If the story of the beleaguered broadcast television networks were turned into a telenovela, the plot might go something like this: a rich, handsome man loses everything he holds dear (ratings) after his glamorous wife (the fickle American viewer) forsakes him for the sexy new men in the neighborhood (cable, TiVo, video games--she gets around). He discovers the secret to rejuvenation in his own backyard, eventually winning back true love and regaining his lost fortune.
Consider yourself warned. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are all developing English-language versions of the over-the-top Spanish-language soap operas known as telenovelas. Unlike American soaps, telenovelas air in prime time, with a cliffhanger at the conclusion of each hour-long episode, and end after a few months. The networks are hoping to find in the telenovela a new format, like reality TV, that will reclaim viewers who have soured on sitcoms, police procedurals and, well, reality TV. "The reality-TV genre is growing stale, and networks are looking for a new, low-cost format to fill that gap," says Monica Gadsby, a Hispanic-media expert and the CEO of Tapestry, a marketing firm in Chicago. If the shows connect with viewers, the U.S. will soon have a taste of the melodramatic highs and campy lows that virtually every other country in the world has loved for years.
NBC has ambitious plans for American telenovelas, with a two-year deal to option all the novelas aired on its sister network Telemundo, which is also owned by parent company General Electric. "Our role is licensing formats to them, hand-holding, consulting," says Alfredo Richard, a spokesman for Telemundo. The stories are almost always some variation on star-crossed lovers united in the end. "It's a couple that is trying to have a kiss, and there's a writer in the middle that doesn't let them," says Patricio Wills, a longtime telenovela writer and now head of production for Telemundo Studios.
So far, NBC has chosen just one Telemundo tale for development, Body of Desire, and tapped as executive producer Nely Galán, a TV veteran in both Spanish and English whose most recent hit was the Fox plastic surgery--reality TV spectacle The Swan. Body of Desire spins the story of a wealthy man married to a beautiful woman; the man dies and is reincarnated in the body of a laborer, only to find that all the people in his former life are phonies. The supernatural twist, Richard says, will appeal to viewers hooked on shows like Medium.
At its core, the telenovela is selling the same idea that made shows like The Bachelor so popular: "You really think that there is one soul mate for you," Galán says. "It's a universal desire." But the scripts need adjustment. "It's very commonplace for a protagonist of a novela to be a virgin until she gets married," she says. "In the U.S., it would seem ridiculous."
Telenovelas will force networks and viewers to change their habits. A typical telenovela that runs daily for months could require more than 100 episodes, in contrast to two dozen weekly episodes for a season of a prime-time network drama. That has always been a sticking point with U.S. TV executives, who have been skeptical that American prime-time viewers would watch so many episodes of one show in a week. "It requires an enormous amount of dedication," says Michael Schwimmer, CEO of Sí-TV, a cable channel that caters to young Latinos in the U.S.