Prime Time for Telenovelas

By Theodore Fischer
June/July 2006

The steamy and wildly popular Spanish-language soap operas known as telenovelas are invigorating programming on all four major U.S. television networks this year.

ABC is adapting the long-running Colombian serial Betty la fea to Ugly Betty, starring America Ferrera (Real Women Have Curves) as a beleaguered secretary at a fashion magazine. Unlike typical 65-episode nightly telenovelas, Ugly Betty will run as a weekly comedy. The show is slated to debut this summer.

Also this summer, NBC plans to air Body of Desire, an English-language version of El Cuerpo del deseo, Telemundo’s saga of love, treachery, revenge, and reincarnation that ended its run in February.

Telenovelas will be the star attraction of Fox’s new primetime program network, My Network TV. For 13 weeks beginning in September, affiliates nationwide will air nightly episodes of Desire—a tawdry tale of two Mafia-connected brothers in love with the same woman—based on the Colombian hit Mesa para tres. The show will be followed by Secrets, a telenovela adapted from Cuba’s Salir de noche, set in the high-fashion industry.

One of several original telenovela-inspired projects in the pipeline at CBS will air twice weekly beginning this spring. But CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler, who grew up watching telenovelas with her Puerto Rican grandmother, notes that once CBS tweaks the highly melodramatic genre to U.S. sensibilities, “the bosoms may not heave as much.”

Return to Top