Telenovelas Are No Small Thing

I was stunned by Richard Natale’s piece on the worldwide spread of U.S. soap operas [“U.S. Soaps Top Foreign Market, but Stay Tuned,” July 28].

I will not argue with the central point of the article--that U.S. soaps are indeed gaining terrain overseas--but I was completely thrown back by the dismissive way in which Mr. Natale addressed Latin American telenovelas.

To make a very long story short, locally written and produced telenovelas have been a staple of Latin American television since its very beginning, which is to say since the late ‘40s. Adapted at first from radio novelas--dramatic, cliffhanger-filled serials with plenty of evil twins and unknown half siblings--the Latin American soap quickly developed into a medium of its own, with a peculiar style and tone.

Mexican novelas--mostly period pieces rich in convoluted melodrama--dominated the market until the mid-’60s, when Brazilian TV networks--notably budding behemoth Rede Globo--took the lead with contemporary soaps that sported a sharper visual style and incorporated daily matters, cultural trends and political issues in their plots.

For the past three decades, Brazilian novelas have ruled both the local and--dubbed in Spanish, naturally--the Latin American markets. Globo has successfully exported its titles throughout Europe and Asia, with period soap “A Escrava Isaura” (“Isaura, the Slave”) becoming a pop culture phenomenon in, of all places, China.

The production of novelas in Brazil is today a multimillion-dollar industry that employs hundreds of writers, actors, stunt people and assorted technicians. Novela stars are as big as and sometimes bigger than their Hollywood counterparts, and plots and characters are discussed on the streets and at social gatherings as if they were real-life issues. As you can see, to brush all this aside with a couple of paragraphs about the “stiff competition” faced by American soaps in Latin America and a curt remark like “produced in such countries as Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela at as little as one-tenth the cost of a $120,000 U.S. episode, these Spanish-language programs ‘kick our butts’ ” is to display an amount of ignorance that quite frankly, intrigues me.

ANA MARIA BAHIANA

Los Angeles Editor

Screen International