What would be of Mexico without its telenovelas?

Telenovela is a genre which somehow mimics those Bollywood productions we all seen on Youtube: farfetched plots, baroque scenery, overacting characters, all paired with way too much passion, beatings, murders, love, betrayal, haciendas, moustaches, horses, maids (who the hell can afford an in-house maid in Mexico besides Carlos Slim?) and many other Mexican and too unrelated things… just to tell a love story, everything mixed up for just one season. The Wire is a kid’s autumn festival play in comparison.

While the (British) name soap opera comes from the fact that they were sponsored by soap companies as the main audience for these programs were housewives, in Spain, are called culebrones (long snakes) because of the convoluted and long plots, but in Latin America are called novelas or more exactly, telenovelas, as they are staged narrations of the love books (novel), which later inspired the radio narration of them (thus called radionovela), and later the broadcasting (telenovela), keeping the eccentric and dramatic plots and exaggerated performances from the time of this format on the radio.

For those knowing Spanish, here is a video explaining the transition from radio-novela to tele-novela and the history of telenovelas in Mexico, worth watching! Check out the sponsors in the beginning… 😉

Nowadays there are telenovelas all day long on public TVs here in Mexico, but the best ones are shown during prime time, and they drag the entire country in front of the TV to see if the maid has finally discovered the plot of the devilish priest who through tricks and manipulations, disinherited the pure, candid and hot heroine; or maybe this was time to see that the resolute, independent and strong-willed, as well as gorgeous heroine (damn, always gorgeous main characters!) falls in love with the shirtless, hot, heir of the neighboring hacienda, whose families held a sour feud for centuries, just to be reconciled and join their enormous extensions of land together and live happily ever after, despite the twisted plots their families, maids, secret lovers and other surprisingly interested people tried to pull on them to prevent… a wedding that solves it all! Hooray! And magically puts the bad ones either in jail, disabled, dead or into bankruptcy. Because this is Mexico. And we ride horses to get coffee at the Oxxo on the corner. Ándele arriba.

They are so popular that even the city buses have TV’s playing downloaded episodes in the case you missed any plot twist:

But in the end, telenovelas are just love stories, whose main characters have to face adversities (bizarre ones) to keep their love pure and have a badass wedding (free unions are not appreciated in Mexico) in the last episode, with the villain receiving a biblical punishment for what he/she did and/or tried to do.

But telenovelas can be extremely funny violent. The video below shows how deadly is to disobey your mother when it comes to kissing a girl… telenovela gold.

Besides this linear plot (forbidden love > adversities > wedding), where the good triumphs over the evil and sacrifice and suffering are always rewarded, the typical stage elements of any Mexican soap opera are:

First of all, somebody has to end up in a hospital as soon as possible, preferably in a coma or something that will keep him/her restrained in a bed for half the season.

Fights! It Doesn’t matter if there is any reason at all, but there has to be some serious slapping, preferably between women; either two respectable old women or two hot girls in bikini (which happens more often than not). You will not find fights between men because Mexican machos seem to prefer to talk and threaten at close-range. Either way, epic:

Shirtless ripped men. Any occasion is good to take the shirt off and show how Mexicans are NOT. Besides the video on the previous link, here below you can see the internationally-TV-issued Mexican. Race still matters in Mexico:

But here, the average, IRL-issued Mexican. CAUTION, eye bleeding may occur:

Hot girls! The main female character is ALWAYS gorgeous (same as for the male), and miraculously ends up dating the producer of the series at the end of the season. I’m not putting pictures of them because this blog will be flagged as NSFW, so just Google “telenovela actress“.

The background music serves to point out if a fight is not only comic or serious, but also brings little more substance to the poor interpretations. For the music, you know there’s going to be some serious s**t coming down:

There is always a priest/maid/servant/bartender whose nose is in everybody’s business.

Epic bitch-slapping scenes. They were too much on the Internets, so consider this video a sum up:

Rich people. Not upper-class rich, but big-ass, full-loaded bank accounts type. Depending on the producing channel, “los ricos” are portrayed as good or evil, depending if they try to conquer the poor, but gorgeous girl or they try to be richer stepping on other people or just acting like assholes . Their last wills always are part of the plot. But never losing classiness, however.

And well… there’s way more to be told, but this post will be longer than the longcat , and I’m no sociologist nor Mexican TV expert… but in the case you need a sample of what a Mexican soap opera can be, here’s the best video of them I could find… enjoy! 😉

Bueno… buenoo…!!