Disruption and continuity on telenovela with the surge of a new hybrid prime-time fictional serial: The super series

Abstract

The Latin American telenovela genre has enjoyed a long-lasting hegemonic position in prime-time television across the region, and particularly within US Spanish-language television market. However, in the last several years, Spanish-language national television networks, as well as their prime-time telenovela product, are being challenged by the new digital and mobile media landscape. Television networks have deployed a variety of strategies to better accommodate to new audiences’ consumption routines in a digital age. This article focuses on a particular moment of disruption – and continuity –, which has been a game changer for US Hispanic television and has transformed the face of fictional serial (telenovelas) in prime time. The surge in popularity of a telenovela subgenre originating in Colombia and widely adopted by US television corporations, known as narconovela, has transformed the telenovela genre/format, prompting industry professionals to initiate new institutional discourses aimed to mark these texts as super series, and in doing so labelling them as a new type of genre. Super series are an excellent case study for understanding the dialectic notion of disruption and continuity both in television studies and the television industry.

Keywords

Telenovelas super series US Hispanic television

The Latin American telenovela genre has enjoyed a long-lasting hegemonic position in prime-time television across the region, and particularly within US Spanish-language television market. However, in the last several years, Spanish-language national television networks, as well as their prime-time telenovela product, are being challenged by the new digital and mobile media landscape. Specifically, the surge of Over-the-Top (OTT) services and Video-on-Demand (VOD) is disrupting commonly held routines of audience consumption as they push Telemundo and Televisa/Univision – the main participant television corporations for the US Hispanic industry – not only to rethink their traditional telenovela narratives but also to rework the genre. This attempt has produced the super series: a new televisual product that combines the structural logics of series with the traditional storytelling style of telenovelas.

Constant narrative innovation has been at the core of telenovela storytelling, making the Latin American genre relevant over many decades. Clear moments of storytelling disruption, in different national markets, have also contributed to the constant evolution of the genre. But I want to focus on a particular moment of disruption – and continuity –, which has been a game changer in the relationship between the two main Hispanic television corporations in the United States and transformed the face of fictional serial (telenovelas) on prime time. The surge in popularity of a telenovela subgenre originating in Colombia and widely adopted by US television corporations, known as narconovela, has transformed the telenovela genre/format, prompting industry professionals leading to the rise of a new institutional discourse aimed to mark these texts as super series thus labelling as a new type of genre.

Super series are an excellent case for understanding the dialectic notion of disruption and continuity in television. As a Televisa executive interviews for this study explained:

people want to feel that there is innovation, then you need to offer them new things that still look familiar to avoid alienating them, while at the same time the show has to have this innovative element to get their attention. (Executive Televisa. Personal Communication, 13 August 2018, Mexico City)

On the one hand, as I will demonstrate, super series depart from telenovelas, in a number of key ways; but on the other hand, they also share key elements of the telenovela genre, as a consequence of their origin as telenovelas themselves in their iteration as narconovelas. This industrial discourse that surrounds the emergence of the super series as a new genre or form within the realm of the telenovela universe reveals some deeply ambivalent interactions between industry players as they discuss and thus discursively construct the dynamics of generic evolution and recognition (Mittell, 2004). Telemundo’s marketing effort to position super series as distinctive televisual product is supported by their surge in prime-time ratings. But as they were making their arguments about super series, there seem to have been a bit of a pull and push dynamic of rejection and recognition, in which the professionals adamantly claim that super series are not telenovelas, signalling that distinction as the sign of the push for innovation made by the network; but at the same time, acknowledging their telenovela lineage.

To investigate this productive tension, I conducted a series of interviews in 2017 and 2018 with high-ranking executives and producers at Telemundo and Televisa (the main content producers of serial fiction for the US Hispanic prime-time slot). I also interviewed executives at independent productions houses as well as screenwriters involved in telenovelas, supers series and series production.

This tension between disruption and continuity makes the super series a good example for the dialectic dynamics of a new hybrid category, created as the industry negotiated its changing technological and cultural environment. As the screenwriter of the successful super series El Señor de los Cielos ( Lord of the Skies, 2013–) put it: ‘I tried to keep some dynamics from telenovela narrative, but mixed with the narrative structure of series, which are close to the English-mainstream series and action-oriented stories’ (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida).

Telemundo’s success with super series in prime-time television not only effectively challenged Univision’s rating dominance but emboldened the network to push innovation further, resulting in the creation of a new category of genre of sorts, the premium series. These shows first followed the common weekly broadcast dynamics of the series, but as a new franchise they have evolved into a telenovela-like daily broadcast routine. Disrupting the common long number of chapters of serial fiction of classic telenovelas, the premium series are based on short number of episodes, 10 to 12, programmed in prime time during 2 weeks, and are changing the way US Spanish-language television networks operate. All these new iterations fictional seriality mean that standard prime-time television is under assault. Smaller storytelling arches and the promise of high production values in the contexts of seriality anchored in a daily viewership routine are challenging the reign of the telenovela genre.

The nature of this disruption brought about by super series and its industry-wide implications cannot be fully understood without considering the decades-long dominant position in prime time of the traditional romantic telenovela model produced by Mexican Televisa and distributed through Univision. Sixty-five per cent of US Latinos are of Mexican decent and their familiarity with Televisa’s telenovela grammar as a kind of ‘manufactured cultural proximity’ (Piñón, 2014; Straubhaar, 1991) was key in the success of Univision prime-time programming. For instance, during the 2000s, Univision’s prime-time viewership share, year by year tripled in number that of Telemundo’s. This began to change in 2011 with the launch of La Reina del Sur (2011–2019) and the launch of El Senor de los Cielos in 2013 allowed Telemundo to claim first place in prime-time viewership within the 18–49 years old demographic in 2017 ( Piñon, 2018). The success of the super series as a new televisual commodity set in motion discursive practices centred on a new and different televisual product, a new genre category rooted in the idea of better production values, and an increasing masculinisation of the genre.

How to think about genres

One of the most important goals in the definition of genres is that they help sort and organise a large amount of content through a set of established conventions guiding television industry professionals, media critics and academics alike, who, in turn, set expectations and behavioural media routines for television audiences. But as Glen Creeber (2008) argues, genres do not remain static, they evolve and are also the combination of different prior genres, as the result of certain industrial and commercial pressures that ended up shaping them, and they need to be understood in specific socio-historical contexts. Furthermore, John Cawelti suggests ‘the reading and criticism of both individual texts and of genres is part of a larger process, the ongoing development of culture’ (1985, 60).

Expanding on Cawelti, Jason Mittell (2004) argues that the relationship of a text with the larger corpus of genre happens through production and reception practices, which should be understood in the contexts of larger social narratives that he identifies as ‘discursive practices’ (2004: 173) within the structural logic of what Michel Foucault calls ‘discursive formations’ (1972: 38). In this sense, the universe that integrates the ‘discursive practices’ is nurtured by the conceptions and expectations of different social groups in which you can find network executives, creative teams (producers, directors, writers, talent, etc.), marketing and advertising professionals, critics, scholars, audiences and fans. Mittell suggests that ‘instead of typical questions of definition or interpretation, we should foreground questions of cultural process in our attempts to analyze media genres’ (2004: 175). In this sense, the genre or format, beyond their diegetic composition, should be understood as a social construction, in which hierarchies of taste operates (Bourdieu, 2010), and which have historically work as a matrix of hierarchies of identity such as class, gender, race, age, sexual orientation or nationality (Newman and Levine, 2012). Mittell argues that television genres are important because they work as ‘cultural categories’ (2004: 177) which guide, organised and give meaning to a set of televisual practices from the participant different social groups

Following these notions of genre in the context of the new digital media landscape, it is important to think about the way that audiences consume content offered by the media institutions, the way that this affects the dynamics of storytelling, and the rules of the genre. But equally important is to look at how media institutions, critics and scholars talk about these genres. Today, when young people are abandoning traditional routines of watching television and the networks are looking for any programming strategy to retain them, the institutional discourse under which programmes are ‘named’ or ‘label’ through specific characteristic such as production values and genre is constructed with implicit social and cultural hierarchies.

Telenovela literature and the evolution of the genre

‘As a type of televisual serial narrative’, Ana Lopez argues that ‘the Latin American telenovela participate in the shared history that gave rise to other serial narrative models such as the US soap opera’ (1995: 258). Cuban radionovelas and the visual grammar and acting of the teleteatros shaped Telenovelas as distinctive genre. It was the change from a weekly format to an everyday Monday to Friday prime-time format that ‘signaled the passage from teleteatro to a telenovelas format’ (Hamburger, 2005: 29). This televisual serial narrative has a continuing narrative structure, in which the story told in every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, triggering the audience’s desire to find out what will happen in the next chapter. The management of the audience’s expectation is structured through a Monday to Friday daily viewership dynamic. Melodrama functions as the engine of the plot and narrative devices, and character development enhances the storytelling process. What differentiates telenovelas from soap operas is that telenovelas ‘have always had clear-cut stories with definitive endings that permit narrative closure’ but also ‘telenovelas are prime-time entertainment for all audiences’ (Lopez, 1995: 258). The close-ending structure of telenovelas is built on a central plot, around which many other subplots can be arranged, but all of which should be subordinated to the main goal to be achieved or an obstacle to be overcome, which signals the ending of story.

Tomás López-Pumarejo (1987) wrote the first critical study of telenovelas, influenced by Robert Allen’s (1985) seminal work on soap operas. López-Pumarejo viewed telenovelas as a heavily feminised, commercialised, daytime television industrial product. As María Mercedes Borkosky (2016) argues, this approach conceives the cosmology of telenovelas primarily within a moral universe, in which the triumph of the good over evil is based on the capacity of the leading female protagonist to navigate and move around the playing field of feelings. Martín-Barbero and Muñoz (1992) analysed telenovelas not as an exclusively feminised-commercialised industrial product but as a distinctive cultural form, in which melodrama, the quintessential element of telenovelas, operates as a cultural matrix inserted in Latin American sociocultural practices of the everyday life. Martín-Barbero also argues that telenovelas produce the basis of a specific communicational contract tied to quotidian life, making them ‘a carnival, where actors, audiences, and characters constantly interchange their positions. This interchange refers to the confusion between what the viewers feel, an aesthetic experience of identity that is open to and counts on the expectations and reactions of the public’ (1993: 23). This process, argues Martín-Barbero, ‘might the product of profound dynamic of memories and imaginaries. What actives these memories and makes them permeable to the modern urban imaginaries…is the order of their cultural matrices’ (p. 23).

Martín-Barbero (1995) further argues that telenovelas have historically followed production paradigms with very distinctive visual style, narrative construction and character development. The first is the traditional telenovela model, based on the Cuban radionovela, mostly adopted by Mexico, in which ‘heart-rending, tragic suffering, predominates’ (p. 279). The second is a realistic telenovela model, prompted by the production of the Brazilian telenovela Beto Rockefeller (1968). ‘This model’, argues Martín-Barbero, ‘without completely breaking with the melodramatic one, incorporates a realism which permits the ‘situating’ of the narrative in everyday life as well as within specifically national reality’ (1995: 280). The many divergent iterations of these two primal models, across the different countries in the region, have produced a more complex and varied storytelling scenario, in which the increasing diversity of narrative formulas are linked to very different national and idiosyncratic expressions and evolutions of the genre. Furthermore, the incorporation of different subgenres in telenovela plot development, arguably as a response to increasing competition in the rise of cable television in the 1990s, grounded the surge of a new telenovela paradigm called Postmodern or Baroque telenovela (Steinberg, 1997). In the Postmodern telenovela, ‘narrative series are multiplied (several tales happen in parallel, and in some moments is difficult to establish the predominance of who is going to prevail in the narrative) and the scene is occupied by different references genres mixtures’ (Steinberg, 1997: 22). In this new modality, the melodrama of telenovelas is mixed with comedy, action thriller, musicals and documentary elements that seem to dislocate the genre. While telenovelas do have an array of iterations across the region with clear moments of disruptions, many of them changing the trajectories of entire national industries, the production of telenovelas as a particular televisual commodity arguably contain general elements that prevent them from fully becoming something else. That is exactly the claim that the industry is making around the rise of super series: that they are something else than telenovelas. I will identify some elements that are shared characteristics of the telenovelas as a genre, as possible site of analysis and comparison. Telenovelas present the following characteristics: (a) they are fictional serials, (b) they are based on melodrama, (c) they offer a close-ending narrative structure, (d) they provide a central plot and a variety of subordinated subplots, (e) they are broadcast daily – mostly Monday to Friday, (f) because of time demands, they not always afford the highest production values, and (g) romance is usually a key element in the plot. The disruption of some of these elements may situate a televisual production in a hybrid position while still making the case of its telenovela lineage. However, as I just pointed out, the decision of what genre is, or not, does not rely solely on rigid characteristics but comes from the participants in the industry, producers, institutions, critics, audiences and scholars. The purpose of my research is to see how the very producers of the telenovela genre and the super series perceive them and talk about them as a site of possible genre perceived evolution or change.

As a key strategy to change how the different participants, practitioners, critics and audiences talk about their new televisual product, Telemundo used a marketing strategy to reposition their successful prime-time fictional serials, from narconovelas as super series, as highlighted in the interview conducted by Latina TV with Esperanza Garay, Senior VP of Latin American Sales and Acquisitions Latin America for Telemundo International. Garay points out that the super series strategies involve:

Taking a programming differentiation strategy from conventional and traditional telenovela, and focusing on a different telenovela, with unique characteristics, with shorter duration, from 60 to 80 episodes. Second, the thematic, because of the time slot, allows us to bring stronger and riskier plots, either thriller, action, or suspense with scenes that require a greater production, bigger investments, and the best talent. (TV Latina, 2015)

That year, NBCUniversal Hispanic Group launched an audiovisual campaign titled, ‘Telemundo super series: not your average telenovela’, in which the genre differentiation with telenovelas was categorised as ‘daring characters, amazing stories, incredible production values, and seasons’ (NBCU, 2015). This marketing goal was underscored in October 2017, by Luis Silberman Telemundo’s President, whose interview with Variety reported that ‘we have begun by changing our prime time, our ten o’clock slot and by introducing super series which are not novelas, but shorter and come in multiple seasons. We pulled away from telenovelas’ (Hopewell and De Pablos, 2017).

The success achieved by Telemundo with the premiere of La Reina del Sur in 2011 (then conceived as a narconovela), and replicated by El Senor de los Cielos in 2013, found its most important moment in terms of genre disruption when it was announced that El Señor would have a second season (Maglio, 2013). This decision marked the rise of the new television fictional serials label as super series that so far included six successful seasons of El Señor de los Cielos, four seasons of La Señora Acero (2014–) and three season of Sin Senos Sí Hay Paraiso (2016–), as the most visible representatives of the new hybrid genre. The strategy paid off, as super series took over slowly but increasingly in the ratings within their time slots, allowing Telemundo to claim the first place in prime-time ratings for the first time in the second half of 2016, and the entirety of 2017 in the 18–49 demographic (Piñón, 2018).

The impact of a changing digital media landscape on audience’s consumption routines

The new digital media landscape has brought incredible challenges and opportunities to the industry as the executives grapple with this new media ecology. Informal and formal conversations with high rank executives in Telemundo and Televisa offer a glimpse of an ‘institutional discourse’ building a message of new paths of opportunity for the television networks, based new opportunities of content distribution in which OTT platforms can extend the life of the networks’ programming, as exemplified by the signed contracts for original programming of Televisa with Amazon, and Telemundo with Netflix. However, the executives recognised the dramatic changes in audiences’ media consumption. A Telemundo executive argues ‘the research shows that audiences do not always watch television content at the time that is broadcast…’ ‘and yes, they are watching our content but in many cases under their own timing and conditions’ (Executive Telemundo. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida). Similarly, a Televisa executive states ‘audiences are watching more content than ever’, but also ‘people are watching content in many platforms and at unusual times…this has lowered the average television everyday viewing, from the times in which there was no competition, for people when they have only the telenovela’ (Executive Televisa. Personal Communication, 13 August 2018, Mexico City). Along this line, an independent screenwriter with long experience on telenovela production asserts ‘this new generation of millennials have not the same span attention that adults used to have, and they now have the need of immediate gratification…they consume the products quickly, and they do it in an addictive matter’ (Independent Screenwriters, Phone Communication, 6 February 2019, Mexico City). The Televisa executive continues arguing that: ‘by impacting audiences’ routines of consumption, you realise that people have more options, and people fall in love with characters, and they want to know more, so this triggers binge watching’ (Executive Televisa. Personal Communication, 13 August 2018, Mexico City). These are the very logics pushing television networks to innovate, to create different content, with higher production values, shorter episodes and instant gratification to compete in the new digital environment, while at the same time keeping traditional formats intact, which respond to the demand of the daily television schedules. In the following sections, I will put forward a set of disruptive practices or characteristic of super series, as described by TV executives and writers, to better situate how they are different from telenovelas as well as a set of characteristics that anchor super series to the telenovela genre. The very people who make production and broadcast decisions and set the agenda about how to talk about them describe all these practices.

Telemundo’s super series: The case of El Señor de los Cielos

Disruption

The transformation and changing face of telenovelas can be characterised through the different points of disruption where new televisual texts are departing from the standard melodramatic moral universe, the traditional narrative structure and the kind of themes, production values and format associated with the telenovelas.

The disruption of the hegemonic position of the traditional romantic telenovela story.

The most successful telenovelas in the US Hispanic prime-time market have focused on the love story, and their various iterations, but as a Telemundo Producer argues ‘the love story has been moved to a back seat on the (newer) stories’ (Executive Telemundo. Personal Communication, 10 July 2018, Miami Florida). More specifically, what is now absent, in super series, is the central plot in which the main heterosexual couple needs to go through a series of obstacles, challenges and incredible twists that prevent them from being together, only to be resolved with a happy ending in the last episodes as the couple is finally reunited. As a result of this disruption, another classic element of the telenovela narrative under question is the specific trope of the Cinderella story. Not only is the romantic couple being decentred, but the role of women in telenovelas is being challenged. The idea that the poor, innocent, virginal young woman is going to be rescued by the wealthy, honest, well-intentioned young man is no longer the rule. This is what has been described as ‘Social Darwinism’ (Fernández and Paxman, 2001: 95), as part of the traditional telenovela plot, in which the only option for women climbing the social ladder is marriage to a wealthy man. Women are now depicted with a lot more agency than before, including their re-positioning as professionals in charge of their own economic destiny. Leading telenovela women are not depicted as weak, helpless, passive victims anymore. Super series, in particular, position women in a different light. In many cases, the leading female protagonist has sexual agency, more active roles and entrepreneurial drive in various professional occupations including positions of power in criminal settings, although this is not always the case with their supporting female characters.

The disruption of the melodramatic moral universe.

Another key departure from traditional telenovelas is the absence of a defined moral universe in which the plot provides a scenario for the battle between good and evil. The traditional telenovela dichotomy is expressed through the characters (the good and the bad) and the kind of relationships that they have. In super series, there is no clear line between good and evil. The traditional character positioning is turned upside down, as the screenwriter of El Señor de los Cielos points out, ‘the leading characters are the bad guys, they inhabit the world of evil, and the ones that are part of the world of justice are the antagonists’. The screenwriter describes the leading characters as ‘being in between the bad and the worse’, he continues ‘…because we are making action-oriented stories, very dynamic stories, in which we do not need to take care of the honesty or virtues of the leading characters, what you ought to do if this were a telenovela’ (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida). Building a moral universe relies on the use of characters as types or stereotypes, with clear divisions between the goods and the evils, and super series show a more complex universe of characters with equally complex interests. It is a new universe where the protagonists are antiheroes with no clear moral values.

The masculinisation of the genre.

One of the main factors in the success of La Reina del Sur is that it drew a large young-male audience, and this was not an isolated event. The audience demographics of narconovelas broadcast in the US Hispanic television networks show high male viewership, in contrast to traditional romantic telenovelas (Piñón, 2018). The masculinisation of the genre through the social problem-oriented theme brought this hybrid new genre into the public sphere. Even in the case of La Reina del Sur or Señora Acero in which a female character takes the lead, the women operate in a male-gendered environment. Because one of the reasons for these changes in narrative strategy is to attract male audiences, male characters have taken a centre stage on these new action packed plot iterations of telenovelas as super series as is the case of El Señor de los Cielos. This is clearly not an anomaly, as narconovelas such as El Capo (2009–2014), Pablo Escobar El Patrón del Mal (2012) or Perseguidos (2016–) have all had a male character as the centre of the narrative. But what is important here is that due to the demand of new fictional, male-oriented, action-oriented, suspense thrillers, a ‘social problem’ perspective is taking over the narratives of these hybrid shows. Stories of law enforcement, crime, migration, money laundering, traffic, mafia and gang-like themes are increasingly present. A producer with Argos Productions argues that with the masculinised world of drug dealers, ‘we are trying to represent this world, a misogynous world’; she continues ‘even though Telemundo and its writer want to show more empowered women on the screen, but when women are immersed in this world, in reality they have really few options’ (Executive Argos. Personal Communication, 7 August 2017, Tlanepantla, State of Mexico, Mexico). These shows are in stark contrast with traditional telenovelas in which women are the leading characters and the real engines of the plot.

Sense of reality, a sense of historical document.

El Señor de los Cielos was loosely based on the life of Amado Carrillo, the famous Mexican drug dealer, renamed Aurelio Casillas in the narconovela. The stories, the characters and the situations presented in the plot of the first season were all anchored in historic events and real people. The narconovela played with real life events and real people in the political, social and economic circles of Mexico, Colombia and the United States. While still fictional, Aurelio touched a chord with audiences. As one of the Argos producer argues:

I think that we were going deep in something that it was happening in the contemporaneous Mexican history, for instance, the story of the peasants who started to work with drug dealers because they did not have anywhere to sell their products.

‘Argos Productions has a revolutionary DNA,’ continues the producer ‘with a critical point of view; and when we start emphasising it, I do think people can see it, people start hearing in the words of our fictional characters, how people really think’ (Executive Argos. Personal Communication, 7 August 2017, Tlanepantla, State of Mexico, Mexico). The Argos executive discusses how telenovelas like Nada Personal (1996) and Demasiado Corazón (1997) were direct predecessors of El Señor de los Cielos in their criticism of the connection between criminal activities and the political establishment. From the first season, set in the 1990s, El Señor has introduced to the audience all the main contemporary Mexican political figures over three decades. In particular, the fierce critique focused on the 57th President of Mexico, Ernesto Peña Nieto (2012–2018), resonated strongly with audiences tired of the high levels of corruption in the political system. The super series portrayed the President as a cold criminal, lured by lust, sex and drugs, and the fictional plot revolves around real events in contemporary Mexican life. Using fiction to mirror reality was done masterfully by the Venezuelan telenovela, Por Estas Calles in 1992, but in the case of El Señor de los Cielos totally fictional interactions, situated in the context of real events, functioned as a vehicle to deliver a harsh commentary against the deep sense of degradation of Mexican social and political realities. The Argos Producer recalls that Rafael Amaya, the actor portraying the fictional character Aurelio Casillas:

understood perfectly the text, and he started delivering a sense of deepness to what he was saying. There were things that he was saying that seemed to me very dangerous because they had a great degree of truth, and that is the moment in which the people started loving to El Señor de los Cielos, and they are not supposed to love him. (Executive Argos. Personal Communication, 7 August 2017, Tlanepantla, State of Mexico, Mexico).

On narrative temporal structure.

Super series explore a different narrative sequence. There are narrative irruptions, disorientation and breaking common telenovela continuity as ways to maintain audiences’ attention. Mittell (2006) has made the case of ‘narrative complexity’, and the use of different strategies of disorientation, to make audiences think by disrupting common rigid structure of seriality and series. Following that strategy, the super series became a possible route of change. A Telemundo Producer argues that super series sometimes break with this common structure:

[Characters] end in a particular situation one day, and the next day the chapter starts in a different situation…(This) can confuse the audience, it is a matter of routines, but people start to understand that some things are linked.

He continues:

sometime you can think: When did that happen? And suddenly at the end of the chapter or in the next the story is narrated through a flashback. This is a narrative structure that come from weekly serial drama, and we have been experimenting a little bit with the audiences in this sense. (Executive Telemundo. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida)

On the amount of episodes and plot arcs.

Super series have responded to audience preference for fewer episodes. Historically, the number of chapters of telenovelas has varied, usually running from 120 episodes to as many as 200, or even more if the telenovela is very successful. Executives, producers and writers all agree that in the new digital landscape, audiences are impatient and prefer stories that have condensed viewing experiences. At the same time, the move to fewer episodes is also well suited to digital platforms. Following the steps of Sin Tetas no Hay Paraíso (2006), a Columbian narconovela with only 21 episodes, Telemundo paired with RTI Colombia on La Diosa Coronada (2010) with 31 episodes, but it did not produce the expected results. It was the success of La Reina del Sur with 63 episodes that set the mark for number of episodes. El Señor de los Cielos had 74 episodes in the first season. Telemundo increased the order to 80 or even 90 in the next seasons, but the digital reality and increasingly competitive digital landscape means the network are commissioning fewer episodes. This applies not only to super series but also to the new format called premium series with only 10 to 12 episodes broadcast daily.

The disruption of the close-end final and the creation of number of seasons.

The creation of seasons for super series is one of the most important departures from the telenovela mode of production. Successful telenovelas grew in number of episodes, up to several hundreds, but have no seasons. Reporter Tony Maglio’s article, ‘Telemundo orders second season of novella, in big break from tradition’, describes how the order of a second season for El Señor de los Cielos was unprecedented business. As he puts it, ‘telenovelas are not built to return for additional seasons. They generally run five nights a week for 100 to 120 episodes’ (Maglio, 2013). Joshua Mintz, then VP executive president of scripted programming and general manager of Telemundo Studios, touted that ‘for the first time in our history, we are leveraging the best of the novella genre, with the frequency of the general market drama series’ (Maglio, 2013). This was a clear break with the past for US Hispanic television, but it was already an industry practice for narconovelas in the Colombian television industry. Fox Telecolombia and TV Caracol have already set in motion a season strategy for their most successful narconovelas such as El Capo, 1,2 3, and El Cartel de los Sapos 1, 2 (2008–).

However, before the disruption that narconovelas triggered, telenovelas had sequels in other countries, particularly in specific subgenres such as youth novelas or children novelas. However, as independent screenwriter argues: ‘in the telenovela context we never talked about seasons. It was possible to make them larger, if the telenovela had a really great success the rare possibility was to make a second part’ (Independent Screenwriters, Phone Communication, 6 February 2019, Mexico City). Very successful telenovelas have had second parts, such as the youth novella, Floricienta (2004), but the second part was not considered a second season. This is important because the first and the second parts had endings that offered plot resolutions, while seasons do not do this.

The possibility of adding seasons to super series has broken the original telenovela contract with audiences, in which they, assumingly, were going to see their expectations satisfied with the resolution of the plot. The absence of resolution takes away the genre’s capacity to restore the moral universe at the end, which had been a key component of the moral lesson of the traditional telenovela. As Adriana Estill argues, ‘(T)he final closure of the telenovela creates a permanent, stable world where “complete” individuals win or lose and the audience can participate in that completion. The closure that a telenovela provides essentially confirms the worldview – the wholeness – always already present’ (2001: 174). In contrast, and in order to keep the suspense and the possibilities to growth the narrative through another seasons, the super series format has an open-ended finale. With this narrative imperative for an established order, where the good guys are awarded and bad guys penalised is gone. There is no moral lesson, something central in melodrama, particularly in the traditional telenovela model.

The creation of seasons, in the context of a digital environment, increases followers in digital spaces and creates a franchise commodity with transmedia possibilities. As the writer of El Señor de los Cielos remembers:

we have good results in ratings, and access to the boom generated by VOD, also there were some content production made for Facebook and social media, around the story, and we had, at the beginning of the fourth season, 8 million followers in Facebook. In that moment we realised this is a monster, this is big, what we have here is actually a franchise. (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida).

As Dennise Man argues, the making of a programme into a franchise is the imperative of the new media environment: ‘It’s not TV, it’s brand management TV’ (2009). The creation of a franchise out of a television programme, and in particular a fictional series, creates a level of fandom and digital interactions that can turn a show into a money making machine. But it also requires, as Mann suggests, a different labour relationship and management with the project. The multiple seasons of a successful super series also aligns more closely with the idea of a series in the mainstream American television context.

Higher production values.

The fast-paced, action-packed, social problem-oriented narratives also require a certain level of cinematic quality and production values. This allows the shows to deliver a certain level of realism, while also allowing them to be marketed as high-quality television commodities. ‘This is not a telenovela’ asserts the screenwriter of El Seños de los Cielos. ‘We have high production values, because super series are a new television genre that has not become strictly an action-oriented story – still is not there yet – but we do not want to be stuck in telenovela dynamics’ (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida). A narrative shaped by a fast-paced rhythm, dialogue, action, editing and locations, with the purpose of appealing to young, male audiences, is replacing the traditional telenovela mode of production based on long dialogue, indoor-based scenes and environments mostly filmed in the studio. As a result, there is a strong element of location filming, which has also been linked to the cinematic properties more aligned with the concept of quality TV. To produce the landmark narconovela La Reina del Sur, Telemundo sought a coproduction scheme with Caracol TV, Antena 3 and the participation of Argos in the production process. At the time, La Reina was heralded as Telemundo’s most expensive production. With sets in different countries, different continents, a lot of locations in exteriors, beautiful landscapes as well as seascapes, and the use of action-oriented storytelling that required boats, helicopters, jets, cars and so on, La Reina established a high-quality and dynamic tone. El Señor de los Cielos followed that path. Telemundo promoted the show as ‘not your average telenovela’ and touted their ‘incredible production values’. All executives, producers, screenwriters agreed that super series offered a different standard on production values, their cinematic values, alongside with the action-oriented sequences. The Argos producers cited the amount of special effects required in the different sequences of El Senor de los Cielos as a clear element that appeals audiences.

Continuity

Continuity in super series is rooted in the longstanding dynamics of production/reception and storytelling strategies of prime-time Spanish-language television. The broadcasting of super series on a daily basis produces a key connection with audiences, which in many cases underscores the very conditions of continuity that has allowed them to rise in visibility as daily, still melodrama-oriented, serial.

Melodrama is still the overarching matrix.

Melodrama and its tricks still govern many of the resolutions on super series, creating a range of verisimilitude from which the leading anti-hero characters can emerge triumphant. The suspense is built on unexpected twists, reminiscent of melodramatic narrative devices. Furthermore, family relations and loyalty still play a key role in the development of the super series. As the screenwriter of El Señor de los Cielos clarifies:

we have characters that are mostly action-oriented but I wanted to keep the spirit of a telenovela here. That is why when it comes to talk about my premises I write, ‘this is the bases on which Los Narcos Tambien Lloran refers to the highly transnationally famous Mexican telenovela, Los Ricos Tambien Lloran [Rich people also cry]…in El Señor you can see how a narco thinks, how a narco lives, and how a narco suffers’. (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida)

Kinship and family relations still at the core of the narrative universe.

Not only are familial ties the basis for relationships between individual characters in El Señor, but relations between different families also act as the foundation for more complex relationships linked to different sets of law enforcement or crime-related businesses, where loyalty, revenge, secrets and betrayal are also rampant. Family and business have been heavily intertwined in the plot development of El Señor. Familial relationships, and their varied interactions, take centre stage with the narrative participation of the different members of the Casillas family. The drug traffic business is most of the times a family business. ‘Alba, Aurelio Casillas’ mother, while not involved directly in the business, has both a matriarchal a primordial role’, says the screenwriter of El Señor (Screenwriter El Señor. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida). She is described as a key ethical point of reference in the context of the broken moral universe of the family business. In El Señor, ‘love-relationships happen when they coincide with business interests’ argues a Telemundo executive (Executive Telemundo. Personal Communication, 9 July 2018, Miami Florida).

The daily routines for viewership.

Super series are scheduled in the programming grid the same as telenovelas. Super series are serials scheduled for prime-time slots for everyday from Monday through Friday. This is the key and crucial format element that structures and defines telenovela production, the narrative devices, and the relationship with audiences’ everyday lives and expectations. While the narrative keeps the pace of the everyday life for the most part, characters do not remember a time past, you experience the past across the many episodes broadcast. So, the confusion between reality and fiction coming from an everyday routine is a key feature of audiences’ experiences that is also reproduced by super series. Super series also rely on the same ‘Star System’ of talent that nurtures the telenovela industry. When asked what she thought about super series, to the Producer from Bravo Productions, replied that she simply defines them as ‘short telenovelas’.

Conclusions

The new digital media ecology is forcing practitioners within the television industry, particularly broadcasting networks, to rework the long-standing telenovela serial format. This is in response to new audiences’ routines of consumption, but also to make them more viable to their new afterlife in digital platforms of delivery. Increasing audiences’ migration to digital platforms is changing the positioning of broadcasting prime-time schedule as the only window of delivery. Broadcasts now coexist with digital source of video delivery offering different logics of time and space availability.

The changing media landscape has produced within the television industry practitioners a sense of opportunity as well as a sense of urgency. Producing certainty is one of the most valuable tools for executives ‘discursive practices’ in the context of an industry that been characterised by Richard Caves (2005) under the ‘nobody knows’ rule, based on the unpredictability of success of television programmes (p. 5). In that process, the conceptualisation of a new televisual product in a changing industrial context needs to be seen as an effort to reflect a spirit on innovation and anchor discourse of success around particular commodities, producing at the same time certainty and guidelines of what lies ahead as content strategy.

The current transformations are not only reflected in a corresponding urge for innovation in televisual products, but also a realignment in which television broadcasting networks are producing content for newly hegemonic OTT providers such as Netflix or Amazon. Broadcasters are adjusting their own televisual formats in a way that can flow dynamically in one or the other platform, in different temporalities of distribution. Telemundo, Univision and Televisa have signed production contracts with the major digital video streaming services Netflix and Amazon. These particular production agreements have been mostly based on the idea of producing dramatic series with high production values, small amount of episodes, controversial and bold narratives, and largely different from other daily serial melodrama.

The position of broadcasting networks, in the pursuing of fictional dramatic series with an afterlife in digital platforms, is already having an effect on the dynamics of production in prime-time television. A new line of televisual products, which Telemundo calls premium series, offers high production values, with a series-like number of episodes (10 to 12) but scheduled on an everyday routine similar to telenovelas. The premium series, titled The Inmate (El Recluso), was released on September 25 of 2018 and ran for 2 weeks. The production of The Inmate not only signals a new stage of quality production in Spanish-language television but a change in the traditional industrial mode of production based mostly in the logics of a diet of daily telenovelas. In January 2019, Telemundo premiered Jugar con Fuego (Playing with fire), a 10 episodes drama scheduled daily over 2 weeks. This new production strategy marries the idea of a series’ production with the quotidian routines of the everyday telenovela broadcast. This is not a change that should be taken lightly.

Constant transformation and accommodation are core features for the success and growth of telenovelas. This is reflected in the very distinctive iterations in different countries, with diverse narrative strategies, the incorporation of various subgenre, themes and character development under the overarching umbrella of melodrama. It is also important to underscore the capacity of the genre for innovation while retaining traditional strategies. Martín-Barbero argues ‘The success of the Latin American telenovela exists to a large degree in making an archaic narrative […] the shelter of modernizing proposals of some aspects of life’ (1992: 71).

Symbolically, super series pursue a new process of modernisation in production values, strategies of storytelling and narrative approaches to characters and themes while rekindling long-felt popular culture elements about family relations love, and success. As Mittell (2004) suggests, the idea of a television genre is engineered in the context of ‘discursive practice’ where a variety of social groups intervene. The television industry has set in motion a campaign that underscores the features and different qualities brought about by super series. We will have to wait to see how these new hybrids carve out their own distinctive places in audiences’ imagination and if the distinctive genre’s expectations offer a route for recognition.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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