Quotes of the Day

In a television studio just outside Madrid, it is the morning of November 20, 1975. As a tearful President Carlos Arias Navarro, speaking on the country's government-run television and radio stations, chokes out the words Spaniards have been waiting for months, if not years, to hear — "People of Spain: Franco is dead" — the camera slowly pans across the faces of the Alcántara family. No one — not father Antonio, still dressed in his pajamas, nor mother Mercedes, wearing a pink bathrobe, nor anyone else assembled around the dining room table — utters a word. But the uncertainty on their faces speaks volumes for a generation of Spaniards.

The Alcántaras are the heart of Cuéntame cómo pasó ("Tell Me How It Was"), one of Spain's most popular television shows over the last six years. The family is, in many ways, a typical television clan, complete with predictably rebellious children, meddling in-laws, and eccentric neighbors. But because the series takes place in the waning years of the dictatorship (it begins in 1968, and each season matches a subsequent year) and scrupulously strives for historical accuracy, the Alcántaras have become evocative symbols and Cuéntame more than an average family melodrama in Spain. If the country is at last officially acknowledging Franco's traumatic legacy and the price of its transition to democracy, it has — at least in small part — the Alcántaras to thank.

Yet the program almost never happened. Producer Miguel Ángel Bernardeau, working with lead writers Patrick Buckley and Eduardo Ladrón, came up with an idea in 1993 for a show — part historical documentary, part nostalgic drama — set in late-Francoist Spain. Bernardeau would spend the next eight years unsuccessfully shopping the program to the country's public and private television networks. Finally, in 2001, state-owned RTVE, which had previously passed on the show, decided to roll the dice. "To be honest," says Bernardeau, "they took a chance because they had nothing else."

Six years later, Cuéntame is a pop culture phenomenon. On average, four million Spaniards — roughly 10% of the population — tune in every Thursday night to watch the Alcántaras navigate the rapidly changing landscape of late-'60s and early-'70s Spain. Theirs is a story of middle-class dreams: a small-town couple, played by Imanol Arias and Ana Duato, moves from the pueblo to Madrid and attempts to make a better life for their children. The pilot featured the family awaiting the delivery of its first television as housewife Mercedes tried to conceal from her traditional husband the news that their daughter Inés would begin taking birth-control pills. Six years on, the family owns a car, has vacationed in France, and watches nervously as Mercedes begins her university education — tutored by a feminist sociologist, no less.

But for all its focus on the minor struggles of daily life, the program is never divorced from the broader political issues of the day. "The regime's repression is permanently present," says Antonio Macías, one of the show's writers. "Contraception was illegal under Franco — that's why Inés had to get the pills from London. Divorce didn't exist. Women couldn't open bank accounts without their husbands' permission. That's all in the show." So, too, are more direct political references. In recent episodes, Antonio, who runs a print shop, has been forced by right-wing goons to put out leaflets saluting the dictator, while he and Mercedes have worried that their activist son Toni is a Communist. In an upcoming episode, they will join the long lines — some mourning, some celebrating, some simply wanting to see for themselves that the dictator was dead — that shuffled past Franco's open coffin for two days beginning November 21.

For years, Spaniards held their tongues about the nearly four decades of dictatorship that preceded that day. "Silence and fear," says Imanol Arias, 51, who plays Antonio. "That was the atmosphere at my house under Franco." Even after the dictator's death, the silence continued, with little public discourse about the civil war [1936-39]that had brought Franco to power. A semi-official "pact of forgetting" eased the way for the nation's peaceful transition to democracy, but also prevented the scars left by the dictatorship from ever being acknowledged — or treated.

Recently, this willful collective amnesia has begun to lift. A slew of books and movies document everything from the plight of Spanish children shipped off to Russia or Mexico during the civil war, to the persecution of homosexuals under the Franco regime. Volunteer organizations like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory spend their weekends unearthing mass graves of Loyalists killed for supporting Franco's enemies, and the descendants of political opponents convicted under Franco have appealed their relatives' sentences. Most important, the Spanish parliament recently passed its long-awaited Law of Historical Memory, which, among other things, makes reparations to the dictatorship's victims.

Cuéntame has played a role in this process of remembering. "Without a doubt, we've helped Spaniards recover the memory of that time," says writer Ladrón. "We were the first TV program to show what life under the dictatorship was like." Paloma Aguilar, author of Memory and Amnesia and professor at Spain's UNED University, agrees. "In its early years, the show presented a fine portrait of social Francoism. Of a time when most middle-class families were just trying to get ahead. Audiences loved it because they recognized themselves in it." Actress Duato, who plays Mercedes, identifies another reason for the program's success: "It gathers the family around the TV to talk about our shared past."

But if the show has reminded Spaniards of the grand atrocities and quotidian hardships of the era, it has also sparked fonder memories. The peppy rock and roll of the era, the Seat 600 (a tin box of a car that was many Spaniards' first automobile), the neighborhood bar where the men of the barrio gathered daily — all feature prominently. So too does the grandmother who lives with the family; the Alcántaras may struggle to attain middle-class comforts — they line up outside the bathroom Saturday nights for the week's one bath — but they enjoy a closeness that few of today's busy, two-career Spanish families achieve. "What people like about this series is the sense of traditional honor and values," says producer Bernardeau. "People in Spain don't have the same sense of conscience any more, their word isn't worth what it once was."

In this nostalgia, Cuéntame reflects the complicated feelings that Spaniards have long carried about their recent past. For those old enough to remember the era, criticism of the dictatorship is blurred by memories of a time when life was in many ways simpler. "The more independent we've become, the less happy we are," says Bernardeau. "We were happier when we had less. Now we're fully Europeans, but we've lost something."

In its first seasons, the nostalgic tone opened the show to criticism. "Because the program didn't show the family fighting against the dictatorship, a big part of the cultural elite and the leftist sectors of society hated it. They saw it as almost a defense of Francoism," says Aguilar. Since then, however, Cuéntame has perhaps swung the other way, with son Toni working secretly in the underground resistance, hippie daughter Inés married to a former priest, and even young Carlitos swept up in suspected political plots. "Spanish society is now more openly sympathetic to criticism of the dictatorship, and the show is as well," notes Aguilar. "But it's hard to say whether changes in society influenced the show, or the show influenced changes in society. Probably they influenced each other, though in its ideological evolution, the show has also become more politically correct."

When Bernardeau sold the show to RTVE, open discussion of the Franco era was still rare enough that his friends promised they'd throw him a party if Cuéntame ever made it to the dictator's death. Now those episodes are scheduled to air in the coming weeks, and the program has a new contract that takes the Alcántaras through the early years of the Transition, to 1979. Bernardeau will get his party, and Spaniards — be they political leaders or couch potatoes — can observe the anniversary of the dictator's death more openly than ever before.

• Lisa Abend and Geoff Pingree/Madrid
• If art can be held up as a mirror to life, then one of Spain's most popular programs is reflecting one of its most traumatic periods