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One distributor, however, is convinced that Americans are ready to commit. "Reality TV has demonstrated that the American public will get behind a character for a short period," says Bob Cook, president of Twentieth Television, the development and production unit of Fox. Cook has adapted two telenovelas to air in September: Table for Three, a love triangle involving two brothers in a Mafia family, and Fashion House, starring Bo Derek as the powerful queen of a fashion empire. Each show will air daily for 13 weeks, with recap episodes on the weekends.
The shows will be the centerpiece for MyNetworkTV, a new network formed by Fox out of 139 mainly small- and middle-market stations, from Topeka, Kans., to Utica, N.Y., that were left behind after the merger of UPN and the WB networks. Just as UPN featured African-American shows and the WB turned into a home for angsty teenage dramas, MyNetworkTV could make its mark with the telenovelas, its first original programming. "We're purchasing several years' worth of novelas," Cook says. If those two don't find an audience, he'll try others. "We believe in this."
Telenovelas are TV's fast food--inexpensive and filling--but networks will have to find a way to raise the production values to the gourmet standards American viewers take for granted. An ordinary family drama like 7th Heaven costs $2 million an episode, while a show like 24, with location shots and elaborate special effects, is "like a feature film" that airs every week, Galán says, and can cost even more. With so many episodes to produce, telenovelas are shot on the cheap: they use video, not film, and an entire run might take place on just a handful of sets.
Galán promises that NBC's telenovela will look and feel as polished as anything else in prime time, but telenovela producers will be spending only an estimated $100,000 to $500,000 an episode. They won't have to pay for superstar salaries (comedian Ray Romano took home $2 million an episode), expensive writers ("adapters" are paid as little as $50,000 a year) or elaborate shoots. Twentieth Television has plotted out the story arcs for both of its shows and will shoot them jointly to create more efficiency, Cook says. By just changing the lighting, for example, producers can use the same set for scenes in both shows.
The other networks have not jumped into the telenovela's arms quite as eagerly. ABC is hedging its bets, developing a remake of a telenovela from Colombia called Yo Soy Betty, la Fea (I Am Betty, the Ugly One) that transformed itself into a global hit. Local versions of Betty's ugly-duckling story won huge audiences in Germany, India and Russia, but ABC will air it as a once-a-week prime-time comedy. As the network responsible for Desperate Housewives, the closest thing to a network telenovela today, ABC has a good shot at creating a successful hybrid. CBS is enlisting a writer who knows a thing or two about melodrama--Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook--to develop a homegrown telenovela.
So, will this new path lead the networks back to true love? Telenovelas always have a happy ending. Television isn't so easy.