Would Germans from a Nazi Victory TL endorse Latin American telenovelas?

Would they?

  • Even the "enlightened" Germans of OTL would like it if they saw it...

    Votes: 3 23.1%
  • TTL's Germans would indeed endorse telenovelas.

    Votes: 3 23.1%
  • TTL's Germans would as less endorse them as OTL's.

    Votes: 1 7.7%
  • Yo soy Thande, el feo.

    Votes: 6 46.2%

  • Total voters
    13
Telling the story from the beginning, some three or four years ago there was some German TV station that tried to copy the elsewhere very popular telenovela format into the German market with a series that's basically Ugly Betty (called "Fallen In Love In Berlin"). It was a giant flop in the end despite starring a woman that used to play in a Restless-Years-style soap opera before.

Well, the broadcasters said that "for a telenovela succeed in Germany, it has to be homegrown". And not airing the twenty to thirty year old Latin American originals cause they've gone beyond the old style tearjerker. Which isn't true for the post-communist sphere of the world where these Latin delicacies succeeded very well, to the point that there have been women blending fiction and reality so extremely that some Hungarian fans collected US$ 75,000 and sent the money to the Brazilian embassy in order to free "Slave Isaura" from the same-named series.

I think that the mentioned unsuitability of Latin-style telenovelas for the Western market is based on the longtime existence of civil society, ubiquitious wealth and other symptoms of a functioning liberal democracy. My grandmother liked to watch series like "The Bold And The Beautiful" when ironing her clothes and also likes that one telenovela shown on public TV called "Bianca", but modern generations of watchers must have grown up with a ubiquitious detachment that makes them see things like "Slave Isaura" as too silly to be watched. If you want to deal with social strife, you watch independent films and no tearjerkers...


Let's say you grew up in a victorious Nazi Germany that has just recently been dismantled and your families get to know these Latin-style telenovelas, would you think that your Auntie Helga would also collect money to convince the Brazilian ambassador to the Reich to release Isaura from slavery like aforementioned Hungarians did? Would they be like my grandma in that respect? No, she didn't see Isaura, but as I said... other generations, other attitude in regard of telenovelas.
 
Well, the deal with telenovelas (and their equivalents: the Filipino teleserye and the French-Canadian/Québécois teleromans) is because of particular cultural situations that happened at a certain point in time. In most of these cases, these resulted from having soap operas broadcast on the radio. These soap operas, however, were more like novels (hence why, in (Québec) French, these are called téléromans - literally, "TV novels" - and I'm sure it's the same way in Spanish and Portuguese) than your average (US) soap opera. Maybe it has something to do with the cultural area that these people originally come from (think: what would be the similarities between Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, and North Africa in terms of culture?), which could be the case.

Indeed, in Canada, the most successful TV programmes are all in French, and these programmes are most likely going to be téléromans. There are cases in Canada of a successful crossover of a roman from French into English (cf. CBC's Sophie, from Radio-Canada's Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin (The Ups and Downs of Sophie Paquin)) and other times it's less successful (cf. CBC's He Shoots, He Scores, from Radio-Canada's Lance et compte, from the 1980s). In the US, with the exception of Ugly Betty (from the Colombian novela Yo soy Betty la Fea (I Am Betty the Ugly)), the novela format has been a failure. Why is it?

If anything, I think it's due to the cultural situation that these novelas/romans were produced in. With Latin America, it is the "natural" progression of the format from radio to television. With French Canada, it's because whilst the CBC's English-language television network could afford to air American programming (if they so chose to), the CBC's French-language television network had to (more or less) produce its own programming. In addition, remakes of novelas, IMO, only work if it's in a similar cultural situation. For example, the Mexican novela Rebelde (Rebel) is a remake of an Argentine novela from several years prior, called Rebelde Way. Both the original and the remake were/are successful in Latin America. In constrast, the original format of MyNetworkTV, which was made up of novelas, failed spectacularly. I think that the difference between the success of Rebelde Way/Rebelde and the failure of MyNetworkTV was because the Latin American cultural situation is one where social commentary in a novela is accepted as normal, because of Latin America's situation, regardless of the political situation. The same could pretty much be said of Québec (and French Canada in general) where although French-Canadians are part of an overarching "Canadian" culture, the peculiarities of French-Canadian culture are such that romans reflect the situation of French Canada in a way similar to the novelas of Latin America.

As an aside, I think the popularity of novelas in the post-communist sphere (and not just Iberia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, though in a way very similar) is that people can relate to the situations found in the novelas (heck, though I don't speak Spanish, I used to tune into the Spanish-language television channel when I was in high school and used to follow Rebelde because I could relate to the situations in the novela) in a way that is unique to the novela, and not just because the novelas were often times the only Western programming avaliable on the state-run television networks. An interesting story related to this is connected with a Mexican novela from the 1970s, called Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Also Cry). Apparently, during the fighting in the Caucasus when the Soviet Union was crumbling, there was often times a truce called so that everyone could watch the novela and the men - in particular - would be able to admire the actress Véronica Castro. (True story.)

So, if I were living in a Nazi-victorious Germany, would I want to free the slave Isaura? Hell yes, I would! :cool:
 
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