Texts and Topics

Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama and are among the leaders in their respective continents. In 2014, Mexico alone made over 100,000 hours of TV that were exported to 100 countries (Smith “Report”). Unlike in the more fragile and vulnerable case of cinema, which relies on government subsidy and is overwhelmed by Hollywood in local theaters, television is in both countries a highly successful industry that fully connects with national audiences and pushes US production to the margins of the schedule. There are thus significant similarities between the two territories that have yet to be explored.

As in other territories, television, freed from cinema's lengthy lead time, is the first medium to engage with urgent contemporary social issues, working through them week by week for audiences in their millions. Thus in recent fiction series Spanish TV has treated the key topics of historical memory and the continuing struggle to work through a traumatic past; the changing relation to a Latin America that is now a dominant commercial partner in areas as diverse as the entertainment industry and drug-trafficking; the pleasures and problems of young people in an age of economic crisis; and the legacy of post-colonialism and terrorism in North Africa. It is striking that these topics have been addressed only rarely and incompletely in contemporary Spanish feature films.

In Mexico, meanwhile, TV fiction has over the last seven years depicted with startling explicitness the new modes of masculinity associated with rapid modernization (including a close attention to queer issues); the social and sexual mores of the new demographic of young urban professionals; the taboo topic of race, a trauma inherited from the brutal colonial period, which was once thought to be irrelevant to the independent mestizo nation; and (clearly the most urgent topic of the day) political corruption and extrajudicial killing, both of which are linked to drug-trafficking. Once more these issues are less fully treated in Mexican cinema, which is currently polarized (as in Spain) between populist comedies and minimalist art movies, commissioned by and exhibited at foreign festivals with only a limited audience at home.