“I’m living proof that the American dream is alive and well,” Teresa Mendoza says in the opening moments of Queen of the South, just before she is murdered. The series, adapted from Telemundo’s Spanish-language hit La Reina del Sur, is as violent and unpredictable as such an opening would suggest, but it has more in common with Miami Vice than Breaking Bad. It’s exactly the kind of guilty pleasure that seems, lately, to be missing from American television. The perfect soapy drama doesn’t inspire disdain, as reality TV does, or mind-bending confusion and anxiety, the way prestige cable dramas do. Instead, soaps keep us entertained by whisking us through a series of outrageous tragedies and adventures, all the while remembering that what we really want to see are people’s responses to outlandish situations, rather than the outlandish situations themselves.

Queen of the South is one of a rash of new shows that take their lead directly from Spanish-language telenovelas, a distinctive species of soap that has become unexpectedly popular in the United States. The plot is a kind of matriarchal Scarface: After her drug-dealer boyfriend betrays his bosses and gets shot, Teresa goes on the run from the cartel, eventually beating them at their own game. With its high-stakes action, the show is a far cry from the first telenovela to make the leap to American television, back in 2006: Ugly Betty, which told the story of an unstylish young woman laboring at a fashion magazine. More recently, the CW Network has enjoyed a hit with Jane the Virgin, in which the heroine is artificially inseminated because of a mix-up at the hospital, and decides to carry the pregnancy to term. Now in its third season, the show has garnered Golden Globe nominations and almost single-handedly hoisted the network’s ratings.

While Ugly Betty acquainted viewers with the telenovela’s outrageous, irresistibly sugary combination of melodrama and sincerity, Jane the Virgin took the telenovela into the twenty-first century, with its complicated romp through the struggle between the lure of pleasure and the pressure to be pure. And more adaptations are in the pipeline: the CW recently remade Como Aproveitar o Fim do Mundo as No Tomorrow, a quirky drama about a couple planning for the end of the world. All of which raises the question: What do telenovelas give us that other shows can’t?

Telenovelas differ from English-language soap operas largely in their scope: Most elapse over a few dozen episodes, and wrap up the lives of their characters in some sort of cumulatively satisfying narrative arc. If the telenovela is a novel—premise, complication, conclusion—then the American soap opera is more like a newspaper. Its only real job is to keep going. Soap opera characters go through so many convoluted misadventures, and are passed back and forth between so many writers, that the most basic details of their lives sometimes vanish without explanation: It’s not unheard of, on a soap, for relatives to forget they’re related, fall in love, and—as long as none of the writers remembers a stray fact from a thousand or so episodes ago—get married.

Like American soaps, telenovelas are dominated by trauma and talk—but mostly talk. Something happens to a character. She calls her friend to explain. The two meet and repeat the facts of the incident again. And again. The primary rule the soap opera writer follows is Tell, don’t show, because telling is cheap and easy to write, and can be stretched out forever. It also dulls the trauma of the show’s events, which is a comfort, because no one in a soap is ever allowed to be happy. If you meet the love of your life, he’ll lose his memory tomorrow. As soon as he gets it back, his long-lost half­-sister will appear from nowhere and frame him for murder. As soon as you valiantly get him acquitted, you’ll become the target of Bolivian jewel thieves.