Soap opera production returns to Venezuela after an era of economic suffocation and censorship

Venezuelan women watch television in a Caracas neighborhood. NurPhoto (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The most watched telenovela on open television in Venezuela this April, according to the audience consultancy BB Media, has been the Turkish production released more than a decade ago.

, a fact that is mounted on the Latin American furor for Turkish series.

It tells the story of an orphan in the city of Izmir who dreams of a better life with her great love, Mustafa, a fisherman who works hard to build a house for both of them.

They broadcast it at night on Venevisión, the channel that currently has a single Venezuelan drama produced 14 years ago on the air, which shares the afternoon schedule with two more recent Mexican soap operas.

The announcement made by the main private television station in Venezuela of the return of soap opera production to the country opens an opportunity after years of aging programming, the impact of the economic crisis and the government siege of the media.

At the end of May, shooting will begin at the Venevisión studios in Caracas, a

that will bring together an outstanding cast of figures from yesterday and today, from within the country and abroad, from the other Venezuela that has risen with the enormous migration.

The executives behind the project have withheld details as part of their launch strategy, but its creator, Venezuelan Daniel Ferrer Cubillán, CEO of Hispanomedios, a talent agency and production company, promises that he will “revolve the name”.

“There are businessmen and brands that are believing in the project, in the urgent need to reconnect with the Venezuelan and the things that are very much theirs: like Miss Venezuela, which was held again at the Poliedro last year, baseball and the TV soaps.

This is everyone's achievement," the 35-year-old businessman says by phone.

At 19 he was writing and producing

, the last youth telenovela broadcast by Radio Caracas Televisión, which was the first television channel in Venezuela and which ceased its broadcasts in 2007, after more than 50 years of history, when Hugo Chávez ordered not to renew his concession after years of struggle by an editorial line critical of his government.

The producer signed an agreement with Venevisión so that all production is Venezuelan and is made with the new quality standards required by digital platforms, the main travel ticket for content today.

"It is a wonderful, picturesque, Venezuelan story in which the name will be mixed up," says Ferrer Cubillán, accompanied in the development of the story by Daniel Alfonso Rojas, Violeta Fonseca and Indira Páez, who is the dramatic advisor of the project, and She was a soap opera writer in Venezuela and until 2021 a senior executive at Sony Pictures Television.

“After

(the last telenovela made by the channel in 2017) this new project excites us a lot and may mark the beginning of a cycle of stable fiction productions, which will revive the Venezuelan telenovela industry, which has been so successful. had for more than five decades," adds Manuel Fraiz-Grijalba, executive vice president of Venevisión, in a statement.

The alliance between both companies has antecedents with the shows

, an interview program with personalities hosted by the former Venezuelan Miss Universe Alicia Machado and the

women's

, with artists from the region.

But the new soap opera, warns Ferrer Cubillán, is designed to suit Venezuelan humor.

“The dramatics are part of our nationality, of our country brand, and it fills me with pride to be able to bring them back,” he says.

“This soap opera seeks to connect with what is good, what is beautiful and what is true.

It is not to please anyone or to talk about politics.

choking season

Venezuela stood out in the audiovisual industry with the soap operas that were made between the eighties and nineties.

There was a prosperous asset: the power of melodrama that Cuban screenwriter Delia Fiallo knew how to cook well.

In those years, hundreds of drama episodes became the country's main non-oil export.

Within this genre, the cultural soap opera also marked historical milestones, from the titles of the playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas and the legendary

, written by Ibsen Martínez, to

, by Leonardo Padrón.

The latter, successfully broadcast on Venevisión between 2003 and 2004, staged one of the first battles between Chavismo and the media.

“After a telenovela like

, in which there was a parallelism with the reality of the country with an antagonistic character clearly similar to President Chavez, comes the Ley Resorte (Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television that controls media content). with which some begin to censor themselves.

Then, with the closure of RCTV in 2007, the channels that remain alive enter a survival mode”, recalls Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, a specialist in soap operas and series and a professor at the University of Georgia, in the United States.

The impact of censorship on the production of soap operas was more evident in the news, opinion and humor programs, and it continues to this day.

But the news of the production of this new drama after more than five years of drought has been celebrated in the media, especially among artists and technicians who see a chance to reinsert themselves at work in the dwarfed television medium.

For Acosta-Alzuru it is also good news, although he wonders if the factors that led to the suffocation of an entire industry have already disappeared.

“The telenovela

, made for Venevisión after the closure of RCTV, was written by Leonardo Padrón under different conditions.

The legal department reviewed the scripts and phrases such as 'Oh, God, everything is extremely expensive' were deleted, which is very hard for someone who writes realistic things”, explains the researcher.

“All this rarefaction of the creative environment makes it stop competing abroad.

At the same time, the entire country began to suffer a huge economic crisis.

That same Venezuelan writer, who today is the exclusive author of Netflix where he debuted with the popular series

, denounced censorship during the last years he lived in Venezuela, when he wrote scripts that the channel did not produce and was targeted by Nicolás Maduro.

A decade ago, in his first years as president, he directly accused him of fueling violence with his stories and promised to create a state center for the production of soap operas for export, which he never launched.

The media have also experienced the cuts of an economy that was reduced to a third in barely a decade with a strong impact on the Venezuelan's capacity to consume, which in turn ruined the advertising industry from which television lives.

After the breaking point of the closure of RCTV under the Chávez government, whose signal passed into the hands of the State, Maduro has increased the file of pressure on the media with twenty international news channels taken off the air and more than 200 radio stations. closed.

At a global level, the audiovisual sector is also experiencing its revolution with the irruption of

in which open TV is looking for its place to coexist with multiple screens.

The announcement of the return of the production of dramas in Venezuela at this time seems to be part of the fragile and uneven recovery of some economic sectors that has been expressed in the reactivation of international concerts, the opening of restaurants and luxury car dealerships and the construction of business towers that, in a dramatic plot twist, have ended in recent weeks as an emblem of a convoluted corruption scandal and political purge revealed by the Government itself.

“TV is one of the toughest industries on aging, but we have know-

from those good old days that could help now, and every journey begins with a first step.

It is clear that a television industry is not built overnight, since it has been in a latent state for quite a few years”, Acosta-Alzuru assesses.

"But one of the things that I wonder now is what kind of stories can be told on today's open Venezuelan TV."