He says that realism “makes
sense of the real” (p. 25), that it is “a reactionary mode of representation that
114 Telenovelas

promotes and naturalizes the dominant ideology” (p. 36). The dominant ide-
ology, or preferred meaning, is always present in Mexican telenovelas, but
so too are alternative meanings, meanings that the audience—depending on
educational and social levels—actively interpret. “People can . . . enjoy soap
operas or telenovelas even though they may be ideologically consistent with
dominant values. But, at the same time, they may take up these pleasures and
use them to critique these same values” (Brown 1994, 5). Scriptwriters and
producers have the double-edged duty of keeping existing audiences captive
while trying to attract new ones. It is all-important for the script—the nar-
rative—to be creative, which means that “topicality, being up-to-date, [and]
controversy . . . [are] all vital factors in the form’s continuance” (Gledhill 1997,
361). This need for cultural verisimilitude is something that roots telenovela
narratives in the world, a world separate from fiction but identifiable immedi-
ately with what is real.
This is particularly the case in what we term the “new-style” telenovelas
seen on TV Azteca during the past seven or eight years. Lo Que es el Amor
(What Love Is) seen in 2001-02 might not have turned out as it did if TV Az-
teca had not experimented with Argos TV and its ideas for reinvigorating
the genre (see Pearson 1999). This telenovela features a group of “yuppies,”
working in the stock exchange, who never seem to actually do any work and
to whom the most extraordinary things happen. Themes include topics such
as male sexual impotence, baldness, obsessive behavior, gang fights, divorce,
murder, blackmail, infidelity, lies, homosexuality, and cancer (to mention a
few!), and their behavior, lifestyle, and clothing represent a completely upper-
middle-class standard of living.
In research carried out at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Cuer-
navaca, in autumn of 2001, these “new-style” telenovelas were viewed by focus
group members as “more realistic” and as entertaining enough to “make you
forget reality for a moment.” Themes were considered to be “realistic,” but the
handling of situations was not. What is presented and identified as a lifelike
situation to begin with then moves into exaggeration and extreme circum-
stances, moving it away from reality. Themes hitherto considered unsuitable
for telenovelas—or indeed television in Mexico—are now being treated, but
at the same time, the stereotypical good and bad characters are still present.
Lo Que es el Amor came on at 9 p.m., in direct competition with Sin Pecado
Concebido (Conceived without Sin) on Televisa’s channel 2. This latter produc-
tion was much more representative of the “classic” telenovela and had consis-
tently higher ratings. Televisa is also moving with the times, but its move to
a more socially realistic treatment has been much slower and more gradual.
They are not losing audiences; they are slowly convincing audiences of the
new trends. TV Azteca, as the new rival only in existence since 1993, needs to
be innovative and trend-setting to win audiences, but what they are discov-
ering is that audiences are not necessarily being taken away from Televisa;
rather, the audience base is growing.
Fact or Fiction? Narrative and Reality in the Mexican Telenovela 115

CONCLUSION
There is room for more telenovelas; there is room for more audience. New
ideas and treatment of the typical telenovela are rejuvenating the genre and
providing a much-needed injection to the format. We can conclude, therefore,
that telenovelas today are indeed a mixture of fact and fiction, with the equa-
tion moving up and down as needed. Telenovelas are fiction and they enter-
tain—this is a fact. Their relationship to reality is at the same time stronger
and more pronounced, but their treatment of this issue is very much bound
into the more traditional desires of audiences to be entertained and trans-
ported away from their own particular reality. “Television is pushed by the
demand that it should entertain. It is pulled by the competition for audiences
into any amount of trivia and sensationalism” (Ellis 1999, 69); television view-
ing is so much a part of life in Mexico that for some, television almost is re-
ality. “Life is like a telenovela” is often the refrain uttered by Mexicans, old
and young, male and female. Telenovelas are a way of life in Mexico, as are
chisme (gossip), mentiras (lies), and infidelidad (infidelity). It is all indefatigably
intertwined, so much so that the line between the world and a world is often
difficult to distinguish.

REFERENCES
Abercrombie, N. 1996. Television and Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Brown, M. E. 1994. Soap Opera and Women’s Talk. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ellis, J. 1999. “Television as Working-Through.” In Television and Common Knowledge,
edited by J. Gripsrud. London: Routledge.
Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge.
Galindo, J. 1998. “Lo Cotidiano y lo Social: La Telenovela como Texto y Pretexto.” In La
Cofradía de las Emociones (Interminables): Miradas sobre Telenovelas en México, edited
by J. Galindo. Guadalajara, México: Universidad de Guadalajara.
Gledhill, C. 1997. “Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera.” In Representation: Cul-
tural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by S. Hall. London: Sage.
Hall, S. 1997. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representations
and Signifying Practices, edited by S. Hall. London: Sage.
Newbold, C. 1995. “Analysing the Moving Image.” In Approaches to Media, edited by O.
Boyd-Barratt and C. Newbold. London: Edward Arnold.
Nichols, B. 1991. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
O’Sullivan, T., J. Hartley, D. Saunders, M. Montgomery, and J. Fiske. 1994. Key Concepts
in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Pearson, R. 1999. “Genre, Convention and Evolution: The Changing Face of the Mexi-
can Telenovela.” Master’s thesis, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
Solomon, S. J. 1995. “Defining Genre/Genre and Popular Culture.” In Approaches to
Media, edited by O. Boyd-Barrett and C. Newbold. London: Edward Arnold.
Whose Life in the Mirror?
Examining Three Mexican Telenovelas as
Cultural and Commercial Products

Laura J. Beard

In “The Cofraternity of (Un)Finishable Emotions: Constructing Mexican Tele-

novelas,” Jorge A. González asserts that telenovelas are, “together with the
Boom writers, the most current and vital cultural product that Latin American
countries export to the world and share among themselves” (60). Brazil’s lead-
ing television network, Rede Globo, for example, which was the fourth-largest
commercial television network in the world in the 1980s after ABC, CBS and
NBC, had by 1988 exported television programs, particularly telenovelas, to
130 countries throughout the world (Tufte 2, 20). These popular serial televi-
sion programs, broadcast during the afternoon and evening hours, are usu-
ally shown Monday through Friday and last for several months. In Mexico,
the most popular telenovelas often have a one-hour episode on a weekend
evening that shows the week’s highlights so that viewers who missed epi-
sodes may catch up on the important parts. Thus, the production and the
consumption of the telenovela differ both from U.S. soap operas, which are
shown during the day and may last years, but also from U.S. situation com-
edies or dramas, which appear only once a week during the evening hours.
As vital cultural products viewed by millions of people on a daily basis, tele-
novelas contribute to the social construction of gender in Latin America.
Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
stresses that it is “impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and
cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (3).
Gender is a performative act, socially constructed and perpetually re-enacted
and reinforced. As Butler sets out the terms of sex, gender and desire, gender
is not merely the juridical conception of the cultural inscription of meaning
on a pregiven sex, but also the designation of “the very apparatus of produc-
tion whereby the sexes themselves are established” (7). Butler’s discussion of
gender thus explores how the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gen-

Laura J. Beard: “Whose Life in the Mirror?: Examining Three Mexican Telenovelas as
Cultural and Commercial Products,” first published in Studies in Latin American Popular
Culture vol. 22 (2003): 73–88.
Whose Life in the Mirror? 117

der configurations within culture are presupposed and preempted in part by

the limits of what, within a given culture, that language sees as “the imagin-
able domain of gender” (9).
An important factor to be examined in the social construction of gender
in Mexico is the role of telenovelas in the production and maintenance of
cultural meaning. As popular commercial television programs successfully
marketed to a large audience, telenovelas take part in forming what can be
seen as “the imaginable domain of gender.” Telenovelas can serve to main-
tain ideological hegemony or, very occasionally, to question certain aspects
of a system. In Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis
comments on how the discourse of dominant cinema performs “a political
function in the service of cultural domination including, but not limited to,
the sexual exploitation of women and the repression or containment of female
sexuality” (26). Such an assertion can be made of telenovelas as well. As de
Lauretis notes, often the only way to position oneself outside of a dominant
discourse is “to displace oneself within it” (7).
In this article, I analyze gender roles as well as racial and class politics in
three Mexican telenovelas that were airing on Mexican television during the
1999–2000 academic year I spent as a Fulbright Senior Scholar doing research
on the social construction of gender in Mexico. In the telenovelas discussed,
I look both for the places where the telenovelas assert their own ideologies
“with a vengeance,” as de Lauretis would put it (157), and for the ruptures
and contradictions in the otherwise smooth fabric of those ideologies, places
where resistance can be located and celebrated. Of the many telenovelas air-
ing during that year I was in Mexico, the three discussed in this article were
chosen as representative of the ways in which telenovelas both reinforce
ideological hegemony and, on certain rare occasions and to a limited extent,
question it. “Laberintos de Pasión” (Televisa) represents the genre of the tele-
novelas set on haciendas (large plantation dwellings), and demonstrates par-
ticularly rigid patriarchal gender and class roles. “El Candidato” (TV Azteca),
while following in many aspects the norms of the stereotypical urban tele-
novela set in Mexico City amongst the rich and powerful, advertises itself as
a “telenovela interactiva” and is of particular interest for the ways in which it
includes aspects of the year’s political presidential campaigns, as a comment
on electoral politics in Mexico. “La Vida en el Espejo” (TV Azteca), one of the
most popular telenovelas of the year, is innovative in its efforts to reflect life
more realistically, to show, as its title indicates, “life in the mirror.”1
“Laberintos de Pasión” is a product of Televisa, the largest producer of tele-
novelas in the world. Televisa produces 70 percent of the Hispanic language
segment of the U.S. market and co-produces 50 percent of the series shot in
Latin America (“Telenovelas: Love, TV, and Power”). The centrality of tele-
novelas in the Televisa company seems implicitly acknowledged by Televisa’s
webpage, which shows a sexy young woman and the greeting “Bienvenido a la
fábrica de los sueños” before going on to note that it is “el conglomerado de medios
más importante en español” ([Link] Indeed, Televisa
San Angel, owned by Emilio Azcárraga (cited by Fortune magazine as one
of the richest men in the world), is its own city, employing 6,500 people who
work at 11 studios, a self-sufficient world where everything from the sets to
the costumes is produced by Televisa, and where the actors even receive acting
118 Telenovelas

classes on site (“Telenovelas: Love, TV, and Power”). Seven or eight episodes
are shot a day, six days a week, as continuing to produce the profitable cultural
product maintains the fortune for the company and its owner. While the im-
pact of the telenovela phenomenon on the international market can be seen in
the example of Televisa, Televisa’s fortune is based on its four national chan-
nels and 200 regional channels, with an indisputable hegemony that is built
on strong relations with the political powers in Mexico. Televisa has its own
set of ethical principles regarding what is appropriate for telenovelas, so that
no matter what the topic, the story must conclude on a note of hope and love,
allowing viewers to be able to go to bed free from stress. Televisa does not con-
ceive of telenovelas as being educational but rather as reflecting some aspect
of reality, with family and true love as the most important elements. Good
acts should be rewarded and bad acts punished, affirm the Televisa executives
interviewed in the video “Telenovelas: Love, TV, and Power.” A traditional,
hegemonic ideology is thus being strictly maintained by the telenovelas pro-
duced by Televisa.
In addition to the ethical principles that are a part of Televisa’s own conser-
vative ideology are those imposed by the Mexican government. Televisa has
a Department of Literary Supervision, with employees who know the ethi-
cal and moral rules stipulated by the secretariat to the Mexican government
which supervises and controls censorship. The department makes sure that
Televisa employees all know these rules, together with the rules of the com-
pany. Readers can refuse a scenario that appears in a script and explain why
it cannot be broadcast. An author who has many years of experience writing
with Televisa knows the rules and abides by them, noted a Televisa executive
interviewed in “Telenovelas: Love, TV, and Power.”
Televisa’s “Laberintos de Pasión” is set in the fictional town of San Vin-
cente, mostly taking place on a ranch called “El Castillo.” In the world of
“Laberintos de Pasión,” the man’s home is truly his castle, for this telenovela
showcases traditional gender roles where the father is the patriarch who rules
absolutely in the house and on the ranch. Both male and female children are
expected to obey the father, and the wife is not allowed to contradict her hus-
band’s dictums. The wife is passive, the husband controlling. The father on
the ranch is Genaro Valencia, a violent man who had apparently murdered
his first wife, appears to be responsible for the death of the beloved grand-
father of the telenovela’s heroine, Julieta Valderrama, and will, by the end of
the telenovela, attempt to kill both his second wife and his foreman. Genaro
has two sons, Pedro and Cristóbal, the first whom he favors and the second
whom he considers weak. The main love story, complicated by both main
and secondary love triangles, is between Pedro and Julieta. In this stereotypi-
cal, melodramatic telenovela, the evil Genaro wears a black hat and the good
Pedro dons a white hat.
A representative scene exemplifying the traditional patriarchal gender
roles and the absolute control males expect to exert over the women in their
families is one aired on November 15, 1999. The daughter of a prominent fam-
ily in town, Alejandra Sandoval, disobeys her father and leaves the house, in
this case only going to talk to the village priest—hardly a grave transgression,
but one that puts her on the street alone in the evening. Her father happens
Whose Life in the Mirror? 119

to see her on the street, becomes furious, yells at her, grabs her, and pushes
her around. When another person in the town protests the father’s treatment
of the daughter, he responds, “Esta niña es mi hija y la trato como me de la
gana.” Throughout the telenovela, the women are seen as property of the men
to be treated as such.
“Laberintos de Pasión” is a stereotypical melodrama, with love triangles,
cases of forbidden love, and climactic announcements coming at the end
of each episode to keep audiences interested enough to return for the next
night’s episode. One of the conventions of telenovelas (and soap operas) is for
each capitulo to be interrupted a number of times by commercials, so that the
scene preceding each commercial break ends with a tag line enticing enough
that viewers will stay tuned to watch the rest of the show. When writers
work on a script, they must order the segments of the scenes to work up to
the tag lines before commercials, putting the second-best tag line before the
longest commercial break and the best tag line before the end of the show to
leave viewers hanging, wanting to come back the next day. In “Laberintos,”
not only are the tag lines carefully scripted, but the most climactic scenes
take place during dramatic thunderstorms. In the episode of November 18,
1999, Genaro tells Cristóbal that he is useless, that their being related is only
an accident as Cristóbal obviously shares none of his characteristics. Cris-
tóbal, angry and hurt, goes crashing out of the house, rushing to Julieta to
share his despair with her. She tries to comfort him, telling him that he mat-
ters to her, that he will always have her, Pedro hears her words, misinterprets
them as declarations of love, Pedro and Cristóbal have a huge fight, Cristóbal
goes off in his pickup truck, already drunk, and crashes, ending up partially
paralyzed. The entire scene happens during a spectacular nighttime thun-
derstorm. Similarly, in the November 25, 1999, episode, when Gabriel, the
man who raised Julieta, finally tells her that his love for her is not that of a
father for a daughter but that of a man for a woman, Julieta goes running off
into a thunderstorm.
A main case of forbidden love is that of Diego and Alejandra. Diego is the
son of Magdalena, a servant at El Castillo. He falls in love with Alejandra
Sandoval, the daughter of a prominent attorney in town. Not only would this
love affair be deemed inappropriate according to the very strict class lines in
San Vincente, but Diego does not realize that Alejandra is his half-sister. In
the episode of December 3, 1999, Diego’s mother goes to see Arturo Sandoval
to tell him that she thinks it is time that Diego knows who his father is. While
Arturo forbids her to tell anyone, she tells him that Diego and Alejandra are
falling in love and that the only way to prevent it is for her to tell Diego the
truth. At this point, Arturo’s wife Sara enters and gets angry at seeing “that
woman” in her husband’s office. Sara has no idea of their previous relation-
ship but thinks that the woman is of low class, una cualquiera. The lawyer tells
Magdalena not to worry, to let him take care of the issue. He seeks to impose
his will without letting his wife see what his connection to Magdalena truly
is. He then announces to his wife that this time he really is going to send
Alejandra away, to lock her up in a convent. Although his wife had disagreed
when he tried to send Alejandra to a convent before, she agrees now because
she does not want her daughter associating herself with a low-class young
120 Telenovelas

man. That the threat of their daughter having relations with a man of a lower
class is enough to justify such a drastic measure shows how important the
maintenance of class distinctions is to the characters of this telenovela. This
episode also provides the attorney with another opportunity to announce,
“Ella es mi hija y ella tiene que hacer lo que yo diga.” A daughter is seen as
the father’s property to be disposed of at his will.
Not wanting to enter a convent, Alejandra runs away to her brother Benja-
min to seek his help. Meanwhile, Rosendo has been sent by his boss Genaro to
take care of Benjamin, since Benjamin is thwarting Genaro’s nefarious plans
to obtain Julieta’s property. When Alejandra enters her brother’s hotel room,
she is attacked from behind and strangled to death. The episode ends with
her body on the ground, and Julieta announcing to her father, with Benjamin
also looking on, “Lo siento mucho, pero su hija está muerta.” Alejandra is an
object always already possessed by a male. She never controls her own fate.
“Laberintos de Pasión” has an unusual heroine, Julieta Valderrama, in that,
unlike most unmarried young women in Mexican telenovelas, she has short
hair. She is also blond and studied to be a medical doctor. Although a stronger
character than Alejandra and in spite of her professional training, she is also
expected to know her place as a female in this very patriarchal society. In the
episode of November 24, 1999, when Rosendo (the evil foreman of El Castillo)
encounters Julieta at night, he tells her she is too pretty to be alone in a house.
When she claims she knows how to protect herself, he reminds her, “Aunque
tengas muchos pantalones, eres mujer y eso te pone en peligro.” The very fact
that she is female puts her in danger in this society any time she is without
the protection of a male.
In the episode of December 9, 1999, another of the evil characters, Javier
Merino, shows up at night when Julieta is alone in Gabriel’s house and as-
saults her. Julieta is resisting his attack, calling out for help, when Gabriel
arrives and pulls Javier off her. The night’s episode ends in that dramatic
moment. The next night’s episode opens in the same moment, with Gabriel’s
masculine fury aroused, ready to kill Javier, but Julieta asks him to stop, tells
him it is enough, that he should just get rid of Javier. The scenes reinforce
the sense that Julieta, or any woman, is not safe alone in a house, but always
needs a man to protect her from the predatory impulses of other men. Other
scenes in which Magdalena is attacked by Rosendo, or in which Alejandra is
killed by Rosendo, also underscore this message.
Pedro talks to his uncle Mateo, the village priest, who tells him, apropos of
Alejandra’s death, that you never know when your day will come and so you
need to work out your life to be happy. Pedro rides off on his horse to see Julieta,
whom he finds sitting by the banks of the river, in the stereotypical romantic
setting. When he tries to kiss her, she pushes him away, forgetting about his in-
jury from a gunshot wound that has not been healing properly. When she then
gets concerned, fussing over him, he looks at her tenderly, “Júrame que no me
quieres, júrame que no estás moriendo de ganas de que te bese, júrame.” Since
she cannot swear to him, they kiss. But Julieta is promptly reminded of her
proper place by one of her paternal proxies, Llauro, who tells her, “Acuérdate de
que este muchacho está casado y por lo tanto tú no tienes el derecho ni de mi-
Whose Life in the Mirror? 121

rarlo.” Rules are strict in San Vincente and Pedro and Julieta, for all their grand
love and passion, should not be kissing by romantic rivers. Meanwhile, Pedro is
reminded by his grandmother, in the episode of December 8, 1999, that “Si Dios
quiere que sea para ti, asi va a ser, pasa lo que pase.” In a Catholic culture, one
can always put one’s faith in God to work out the details of one’s labyrinthine
love life. While the telenovela enforces strict rules regarding proper behavior
in a conservative Mexican society, it also must fulfill its generic role as a love
story that makes people dream, following Televisa’s ethical principles to leave
viewers always with hope and love, free from stress.
Each episode of “Laberintos de Pasión” opens with the characters chasing
each other through an outdoor maze of bushes, appearing and disappear-
ing. Viewers usually get just enough of a glimpse to see who they are. The
telenovela closes and cuts to commercial breaks with a mariachi theme song.
Most telenovelas have their theme song at the beginning and the end of each
episode, but not at commercial breaks. Having the theme song interrupt the
chapters of the telenovela underlines the artificial aspect of this cultural prod-
uct. For “Laberintos de Pasión” is quite contrived, playing off every cliché of
the genre while it serves to maintain ideological hegemony in terms of gender
roles and class and racial politics.
Both “El Candidato” and “La Vida en el Espejo” are productions of TV Az-
teca, which has, on its website, the slogan “Historias que te inspiran a pensar,
sentir y sonar como nunca antes.” TV Azteca has its own publicly stated belief
regarding the purpose of television:

La televisión es relater historias, tanto las historias verdaderas del periodismo

en televisión que nos mantienen informadas acerca de lo que está ocurriendo
en nuestro mundo, como los dramas y comedias que nos ayudan a compren-
der quiénes somos y hacia dónde vamos como una cultura, como un pais y un
mundo. En TV Azteca, comprendemos el poder de la televisión, especialmente
en México y el resto de Latinoamérica donde la gran mayoría de la gente recibe
sus noticias y entretenimiento de la televisión. Los programas de TV Azteca
llegan a los hogares de más de 100 millones de personas cada dia en México,
Chile, El Salvador y Costa Rica.

TV Azteca siente la obligación de promover un México y un mundo mejor, a

través de la producción y transmission de programas que reflejan nuestros va-
lores: familia, esfuerzo, aprendizaje constante y permanente, pasión, generosi-
dad, honestidad, confianza, libertad, respeto, tolerancia y amor por México.2

Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego

While family comes first on the list of TV Azteca values, as it did for Televisa,
TV Azteca does seem to expand its values beyond family and true love. TV Az-
teca also puts thinking before feeling and dreaming in its list of inspirational
effects of its stories, while Televisa is, quite simply, a factory of dreams.
TV Azteca describes its telenovela “El Candidato” as “un melodrama
romántico situado en un contexto actual: el camino que sigue un país que
122 Telenovelas

intenta llegar en la democracia a la elección de su próximo presidente.”3 Ad-

vertising itself as a “telenovela interactiva” and showing an e-mail address
on the screen each night, the producers of “El Candidato” wanted a response
from the viewing public and promised from the beginning to incorporate
their comments into the production of the telenovela. The description of the
telenovela on the web site explains that

La historia tendrá un fuerte arraigo con la opinión pública, para ello contará
con un correo electrónico que servirá de puente para hacer llegar a la historia la
problemática que vivimos hoy en dia los mexicanos.

Also on the web site is a questionnaire for viewer comments. After asking for
certain biographical details about the viewer (name, year of birth, sex, city
and country, educational level, civil status, occupation, e-mail, and where one
usually has access to the Internet), the questionnaire offers the viewers the
opportunity to express opinions about the telenovela (the story, the actors,
the production, the plot, the episodes, the love story, the treatment of political
themes, the acting). The questionnaire also asks viewers if they agree that TV
Azteca produces formulaic telenovelas and why (my favorite question), what
grade would they give “El Candidato,” and what would they ask of the next
president of the republic. Viewers get to participate not only with comments
on the telenovela but also with their political opinions on what they think
their next president should be like, an unusual aspect of “El Candidato.”
But the desire to know what the viewers want is common to all producers of
telenovelas, for producers of this cultural product must give the public what
that public wants. Telenovelas are a hugely popular, and profitable, product
that generates general public loyalty to stations, and the multiple commercial
breaks per episode generate a large percentage of the total revenue a station
brings in. In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement multiplied by
five the price of advertising space, a significant boost for companies produc-
ing telenovelas in which eighteen percent of the broadcast time can be used
for ads (“Telenovelas: Love, TV and Power”). Soliciting audience comments
on the telenovela allows producers to incorporate material directly from their
viewers’ suggestions, if they so choose, thus solidifying viewer loyalty.
“El Candidato” tells the story of Ignacio Santoscoy, a politician from the
Alianza Popular party, married to Marycarmen Manrique, the daughter of
Don Juventino Manrique, a powerful political cacique whose wealth and con-
nections have helped Ignacio rise to the top of the ranks of Alianza Popular.
But in marrying Marycarmen, the elder daughter, to make Don Juventino
happy, Ignacio ignored his love for Beatriz, the younger daughter and half-
sister of Marycarmen, who was then sent off to Harvard to earn a degree. In
the telenovela, she has returned, the love of Ignacio and Beatriz is reignited
and the main love triangle of the telenovela is set.
In spite of her Harvard degree and exalted position in the party, Beatriz,
portrayed by Lorena Rojas, remains the representation of woman as image,
a vision of beauty, an object to be looked at, the site of visual pleasure. While
seen occasionally in her office, she is more frequently portrayed in the do-
Whose Life in the Mirror? 123

mestic sphere (her apartment, her father’s house or, less frequently, Ignacio’s
home) or in a sexualized space like the beach, where she and Ignacio share
erotic encounters that are then replayed in other capitulos as flashbacks, em-
phasizing the female body as the locus of sexuality and desire.
As a signifying practice, the telenovela is a work producing effects of
meaning and perception. Advertisements for “El Candidato” announce that
“El poder tiene dos caras” and then, showing the face of Don Juventino, pro-
claim “ambición, intolerancia, corrupción” and, showing the face of Ignacio,
“el lado sensato, honesto, auténtico.” Considering that throughout the tele-
novela, Alianza Popular is clearly the symbol for the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party for more than seventy years and the
party still in power at the time the telenovela was being aired, this symbolism
has to read not only as an acknowledgment that the PRI is corrupt, its politi-
cians intolerant and ambitious, but also as an attempt to encourage viewers to
believe that the new PRI candidates are honest, authentic, and level-headed,
reformed characters indeed. If telenovela viewers could fall in love with Igna-
cio Santoscoy, as it was clearly hoped they would, they could vote PRI in the
upcoming elections.
Another advertisement promises that the telenovela offers viewers “Cu-
atro maneras diferentes de vivir la vida en El Candidato: la pasión de Ignacio,
el amor de Beatriz, el odio de Marycarmen, la envidia de Adrian.” Not only
are good and evil characters clearly distinguished here, but gender roles are
appropriately maintained in the emotions portrayed by Ignacio and Beatriz.
Ignacio, the virile telenovela hero, is allotted the passion, but Beatriz is al-
lowed only love. Passion would be inappropriate for a woman in this society.
In “El Candidato,” for Ignacio, the hero, to be able to leave his wife, the mother
of his children, for Beatriz, Marycarmen must be seen as a bad wife and mother
and Beatriz must be set up as her binary opposite. Marycarmen is continuously
portrayed as conniving, cold, harsh, cruel to her children; she drinks to excess;
she has a secret affair with Adrian, her husband’s best friend, gets pregnant by
him and then pretends the baby is Ignacio’s in order to win Ignacio back. She
later throws herself down the stairs when she and Beatriz are alone in the house
in order to claim that Beatriz tried to kill her, and loses the baby. In the episode
of November 15, 1999, Ignacio tells Marycarmen, “Jamás me hubiera imaginado
que tú fueras capaz de jugar con algo tan sagrado como la maternidad.” Not only
is Ignacio setting Marycarmen up as the bad mother and showing his shock and
disdain, but his words reinforce the hegemonic discourse of the sacredness of
maternity. A woman’s desire can never come before the sanctity of maternity
in this society. In the episode of November 25, 1999, Ignacio, Beatriz and the
children (of Ignacio and Marycarmen) pray to “diosito” to care for Marycarmen.
They form a vision of the perfect Catholic Mexican family, with Beatriz in the
place of the mother. This scene serves to show that she will be a better mother
than Marycarmen, as viewers have had no scenes of such domestic tranquility or
religious devotion with Ignacio, Marycarmen and the children. Scenes abound
of Beatriz playing with the children, her niece and nephew, helping them with
homework or answering their questions, encouraging them to continue to love
and support their mother during this difficult time.
124 Telenovelas

In “El Candidato,” Don Juventino represents the same traditional patriar-

chal gender roles and power plays represented by Genaro in “Laberintos de
Pasión” and he spouts some of the same types of lines as those of the attorney
in “Laberintos.” When his wife Griselda threatens to leave him if he does not
tell her the truth about his daughter Beatriz, about what had happened twenty-
eight years earlier when he showed up with the young girl, a gun in his hand
and his shirt covered in blood, he tells her, “No cabe duda que mujer que no
jode es hombre” (December 7, 1999). Like Genaro, in “Laberintos,” he sends
a strong man to do his dirty work, but because “El Candidato” operates in a
higher level of society, among the rich and famous of Mexico City, Don Juven-
tino’s strong man usually hires hit men to take care of the dirty business.
An interesting aspect of the telenovela is the homosocial bonding between
the male characters in the Alianza Popular. In Between Men, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick argues that in many nineteenth-century literary texts, a homoso-
cial bonding between men underlies the more obvious heterosexual narra-
tive, explaining that a homosocial attachment is one of deep affection that,
while erotic, is never actually consummated. Often the homosocial bond is
maintained through the body of a woman, a woman who serves as a com-
modity of interchange between the men. In “El Candidato,” we see Ignacio as
the object of desire not only of the women but also of the men, with multiva-
lent homosocial bonds created with both Adrian and Don Juventino. Don Ju-
ventino and Ignacio’s bond is maintained through the bodies of two women,
Marycarmen and Beatriz, as Ignacio is the husband of one daughter and the
lover of the other daughter of Don Juventino. Don Juventino, in a telling epi-
sode on November 15, 1999, confesses to Ignacio, “Yo te quería.” Adrian also
negotiates his relationship with Ignacio through the body of a woman, hav-
ing an affair with Ignacio’s wife and impregnating her in an effort to possess
Ignacio’s phallus. Also in the episode of November 15, 1999, Adrian tells Igna-
cio, “Necesito estar cerca a ti.” At some level, Ignacio is presented as the object
of everyone’s desire.
Another notable element of “El Candidato” is the way it incorporates cur-
rent events into the drama of the telenovela. If Vicente Fox or Francisco Labas-
tida says or does something noteworthy on the campaign trail on Tuesday, the
corresponding candidate in the telenovela will make a similar comment or
action in the Thursday or Friday night episode. Nor is it only political events
that show up in the telenovela; popular cultural references are also contem-
porary. In the February 25, 2000 episode, Perla was excited about the nine
Grammy awards won by Santana. Space is left in the main story line to add
short scenes that make references to current events, scenes that can obviously
be shot and edited in one or two days. In this way, “El Candidato” is indeed a
telenovela interactiva.
“El Candidato” can be likened to the hugely popular Venezuelan telenovela
“Por estas calles,” aired in 1992, which broadcast that nation’s problems into
every part of the country as part of the telenovela’s storyline. Storylines re-
volved around events in the life and administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez,
even including news footage from coup attempts in the telenovela broadcast.
“Por estas calles,” however, went much further in its realism than “El Can-
Whose Life in the Mirror? 125

didato,” reaching the point that there were entire episodes without a single
love scene, signaling that the telenovela had indeed changed. In “El Candi-
dato,” while the story of the presidential campaign events is an important
and novel element, the telenovela still focuses on the love story between Igna-
cio and Beatriz with the attendant secondary and tertiary love triangles and
complications.
The very popular “La Vida en el Espejo” attempts, as the title indicates, to
represent life, to reflect life in a more realistic manner than most telenovelas.
It is the only telenovela I have seen in which characters go to the bathroom,
for instance. However, it still reflects the life of only one slice of the Mexican
population—the wealthy in Mexico City—and thus, like other telenovelas,
comes closer to providing for its viewing public a reality of desire rather than
a reality of life.
The main characters are Santiago, his wife Isabel and their three children:
Mauricio, the elder son, Eugenio, the middle child, and Diana, the younger
daughter. Isabel has an affair with Eduardo, a younger man who had worked
at the ad agency she and Santiago own. She leaves Santiago to be with Ed-
uardo, but then repents, as she realizes that her family means more to her
than the relationship with Eduardo. She wants to recuperate the love of her
children and, if she can, get Santiago’s love back, so she breaks it off with
Eduardo. She ends up moving back into the family house and Santiago gets
an apartment, because he feels that the children need their mother at home.
Meanwhile, Santiago falls in love with a younger woman, Gabriela Muñoz.
Gabriela works at a radio station, comes from a lower economic and social
class, and is less educated.
The daughter, Diana, is still in high school. She goes through a period when
she will not eat, will not go to school, is obnoxious to everyone, and is using
drugs. After her mother is attacked by her ex-lover, Diana refuses to testify
against him, shows no support for her mother, instead taunting her mother
with the idea that she would rather have Gabriela Muñoz as her stepmother.
In the episode of November 19, 1999, Diana’s boyfriend wants to know what
is the matter with her, why she is always so moody, why she never wants him
to kiss her. When he does kiss her, at her invitation, she then screams at him
to get off her. After these disturbing episodes, Gabriela encourages Diana to
see a psychologist. Diana undergoes a miraculous conversion, starts being
polite to people and changes the way she looks. She starts to dress in a more
stereotypically feminine fashion, tames her hair, wears makeup, and makes
up with her boyfriend. In the episode of November 24, 1999, they are kissing.
That Diana starts displaying “appropriate femininity” once she starts seeing
a psychologist underlines that only certain forms of female behavior and ap-
pearance, only certain gendered performances, are considered “normal” in
this society.
The portrayal of Diana’s transformation into a young woman who is per-
forming her femininity appropriately after psychiatric counseling betrays
how the patriarchal system only accepts certain performances of femininity
and threatens to reject all women who fall outside those norms as mad. Other
side stories of the telenovela also stress the traditional side of the patriarchal
126 Telenovelas

system. Julio is one of Santiago’s best friends, a divorced, alcoholic woman-

izer, father of one son, owner of a jewelry store and a very fancy apartment.
Julio, Santiago, Ernesto, another of Santiago’s best friends, and Alvaro (Santi-
ago’s brother who has been living in the United States for many years) are the
four members of the Club de Tony. The purpose of the Club de Tony appears
to be to get together, to get drunk, and to say derogatory things about women
in a form of male bonding.
In the episode of November 30, 1999, since it appears that Santiago and
Alvaro’s sister Cayetana is going to marry Gustavo Prieto, her childhood
sweetheart from whom she was separated by the egotism of her brothers,
Julio decides that Gustavo should become a member of the Club de Tony.
Gustavo is invited to a reunion and has to swear the oath—on a copy of Play-
boy—“no reveler ninguna verdad revelada aquí a nínguna mujer.” No one
ever proposes making Mauricio a member of the club, but perhaps his gay
identity precludes that invitation.
Indeed, much of the interest of the fall episodes comes from Mauricio com-
ing out to his parents and their struggle to come to terms with this new real-
ity. Having a gay character and the different issues it brings out is one of the
unusual aspects of this telenovela. In one episode, for example, Isabel and
Mauricio have a frank talk. She wants to ask him about his relationship with
his partner Jimmy, but feels awkward doing so. He tells her not to, that if he
were married to a woman, she would ask. So she asks him, what do they do?
He says the normal things, we go to the movies, to a play, we go for drinks in
a bar, we eat out a lot since neither one of us likes to cook. We have disagree-
ments, make up, just like any other couple. But mostly we support each other,
understand each other, love each other. He notes that the one difference is
that they can’t hold hands or demonstrate their affection in public. Then Mau-
ricio asks Isabel about her relationship with Eduardo, what happened, why
she broke it off. She goes on about the difficulty of being a woman in Mexico if
one does not fit in with the expected norms of femininity and maternity. She
then says that being a woman in Mexico is like being gay in Mexico. He tells
her not to exaggerate. At least she doesn’t have to worry about being attacked
on the street for her sexuality.
Isabel and Mauricio’s discussion of the difficulties of being female and of
being gay in Mexico is one of the more striking moments in the telenovela. It
offers a rare example where such issues are discussed, even if one might take
issue with what the characters say about the topics. For while Mauricio tells
his mother that she does not have to worry about being physically attacked for
her sexuality, in episodes of “Laberintos de Pasión” noted above, women are
repeatedly reminded that they are never safe alone, neither in the streets nor in
their own homes. In fact, rape and sexual assault statistics suggest that women
in Mexico are attacked simply because they are women. The 1992 Boletín del
Centro de Ayuda a Victimas de Violación put out by the Puerto Rican Department
of Health, citing rape statistics in various Latin American countries, asserts
that a woman is raped in Mexico every nine minutes. But domestic and sexual
violence against women, while widespread, is also vastly underreported. It
is estimated that only one in ten rapes gets reported to legal authorities in
Whose Life in the Mirror? 127

Mexico and perhaps one percent of rapes are punished (Jordan A1). In “La
Vida en el Espejo,” Isabel herself is assaulted by Eduardo after she ends their
relationship, so she is aware of the ever-present threat of violence and rape for
women even if Mauricio seems not to be cognizant of it.
“La Vida en el Espejo” also includes scenes in which Mauricio and his
partner, Jimmy, a visiting professor from Stanford currently teaching in
Mexico, discuss issues about being gay in Mexico. The November 25, 1999,
episode opens with Jimmy in the shower—a nude man seen from afar, as
the camera is on the opposite side of the bedroom. Jimmy and Mauricio are
discussing whether they should move to San Francisco because in the United
States individuality is more respected. The scene ends with the two of them
in the bathroom, obviously about to have a sexual encounter, but they shut the
bathroom door, so that whatever happens is off camera. Since they live alone
in the apartment, there is no particular reason why they would shut the door,
but their love scenes are always staged off camera and right after a cut. Much
less intimacy between men is shown than would be the case were it a scene
between a man and a woman.
In a later episode, two men break into Mauricio and Jimmy’s apartment
and beat up Jimmy. The assumption is that they were sent by Irene’s father,
who is furious that Mauricio and Irene did not marry, and even more furious
that Mauricio is gay, and that the beating was intended for Mauricio. Gay-
bashing is the subject of the November 23, 1999, episode, in which Jimmy and
Mauricio are attacked by two men on the street.
Mauricio’s sexual identity incites other violent reactions. The ad agency
that Santiago and Isabel own has been working on a political campaign, but
when the candidate for the Senate and his campaign manager find out about
Mauricio’s sexual orientation, via a scene in a restaurant in which the drunken
father of Mauricio’s ex-fiancee denounces Mauricio as a homosexual and Isa-
bel as a prostitute, the agency loses the contract. The candidate says that he
could never permit a homosexual to work on his campaign. Isabel is furious,
pointing out to Santiago and Mauricio the candidate’s hypocrisy as he had
just been requesting that very week that the campaign slogans emphasize the
equality of all Mexicans.
Mauricio feels terrible that the agency has lost the campaign. Both his par-
ents say that it is not his fault, that it is the fault of the politician and his cam-
paign manager or the fault of Irene’s idiotic father. In one scene, Isabel tells
him not to worry about it, that she has accepted his “condíción.” Although the
scene is supposed to be a positive one in which she is being supportive, her
use of the term “condition” pathologizes Mauricio’s gay identity.
Thus, although the telenovela attempts to portray gay characters in a posi-
tive light and, indeed, both Mauricio and Jimmy are attractive, intelligent,
sympathetic characters, it is in the moments like these when Isabel patholo-
gizes Mauricio’s gay identity that “La Vida en el Espejo” falls short of the
goals it obviously hoped to attain. But it certainly makes positive strides that
put it well beyond the stereotypical telenovela.
A side storyline of the telenovela involves Santiago’s brother, Alvaro, who
is married to Sharon, a woman from the United States, and living in Denver
128 Telenovelas

with their two children. Although in his visits to Mexico he had always pre-
sented their marriage as a perfect one, it turns out Sharon was abusive. One
intriguing aspect of this story is the ways in which Sharon, the only character
who represents the United States, is presented as manipulative, abusive, and
greedy. In her physical appearance, she contrasts with the Mexican women
normally seen in the telenovela—she is large and unattractive. She serves as a
synecdoche for the U.S., for Mexico’s feelings towards its aggressive northern
neighbor. It is also interesting to note that Alvaro, as the character who pres-
ents himself as someone who was taken in by/taken advantage of by Sharon,
is portrayed by an actor with a less elegant appearance and less European
features. Being that Santiago, Cayetana and Alvaro are siblings and share
the same gene pool, the lack of physical resemblance with this character is
striking. If Sharon is seen as representing the United States, then there cer-
tainly seem to be some racial politics involved in terms of who suffers most in
Mexico at the hands of the United States.
The other more indigenous-looking characters in the telenovela are the do-
mestic employees. The maid in Santiago and Isabel’s house and the maid in
Julio’s house both have more indigenous features than their employers. The
maid in Julio’s house, Pancha, is portrayed by a great comic actress who plays
her often stereotypical role to the hilt. Such casting, however, confirms tradi-
tional racial and class roles in Mexico.
Another interesting aspect of the sometimes transgressive nature of this
telenovela is in the treatment of a character’s bout with prostate cancer. Er-
nesto, one of Santiago’s best friends, is treated with an operation and left im-
potent. He refuses to tell his wife, Paula, although she knows from the doctor,
and is nasty to everyone. She makes an appointment with the doctor to learn
about the injections, and one amazing scene shows the doctor explaining the
condition and the treatment with diagrams and plastic models, showing how
one applies the injection in order to effect an erection in the male. It is very
explicit and obviously done with didactic intent. This telenovela seeks not just
to entertain but to educate.
The dual intent to entertain and to educate is also seen in the treatment of
teenage pregnancy. Eugenio, Santiago and Isabel’s younger son, has barely
finished high school and his girlfriend, Paulita, the daughter of his parents’
best friends, is pregnant. The parents do not want their children to marry
because they are too young, because they want them to go to university,
etc. But Eugenio and Paulita are determined to marry. The relatives all have
strong reactions to the pregnancy, which is considered a grave transgression.
Eugenio’s aunt Cayetana gives them a beautiful old house and helps them
to get established. She is portrayed as a very conservative, Catholic Mexican
woman, and her support of their marriage is in large part due to the fact that
she believes that, having made this terribly grave error, they have to marry.
Paulita’s father refuses to speak to or of her and claims that he no longer has
a daughter.
In the episode of December 7, 1999, Paulita has lost her baby. Again we see
the didactic nature of the telenovela. Eugenio and Paulita explain to the oth-
Whose Life in the Mirror? 129

ers that the doctor said that 25 percent of women have a spontaneous abortion
and that by the time Paulita was feeling the pains, the abortion had probably
already taken place so that even if she had gone to the doctor immediately, it
would have been too late. They are upset, but their parents tell them that they
are young, they have each other, they will still have a family in the future.
While the executive from Televisa interviewed for the video “Telenovelas:
Love, TV, and Power,” denied that his company conceived of telenovelas as
being educational, for many people involved in the production and consump-
tion of telenovelas, they are an important vector for education and influence.
In episodes regarding medical concerns, we can see how the popularity of the
telenovela then constitutes the program as an important and relevant educa-
tional instrument, as the medium of mass communication is used to promote
education and consciousness of public health issues. The emotional connec-
tion that the telenovela viewers feel with the characters in the storylines, their
involvement with the lives of the characters, helps them to engage with the
health issues and to see them as relevant in a way they might not in a health
report in the evening news program.
But at the same time that “La Vida en el Espejo” seeks both to provide a more
realistic view of life in Mexico and to ignite awareness of and provide informa-
tion about important health issues, it is always first and foremost a telenovela
in a developing country where television is an important commercial activity.
The blurring of the lines between advertisement and entertainment is common
in the world of telenovelas, and “La Vida en el Espejo” is no exception. The
telenovela opens with the introduction of “El instituto Ponds trae para ti tu tele-
novela La Vida en el Espejo,” and the logos for both the telenovela and the jars
of Ponds cold cream are blue and white, further associating the telenovela and
the commercial beauty product in viewers’ minds. The product placement in
the show is blatant. Isabel and her best friend Paula are both seen using Ponds
cold cream in different scenes or are seen with jars of the cold cream on their
dressing tables. But the most forced product placement is a poster of Ponds
Institute on the inside of Diana’s door. Since Diana is portrayed as a rebellious
character who is not performing her femininity appropriately throughout most
of the telenovela, it seems completely out of character for her to have a poster for
cold cream adorning her bedroom. Nor is Ponds the only commercial product
seen in the show. When characters drink beer, it is always Corona, and the bot-
tles are positioned so that viewers can see the name. In an episode of December
8, 1999, a computer in a scene clearly shows the screen for Prodigy Internet.
In the same episode, Eugenio wears a Pepe Jeans polo shirt. All these product
placements bring in additional ad revenue for the studios and remind viewers
that “La Vida en el Espejo” is a commercial product. Viewers who might get too
caught up in the world of the telenovela, who—to borrow a term from narra-
tive theory—are reading too much as members of the narrative audience, are
reminded that these characters are not real when a commercial break runs an
ad for Whiskas cat food with the actress who plays Paulita.4
In the end, “La Vida en el Espejo” does break with generic traditions in
many ways, introducing a gay character in a main role and portraying him in
130 Telenovelas

a stable, positive relationship, addressing societal issues like prostate cancer,

teenage pregnancy and alcohol abuse, portraying a strong female lead who
insists on living her life the way she chooses and then dealing with the conse-
quences of her choices. Characters have honest conversations about issues not
often discussed so openly on Mexican television. While there are certainly
many moments that are problematic and issues that are not addressed, this
telenovela does provide a different view of Mexican life than that normally
seen on the TV screen.
Telenovelas are an important part of the cultural phenomena of everyday
life in Mexico and in Latin America. As Jesús Martín-Barbero affirms, “In the
redefinition of culture, the clue lies in the understanding of the communica-
tive nature of culture, understanding culture as a process that is productive
of meaning, and not just as a ‘circulator’ of information” (Tufte 16). Culture
produces meaning, and as vital cultural products telenovelas participate in
the production of meaning about gender in Mexico. In a country where many
more people watch the television or listen to a radio than read a newspaper,
television programs, including the ever popular telenovelas, have a huge im-
pact in the production of meaning about gender, race, class and sexuality.5
Telenovelas have many faces, but holding a mirror up to them can reveal what
images of gender, sexuality, race and class are being reflected back.

NOTES
1. I should note that I use the present tense even though the telenovelas are not run-
ning on Mexican television at the time of publication of this article.
2. The telenovela website I accessed while I was living in Mexico in 1999–2000
([Link]/televidentes/telenovelas) is no longer accessible and this
particular statement from the president of TV Azteca no longer appears on the site.
However, the TV Azteca website still offers statements about its values. In the seg-
ment on “cultura corporativa,” TV Azteca proclaims itself a “Señal con valor,” with
a short paragraph explaining that “Es quien te ofrece incondicionalmente amor, va-
lores, educación y la gran habilidad de enseñarte a descubrir tus errores; formación,
que durante toda la vida te ayudará a ser cada vez mejor” [[Link]/
corporativo/cultura/[Link]]. While unconditional love comes first, values and
education are most highly stressed.
3. From the web site, “Información para televidentes” at [Link]
mx/televidentes/telenovelas/candidato/[Link]. All further quotations from
the website are from the same site.
4. In Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, Peter J.
Rabinowitz distinguishes between the actual audience (the flesh and blood people
who read a book), the authorial audience (the hypothetical audience an author has
in mind in creating a text) and the narrative audience (the audience who accepts the
fictional characters as people). Telenovelas rely on an audience who “reads” in large
part as members of the narrative audience.
5. In statistics published in 1996, 28 percent of Mexicans read a newspaper daily
while 9 out of 10 people listen to radio and watch television (González and Chávez,
1996: 113, cited in A. González, “The Willingness to Weave,” p. 36).
Whose Life in the Mirror? 131

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Index

ABC, 25, 81, 116 Bandeirantes (Brazil), 39

Abercrombie, N., 112 Bardasano, Carlos, 67
ABS-CBN (Philippines), 66 Barrera, Vivian, 89n7
Akyuz, G., 44 Bay Guardians, 69
Albania, 39 Before Reading: Narrative Conventions
Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema and the Politics of Interpretation
(de Lauretis), 117 (Rabinowitz), 130n4
All My Children, 83, 85, 89n5 Behr, Felicia Minei, 85, 89–90n11
Allen, Robert, 3, 12–13, 15, 21, 23, 24, 82 Belgium, 42, 51
Alonso, Ernesto, 54 Bell, Bradley, 83
An American Family, 16 Bernardi, Helena, 63
The Andy Griffith Show, 15 Bernstein, Basil, 98–99
Ang, Ien, 4, 27n5, 52 Between Men (Kosofsky), 124
Angel Malo (Bad Angel), 64 Beyond Cultural Imperialism (Golding and
Another Life, 6 Harris), 33
Another World, 23, 88 Bhushan, Nyay, 67
Antola, L., 38 Bielby, Denise D., 89n7
Aragón, Angélica, 55, 56 BNT (Bulgaria), 46
Argentina, 58, 62; economic crisis in The Bold and the Beautiful, 13, 87, 89n9;
(2001), 64 introduction of Antonio to the cast
ARGOS, 55 of, 83
Argos Productions/Argos TV, 105, 108n4, Bosnia, 66
114 “Boutique programming,” 25
Arias, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, 56 Brazil, 36, 52, 104; social realism of
Arnold, Gillian, 56 Brazilian telenovelas, 64; television/
As The World Turns, 89n3 telenovela industry of, 37–38, 42, 54, 56
ASBI (análisis semantic basado en “Brazilianization,” of television content
imagine) analysis, 95–96, 99–100n1 and values, 37
Audience(s), 108n2; “bio-time” of, 70; Broadcasting system in Latin America,
concept of, 93–94; different types of structural influences on, 35–36
(actual, authorial, narrative), 130n4; Brown, Mary Ellen, 26n1
engagement of by telenovelas, 94; Brunsdon, Charlotte, 3, 11–12, 17, 25
viewing habits of Mexican viewers, Bulman, Gabriel Vazquez, 52
97–99 Butler, Judith, 116
Audley, Paul, 103
Aulette, Ken, 27n5 “El Candiato,” 117, 121–22;
Australia, telenovelas of, 41, 47, 54, 56 advertisements for, 123; homosocial
136 Index

bonding in, 124; incorporation of “reverse” cultural imperialism, 34, 38,

current events into its storyline, 124; 42, 47, 62. See also “Contra-flow”
as an interactive telenovela, 122; plot “Cultural proximity,” 69
of, 122; representation of patriarchal “Cultural syncretism,” 79
gender roles in, 124; representation of Culture, 103–4, 130
women in, 122–23 Cunningham, S., 79
Cantor, Muriel G., 4, 26–27n4
Capitol, 13 Dallas, 4, 5, 15, 27n5, 59; difference of
Caracol (Colombia), 69 from daytime soap operas, 4; as first
Carvajal, Alicia, 66 true “prime time” soap, 7
Castro, Fidel, 62 Dark Shadows, 27n5, 82
Caughie, John, 7, 8; on the “assumptions Days of the Week, 4
of genre” in television, 8; on the Demasiado Corazón, 97
“novelistic” in television, 18, 29n39 Denmark, 39
CBS, 32n83, 81, 116; programming Desencuentro Huracán, 97
directed at women, 25 Desperate Housewives, 67
Cenicienta, 54 Discovery Channel, 59
La Chacala, 97, 98 Dobbin, Mickey Dwyer, 84–85
Cheers, 15 The Doctors, 82
Chile, 64 Dodds, Peter, 56
“Chinovelas,” 66 Donahue, 5
Christian Broadcasting Service, 6 Dynasty, 4, 5, 15, 16–17, 27n5
The City, 82
Clarin, 53 EastEnders, 5, 18
Clase 406, 65–66 Ellis, John, 21, 112
CNN, 19 Em Busca da Felicidade (In Search of
CODITEL (Belgium), 51 Happiness), 62
“The Cofraternity of (Un)Finishable Emergency, 15
Emotions: Constructing Mexican Escobar, Ramón, 63
Telenovelas” (González), 116 A Escrava Isaura (Isaura, the Slave), 38,
Colgate, successful sponsorship of 42, 65
telenovelas, 62–63 Esmeralda, 65, 66, 97
Colombia, 53 Estonia, 46
“Contra-flow,” 33, 34, 38, 39; and Latin Estrada, Erik, 89n9
American fictional material, 41–42, ETB (Basque), 45
47
Coronation Street (book [British Film Family, 24
Institute]), 4 Fantasy Island, 15
Coronation Street (television show), 5, 18, Fernández, C., 54–55
52 Feuer, Jane, 7, 9, 13–14, 16, 17
Cristal, 38 Fili-Krushel, Patricia, 84
Croatia, 42, 66 Film theory, 9
Croce, Jim, 84 Fiske, J., 112, 113
Cuba, role of in the origins of telenovelas, Fox, E., 36, 39
62 Fox Broadcasting, 25, 53
Culebrones (serpents), 62 FremantleMedia, 67
“Cultural fronts,” 68; multidimensional Friends, 69
aspects of, 71
Cultural identity, 103, 107–8; portrayal Gabriela, 38, 39
of Mexican cultural identities in the Galavisión International, 40, 53
media, 104–5 García-Márquez, Gabriel, 41
Cultural imperialism, 33–34, 47, 79; Gender, social construction of, 116–17
cultural flow, 47–48; internal and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
external, 37; refutation of, 38; Subversion of Identity (Butler), 116
Index 137

General Hospital, 4, 82, 84, 85, 89n3 “Laberintos de Pasión, 117, 126;
Generations, 13 melodramatic nature of, 119;
Genre theory, 9, 15 portrayal of forbidden love in, 119–20;
Geraghty, Christine, 4–5 “proper” gender roles of women in,
Germany, 39 120–21; thunderstorm motif of, 119;
Giddens, A., 99 traditional patriarchal gender roles in,
Gledhill, Christine, 11, 21, 29n33, 80, 113 118–19; use of taglines in, 119
Globalization, 48, 62; of Latin American Lang, Jack, 40
audiovisual corporations, 39 Latin America, 63–64, 67, 69, 104;
Globo/Globo TV/TeveGlobo. See TV creolization of Latin America culture,
Globo 37
Going Home, 56 Lauretis, Teresa de, 117
Golding, P., 33 Leahy, Lynn, 83
González, Jorge A., 116 Lee, C. C., 35
Grindon, Michael, 67 La Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión, 53
Grupo Alfa de Monterrey, 53 La Ley de Silencio (The Law of Silence), 67
Guiding Light, 13, 63, 89n3 Liebes, T., 80, 82
Life, three realms of, 90n13
Haddrick, Greg, 56 Little House on the Prairie, 24
Harris, P., 33 Livingstone, S., 80, 82
Hayman, Connie P., 85–86 LNK (Lithuania), 46
HBO, 19 Lo Que es el Amor (What Love Is), 106,
Heath, Stephen, 13, 18 108–9n6, 114
Hill Street Blues, 4, 7, 15, 23 Localization, of global cultural products,
Home and Away, 52, 56 52
Homefront, 27n5 Logan, Michael, 81
Hoskins, C., 88 Love Boat, 15, 22
Hotel, 15, 27n5
HRT (Croatia), 45 Magyar TV (Hungary), 45
HTV (Croatia), 66 Marimar, 61
Hungary, 42 Marinho, Roberto, 53
“Marlena De Lacroix.” See Hayman,
Ibarra, Epigmenio, 55, 105–6, 108n3 Connie P.
Iceland, 39 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 37, 57, 58, 130
A Indominada (The Indomitable), 108n1 Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, 4, 16, 27n5
Ireland, 39 M*A*S*H, 15
Italy, 40, 44 Mato, Daniel, 53, 58
Mattelart, A., 52
Jacka, E., 79 Mattelart, Michele, 3, 52
Japan, 41, 47 McAnary, E., 37
“Journées de la Télévision Brésilienne” MDA, 56
(“Days of Brazilian Television”), 40 Mediaset (Italy), 44
Joyrich, Lynne, 10 Megachannel, 44–45
Jucaud, Patrick, 65 Megavisión, 53
Mellencamp, Patricia, 8
Kassandra, 61, 65 Melodrama: association of with soap
Kelly, George, 95 operas, 11, 29n33; as a “contaminated”
Knots Landing, 15, 27n5 genre, 10–11; diffuseness of television
Kosofsky, Eve, 124 melodrama, 10; film melodrama,
Kreutzner, Gabriele, 4 10; institutional forms used in the
Kuhn, Annette, 25 production of, 57; Latin American,
37; “melodrama aesthetic” and
L.A. Law, 4, 15, 20, 22 “melodrama style,” 9; as a “meta-
La Pastina, A. C., 37 genre,” 9; pervasiveness of, 10; as the
138 Index

preferred form for television, 10; as Oliveira, O. S., 37

a social experience, 68–71; television One Life to Live, 82, 83, 85, 87
melodrama, 4, 5; and “women’s The Oprah Winfrey Show, 5
fictions,” 11 Ordaz, Díaz, 53
“Melodrama Inside and Outside the El Otro y Pecado Mortal, 54
Home” (Mulvey), 9
Melrose Place, 22 Packard, Felicity, 56, 57
Mercedes, María, 51 Paradise Beach, 25
Mexico, 36, 52, 69, 104, 130n5; Epoca de Partido Revolucionario Institucional
Oro period of (1940s), 110; problem (PRI), 123
of rape in, 126–27; television industry Passions, 82, 88
of, 37–38, 42, 118; television viewing Paxman, A., 54–55
habits in different areas of, 97–99. PBS, 19
See also Cultural identity, portrayal Pearson, Rosalind, 52
of Mexican cultural identities in the Peyton Place, 7
media; Social imaginary, the, and Phelps, Guy, 95
Mexican television contexts Philippines, export of telenovelas from,
Mi Pequeña Traviesa, 97 66
Milmo, Emilio Azcárraga, 53, 54; on the Pietri, Arturo Uslar, 64
role of the telenovela, 54 Pimstein, Valentin, 54
Milmo, Emilio Azcárraga Jean, 53, 117 Pingree, Suzanne, 4, 26–27n4
Mirada de Mujer (A Woman’s View), 52, Plataforma Digital, 40
55, 57, 61, 77n2, 97, 98, 108n4; María Pliego, Ricardo Salinas, 105
Inés character in, 55 Poland, 38, 40
Mirus, R., 88 Poor Anastasia, 67
Modleski, Tania, 17, 30n54 “Por estes calles,” 124–25
Monday Night Football, 25 Port Charles, 85, 87, 89n5, 89–90n11;
MTV, 7, 19 “books” of, 84; criticism of its
Mulvey, Laura, 9–10 format change, 85–86; innovative
Muraro, H., 36 serial programming of, 84; possible
Murdoch, Rupert, 53 cancellation of, 85; use of specific
Murdock, Graham, 95 musical themes in, 84
Murphy Brown, 15, 22; controversy Portugal, 38, 42, 44, 45
concerning Murphy Brown’s
pregnancy, 5 Queer as Folk, 69

Nada Personal, 55 Radio, 69; “radio” novels (radionovelas),

Narrative theory, 113 62, 69, 110
National Geographic, 69 RAI (Italy), 45
NBC, 81, 116 RCTV (Venezuela), 39
Neale, Steve, 15; on generic specificity, 16 The Real World, 16
Neighbours, 51, 52, 56 Red Bolivia, 53
Netherlands, the, 39 Repertory Grid, 93, 95
News Ltd., 53 RETE4 (Portugal), 44
Nochimson, Martha, 30n60 Reyes, Alberto Nolla, 54
Nordenstreng, K., 48 Los Ricos también Lloran (The Rich Also
North American Free Trade Agreement, Cry), 52, 55, 61; popularity of in post-
effect of on telenovela advertising, Soviet Russia, 65
122 Riggs, Marlon, 5
Northern Exposure, 15 Roach, C., 38
NYPD Blue, 22, 23 Rogers, E. M., 38
Roseanne, 22, 32n83
O Pogador de Promessas, 46 Ross, Andrew, 30n58
O’Donnell, H., 80 RTP (Portugal), 44
Index 139

RTV (Romania), 45 parodies of, 16, 30n50; the pleasure

Ryan’s Hope, 13, 82 of viewing soap operas, 57–59;
production of, 20, 23; profitability
S4C (Wales), 43 of, 89n4; “real time” in, 14, 29n42,
Sabbah, Françoise, 45 repeats/reruns of, 89n2; similarities
Sada, Garza, 53 to melodrama, 11, 29n33, 57; social
Sahab, Claudia, 66 evolution of as a genre, 82–84;
Sánchez, Jorge González, 57 targeting of female audience by, 24–25,
Santa Barbara, 13, 65, 83 32n78, 32n83; viewer consumption of
Sat 1 (Germany), 43–44 entire broadcast runs of, 13. See also
Schiller, H., 38 Soap operas, definitions of
Seinfeld, 22 Soap operas, definitions of, 3–4,
Seiter, Ellen, 4 26n1, 80; as a continuing fictional
Senda Prohibida (Forbidden Path), 54, 63 television program, 16; defining
Serbia, 66 soap opera “text” problems,
Shapiro, Angela, 85 12; definition emphasizing the
SIC (Portugal), 40, 44, 45 specific characteristics of the
Simplemente María (Simply Maria), 63 genre, 6, 15–16; differences from
Simpson, O. J., 81 closely related programming, 4–5;
Sin Pecado Concebido (Conceived Without differences from telenovelas, 57,
Sin), 106, 108–9n6, 114 63; difficulty of defining soap
Sinclair, J., 35, 38, 39, 48, 69, 79 operas as “text,” 12–13, 14–15; as
Sinha Moça, 42 focusing on relationships within a
Skirrow, Gillian, 13, 18 specific community of characters,
Slovak Republic, 42 22; functional definition of, 5–6;
Soap, 4, 16 problematic nature of defining
Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making soap operas (forms, practices,
Meaning in Everyday Life (Harrington, and medium distinctions), 6–7; as
Lee, and Beilby), 59 programs presented in multiple
Soap operas, 30n48, 80–82, 88, 103, weekly installments, 17; similarities
110; audience considerations when to telenovelas, 63
changing the serial format of, 84–86, [Link], 86, 90n12
88–89n1, 90n14; audience intimacy Social imaginary, the, and Mexican
with, 17; Australian 51, 52; “camp television contexts, 95–97, 100n2
decodings” of, 16; characteristic “look” Social interpretation, 70–71
of, 23–24; closed-captioning and Sony Corporation, 67
simulcasts of for Spanish audiences, The Sopranos, 69
83; “dailiness” of, 17–20, 30n60; South Park, 69
decline in popularity of, 81; distinction Soviet Union, 39
between “prime-time soaps” and Spain, 38, 40, 41
daytime soaps, 4, 17; duration of, Spanish International Network (SIN), 53
89n3; emphasis on interior sets in, Sreberny-Mohammadi, A., 38, 48
23, 24; ethnic/racial makeup of soap St. Elsewhere, 15
opera casts, 82–83; and feminist Straubhaar, Joseph D., 35, 37, 38, 62, 65,
discourse, 31n72; and the “flow” of 69
commercial television, 18, 22; gender STV (Slovak Republic)
issues involved in, 25–26; genres of, Sunset Beach, 88
80; “ideological problematic” of, 23; Swans Crossing, 25
increase in popularity of, 89–90n11; Switzerland, 46
interlocking storylines of, 21–22;
issues concerning the reformatting TCI (United States), 53
of, 87–88; lack of closure in, 12, 21, 23; Tele3 (Lithuania), 46
marketing of, 81, 89n5; as “meta-text,” Telemadrid, 45
13; narrative form of, 12–13, 17, 21–22; Telemundo, 63, 67, 82
140 Index

Telenovelas, 16, 89n7, 89–90n11, 103, telenovelas, 62; use of language in,
107–8, 110, 115, 130; appeal of to 112; use of taglines in, 119; websites
women, 104; audience reception of, 37; of, 130; worldwide export of,
authenticity in, 37; changing content 37–38; writers’ and directors’ panels
of, 64, 105–7; as closed narrative texts, concerning production of, 55–56. See
110–11; criticism of by Latin American also Telenovelas, international debates
elites, 64; cultural development of, concerning; Telenovelas, plotlines of;
52; as cultural hybrids, 63; as cultural Telenovelas, as symbolic and complex
products, 116; depiction of reality forms
and fiction in, 111–14; differences Telenovelas, international debates
from soap operas, 52, 57, 63, 110–11, concerning, 34–39, 46–48; capital
116; different rates for the sale of to control over Latin American television
other countries, 46; emerging markets industry, 36; ideological questions
for in Eastern Europe, 45–46, 64–66; concerning local program formats, 37;
expectations concerning everyday inflow of foreign programs, 36; key
life created by, 99, 100n3; exports of problems of the debate, 34–35; North
to the United States, 64, 69; failure of American structure of Latin American
some telenovela themes in Eastern broadcasting, 35–36
European countries, 65–66; future Telenovelas, plotlines of, 106; poverty,
of telenovela exports, 39; as a genre 63–64; reversals of fortune, 63;
inspired by American soap opera sentimental fairy tales, 64; struggling
models, 37; global success of, 52, single women, 63, 105
61–62; importance of Europe as an Telenovelas, as symbolic and complex
export market for, 40–41, 41–42; lack forms, 70–71, 77; argumentation
of export success to Northern and analysis of telenovelas, 73;
Northwestern European countries, development of a deep interpretation
42–43; lack of realism in Mexican model of telenovelas, 75–77;
telenovelas, 54; leading Latin and levels of analysis regarding
American producers of, 62; and life telenovela production, 71; pragma-
dynamics, 104; “Maria” telenovelas, linguistic analysis of telenovelas,
54; narrative devices of, 111–12; 73; semantic analysis of telenovelas,
narrative structure of, 113; “new style” 73; stylistic analysis of telenovelas,
telenovelas, 114; as the “opium of the 72–73; understanding the complex
poor,” 64; the pleasure of viewing symbolic form (complex texts) of
telenovelas, 57–59; popularity of in telenovelas, 72–73; understanding the
post-Soviet Russia, 65; problems of social interpretations of telenovelas,
language in the export market, 43; 73–74
realism in, 113–14; reasons for export “Telenovelas: Love, TV, and Power,” 118,
growth of, 40; as remakes of old 129
stories (refritos), 112; role of cultural “Telenovelas and Soap Operas:
proximity in exports to Southern Negotiating Reality from the
Europe, 44–45; similarities to soap Periphery,” 52
operas, 63; social and scientific myths Telesistema Mexicana, 53
concerning, 74–75; socio-cultural Televisa (Mexico), 36, 47, 52, 62, 69, 97,
phenomenon of, 68; specific export 98, 106, 114; and censorship, 118;
markets for, 39, 64; sponsorship of by ethical standards maintained in
American corporations, 62–63; styles its telenovelas, 118; globalization
of (“realism” and “Cinderella”), 54, of, 55; history of the formation of,
63, 95, 97, 98, 111, 113–14; success of 53; interventionist actions of the
in Poland, Spain, and Portugal, 38, 64; government toward, 53; production
Taiwanese telenovelas (“chinovelas”), of telenovelas by, 54–55, 111, 117–18;
66; total number of viewers telenovela exports of, 38
worldwide, 62; transition of from Television, 29n39, 30n61, 69, 89n6;
serialized novels to “radio novels” to categories of television programs
Index 141

using the serial format, 15; and interest of in new export markets for
the concept of interruption, 17; telenovelas, 45–46
development of outside Latin TVE (Spain), 44, 45
America, 66–67; differences and Tufte, Thomas, 52
similarities between American and Turkey, 46
British television, 19; distinctions Twin Peaks, 4, 8, 27n5
between film and television, 9, 13–14; Tyszka, Barrera, 63
effects of cable television on major
network programming, 81; as a genre- United Kingdom, 39
driven medium, 7–9; habitual daily United States: Latino population of, 83;
viewing of, 17; interest groups in as the major exporter of television
vying for power, 70; intertextuality programs, 79–80
of, 12; introduction of public concerns Univisión, 36, 67, 81–82
into private viewing spaces, 5;
irretrievability of, 13; narrative Varis, T., 48
function of, 18; nonfiction genres of, Vazquez, Veronica, 94
18; “permeable borders” of, 11; as Venevisión (Venezuela), 36, 39, 62, 69
primary representative of postmodern Venezuela, 42, 53, 104
sensibility, 7; problematic nature of “La Vida en el Espejo,” 117, 129–30;
defining specific television genres, blurring of the lines between
7–8; “reality TV,” 111; relationship advertisement and entertainment
of to its audience, 11–12; resistance in, 129; depiction of the difficulty of
of television programming to being a woman in, 126–27; depiction
categorization, 7; serial forms of of gay life in, 126, 127; dual intent
(“serialness”), 21; theories concerning of (to both educate and entertain
live television (“ideology of audiences), 128; plot of, 125; portrayal
liveness”), 13–14, 17, 20; undermining of American women in, 127–28;
of television’s textuality, 11–12. portrayal of the patriarchal system
See also Social imaginary, the, and in, 125–26; portrayal of teenage
Mexican television contexts pregnancy in, 128–29; product
Texas, 13 placement in, 129
Thalía (Ariadna Sodi Miranda), 51 Villa Maria, 66
Third World, the: as victims of Villeli, Fernanda, 54
Hollywood, 38; Western imperialistic Vink, N., 37, 38, 52
influence on Third World culture, 37 Virgin of Guadalupe, 113
thirtysomething, 4, 15, 20 Vujnovic, Marina, 63
Thorburn, David, 9, 10
Todorov, Tzvetan, 113 The Waltons, 24
Tomlinson, J., 33 Wiegman, Robyn, 10, 11
Tongues Untied (1990), 5 Williams, Raymond, 31n70
Torchin, Mimi, 27n5 Wills, Patricio, 63
Trinta, A. R., 37 Winnicott, D. W., 90n13
TV3 (Estonia), 46 Wiseguy, 15
TV Azteca (Mexico), 55, 69, 93, 95, 97, Women and Soap Opera (Geraghty), 4
111, 114; and the changes in telenovela
content, 105–7, 114; public statements Yearbook, 16
of regarding the purpose of television, Yo soy Betty la Fea (I Am Ugly Betty), 52,
121 53, 66–67
TV Globo (Brazil), 36, 39, 40, 47, 48, 53, Yugoslavia, 40
62, 63, 67, 69; co-productions of, 66; as
an exporter of telenovelas, 38, 65; ZDF (Germany), 44
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About the Editor
and Contributors

EDITOR
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
and Five College–Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native
from Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Co-
lumbia University. Stavans’ books include The Hispanic Condition (HarperCol-
lins, 1995), On Borrowed Words (Viking, 2001), Spanglish (HarperCollins, 2003),
Dictionary Days (Graywolf, 2005), The Disappearance (TriQuarterly, 2006), Love and
Language (Yale, 2007), Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook, 2008), and Mr. Spic Goes
to Washington (Soft Skull, 2008). He has edited The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories
(Oxford, 1998), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), Isaac
Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (3 vols., Library of America, 2004), The Schocken
Book of Sephardic Literature (Schocken, 2005), Cesar Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale (Pen-
guin, 2008), and Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library
of America, 2009). His play The Disappearance, performed by the theater troupe
Double Edge, premiered at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and has
been shown around the country. His story “Morirse está en hebreo” was made into
the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah (2007), produced by John Sayles.
Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship,
the National Jewish Book Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award,
Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. His work has been
translated into a dozen languages.

CONTRIBUTORS
Laura J. Beard is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern
Languages and Literatures at Texas Tech University.
Denise D. Bielby is Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the Center for
Film, Television, and New Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She is the author, with C. Lee Harrington, of Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making
Meaning in Everyday Life (1995), and co-edited, also with C. Lee Harrington, Global
TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market (2008).
144 Telenovelas

Daniel Biltereyst teaches cultural media studies and international communica-

tion at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Ghent,
Belgium.
María de la Luz Casas Pérez teaches at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Cu-
ernavaca, Mexico.
Reginald Clifford received a doctorate from Loughborough University.
Jorge González teaches at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico.
C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and affiliate in the Women’s Studies
program at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. She is author, with Denise D. Biebly,
of Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (1995), and co-
edited, also with Denise D. Bielby, Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the
World Market (2008).
Ibsen Martínez is a Venezuelan columnist and playwright.
Philippe Meers served as research assistant at the Fund for Scientific Research
in Flanders, Belgium.
Rosalind C. Pearson is director of communication and public relations at Tec-
nológico de Monterrey, Campus Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Christina Slade is Professor of Media Theory at the Institute of Media and Re/
presentation of the Faculty of Arts, Utrecht University, Holland. She is the author
of, among other books, The Real Thing: Doing Philosophy with the Media (2002).
Laura Stempel Mumford is the author of Love and Ideology in the Afternoon Soap
Opera, Women and Television Genre (1995).