I live in a Spanish speaking neighborhood in Chicago, but don’t speak it. And truth be told, the only reason I want to learn it, is 'cause I want to watch those Spanish TV shows.
In Chicago we have WSNS-Telemundo (Channel 44), WGBO-Univision (Channel 66) and WXFT-Telefutura (Channel 60) as full power, full time Spanish TV stations.
We also have a low power Spanish TV stations and stations like WGN-the CW (Channel 9) and WTTW-PBS(Channel 11) which have Spanish TV on their subchannels.
Anyway, if I’m bored I’ll skim pass those channels, and even though I can’t understand those shows, they all seem interesting. First of all everyone on these Spanish channels, seems to be really goodlooking :). I love the Spanish soap operas as they seem to be so dramatic.
I don’t understand what they’re saying but the way they’re saying it.
So I was wondering for those Spanish speakers, are the shows good? Or are they just as boring as American TV (I know that’s just my opinion).
And yes I know it’s a wide open question. 'Cause I often wonder where they pick the shows up. I know a few come from Puerto Rico but most seem to be Mexican.
That’s a tough one. My cable provider recently picked up Telemundo, and there are some prime time shows on there that look really good, but since I missed the early episodes, I don’t want to start watching in the middle of the series.
I absolutely agree about the actors being good-looking. That’s a distinct plus.
My girlfriend is Guatemalan and she loves the telenovelas (Spanish soap operas). I speak and understand Spanish, but personally those shows make me gag just as much as American soap operas, which is a lot. As you note, they do seem really dramatic. Which just reeks of all kinds of phony to me.
Although I found it pretty interesting that the American show “Ugly Betty” actually ripped off a Colombian telenovela called “Betty La Fea”. I thought it would have been the other way around since sometimes other countries just copycat American entertainment but no, it was originally a Latin-American program (and it is still running).
Incorrect. Most shows are Mexican, Colombian, Argentinian, or Venezuelan. There is also another subset of shows, those produced in the US, mostly Miami (Don Francisco’s shows, and Cristina, are example of these shows).
Novelas vary in their quality. Top novelas, IMHO, are the Brazilian ones, many of which are eventually translated to Spanish and aired in either Telemundo or Univisión. Colombian novelas are also good, and less dramatic than the Mexican novelas. Mexican novelas, for the most part, big generalization, are overly dramatic, and many of them are remakes of either older Mexican novelas, or Colombian/Brazilian/Argentinian novelas. There are a few good, original Mexican novelas, though, but they’re the minority.
All that said, I confess to have watched a lot of novelas in my youth.
Rigamarole, Betty la Fea ended years ago (say, about 8 years, as it ended shortly after I finished high school). A second part was also produced, and already aired.
Really popular novelas are reran occasionally. Not only that, but, following what I said above about Mexican novelas, the original Betty la Fea has also been picked up and remade by the Mexicans…
Oh yea, I forgot that sometimes Telemundo and others (Gems?) also show original Spanish (as in from Spain) shows, which are also regarded to be good and high quality… well, higher than a Mexican telenovela.
Mexican telenovela is the TV equivalent of a Big Mac.
Whenever I flip through spanish-speaking TV, everything seems so loud and bright and colorful like it’s meant to keep the attention of a child - even though it’s clearly meant for adults.
I used to run across “Super Bla Blazo” it had a puppet and a very good looking guy hosting it and everyone seemed to be having fun. I have no idea what it was but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I also thought “Que Pasa USA?” was funny. Even though I only understood half of it. They even had an episode about a the man thinking his son might be gay, which was a pretty big deal in the 70s. Very advanced, but I think this was PBS at least it was on our PBS station in Chicago
I think they should put English subtitles in the closed captions. We have a low power station in Chicago that does that with Korean Soap Operas.
I didn’t realize this, well if they can dub them from Portuguese to Spanish they should be able to dub them into English. They are missing a big market I think
I’m not so sure… See, in Latin America (including Brasil), novelas are not years-long things, like it is in the US (like General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, etc.). Heck, they’re not even multi-season series… Although they could be, considering their format…
They usually run five days a week, at an established hour (say, 6-7pm or 8-9pm), for about 6 months. Then it is over, fini, done, the novela ends. The last week or so, and the final episode, are in some cases big deals… They may have a 2 hour special, or a recap of what has happened until then, or even interviews (before or after the last episode) with the actors. It all depends on how big was the novel.
Just like many other cultural things between Latin America and US, I just don’t think it will translate well… I don’t think the US TV audiences would like them.
Most of what’s on WTTW’s Spanish channel is recycled from the BBC. Why they don’t run a SAP with the original dialog, or English closed captions (the commercial Spanish stations use CC3 for English subtitles), is beyond me.
As for the comedy, did you ever see Channel Ocho on The Simpsons? The Bee Man was based on a real Spanish TV character, with the difference being that he’s funnier. Spanish, okay, Mexican comedy is aimed at a common denominator below that of Small Wonder. It shouldn’t be surprising; much of the audience is fresh off the rancho and has not yet developed sophisticated, urban tastes. It’s like the American audience was 100 years ago or less. MUCH less, in the case of Hee Haw. It ain’t fancy, it ain’t droll, but it can still be funny.
One of the most popular Spanish-language shows (as this interesting article shows) is El Chavo del Ocho (“The Kid from [Channel] Eight”), which ran for a baffling 1,300 episodes and went out of production in 1992 (though reruns are still popular both on Spanish-language stations in the U.S. as well as in Portuguese translation in Brazil). The show indeed is childlike, featuring adults dressed as children and a lot of slapstick, which apparently appeals both to kids and adults who remember it from its original run. (The lead actor on the show also played a clumsy superhero called “El Chaupin Colorado” [The Red Grasshopper], who is the inspiration for The Simpsons’s Bumblebee Man.)
It wasn’t ripped off- it was licensed (just as many reality and game shows are licensed from European concepts). Betty La Fea is so popular that many countries around the world have their own local version (I remember when Entertainment Weekly ran a spread showing the Bettys from each one- it was interesting to see which ones were truly ugly and which ones were, like America Fererra, not so much).
Rigamarole, yea, like I said… The famous novelas are put on reruns later on… And Mexico, for example, has already created (and by now probably finished) their own version of Betty la Fea.
I take offense in dropzone’s comment. Roberto Gómez Bolañes (Chespirito), the actor behind el Chavo and el Chapulín Colorado, and his coworkers, were and are NOT pandering to the lowest common denominator. dropzone and others are a bit too quick (and don’t know the language ) to judge.
El Chapulín Colorado was in fact making fun of the American-style superhero… what if instead of an all American hero, they had a more humble type? At the end of the day, anyways, he won the day. Many of the episodes were parodies of Westerns, and even in a couple of episodes they made fun of the US (represented by the character of “Uncle Sam”), and the USSR (represented by a fat… someone). And he uttered one of my favorite lines (rough translation): “Brave is not the one who is fearless, but the one who is afraid and faces those fears.”
El Chavo was more for kids, but it always had an undercurrent or background based on real life and not so nice events. C’mon, the main character is an orphan who lives in a barrel!!! His best friend and her dad are almost always on the verge of being kicked from their apartment because they don’t pay rent. The other friend has a dead who left for the sea and never returned, and is being raised just by his (supposedly widowed) mom.
Not to mention Chespirito did have other characters and other programs, which did cater to a more adult audience. Heck, sometimes in the voice overs of El Chavo, you can tell it was supposed to air at a later time than 10am on a Saturday, as they kept the part that said “And the events of this evening include…”
From what I’ve been told, that telenovela is based on a really depressing book… I’m not sure how much they changed in the telenovela, but they’re usually faithful to the book, just making it more dramatic and phony.
Just because the title is awesome doesn’t mean the contents are cheerful…
Well, it would depend on what you like. “Culebrones” are definitely dramatic as all get-go. They became popular in Spain (competing with local, less dramatic, material) some 15 years ago: nobody watched Cristal but everybody seemed to know what was going on and chévere became a part of the average Spaniard’s vocabulary…
Ugly Betty is the US remake of one that was more humoristic than most; in general you have lots of orphans, enough star-crossed lovers for a whole new galaxy, main female characters discovering that the father of the man they love but who is married happens to be the mfc’s father (of course, this means that he will later turn out not to be the guy’s father, but that can take half a year)… drama is very much what they go for.
Some of the reasons for their popularity in Spain were
tooooooons of drama, but it’s drama that people here could associate with more easily than, say, “oh noes, he lost control of his Ferrari while the oversurgified bottleblonde gave him a BJ and they crashed!”.
legal systems and bureaucracy similar to ours,
the evil guys are very evil and the good guys are very good, but both can be dumb or smart, and both can be pretty or not, and sometimes you find out the reason the Evil Beeatch has been acting like that and it’s something people can identify with, and she’s still Evil but now people suddenly start taking her side a little.
If you like star-crossed lovers, jungle-sized and jungle-tangled family trees… yeah, you should have a lot of entertaining anguish with those.
“Sin Senos No Hay Paraíso”? I know “Sin tetas no hay paraíso” as a Spanish one made following the latinamerican format, all I know about it is that the handsome guy (Duke) is a drug dealer and there’s more drugs and prostitutes than in a cops series, including several girls “from good families”. No idea if it’s the same story or not.
One night I skimmed past a Spanish channel and something caught my eye. When I went back I found what looked like an interview show. There was a very large (and unattractive) man in a hot tub with another similarly sized man. They were surrounded by stunningly beautiful women in bathing suits who waited on them as they talked, bringing them drinks and food. The focus seemed to be on the discussion between the men, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Needless to say, I was mesmerized by their banter and couldn’t tear myself away until my wife came into the room.
Can anyone tell me what the show was, where can I see it again and, please God, tell me there is a version in English.
) to judge.