Producer Intentions and Audience Affections

Although much discussed, the question of transnational television formats remains vital, exemplifying as it does conflicts between culture and commerce, production and reception, style and substance (see most recently Oren and Shahaf). After our discussion of national historical fiction, in this second chapter I treat what is a perhaps a unique case: the Spanish adaptation of a Colombian series on drug-dealing and prostitution. Both of the series are named with knowing and showy salaciousness Sin tetas no hay paraíso (the more modest North American remake referred rather to “senos” or “breasts”). As we shall see, the implications of the show for audiences’ gender identification and desire are more complex and less retrograde than this title suggests; and the series’ representation of (and address to) Spanish women and men is inextricable from shifting definitions of nationality in the period of financial crisis that began in 2006.

This newly complex circulation of people, products, and services across the Atlantic includes television fiction itself and makes itself felt outside and inside Sin tetas, that is to say both in its production process and in its fictional world. Moreover, although reviled at the time it was broadcast in Spain, the serial has since attracted unparalleled academic attention. Indeed, as we shall see in the conclusion to this chapter, one study funded by the Catalan government was devoted to this single series, testimony to its powerful social impact and the anxieties it produced.

A convenient point of entry into the broader debate on transnational formats is the special issue of Television & New Media edited by Christina Slade and Annabel Beckenham in 2005 and called “Telenovelas and Soap Operas: Negotiating Reality.” If, as the subtitle suggests, the acknowledgement that popular TV fiction is a form of working through social issues for its viewers is hardly novel in an English-speaking academic context, such an assumption remains, as we shall see, rare in Spain; and juxtaposing as it does Latin American telenovelas and Australian soaps, the collection is exemplary of new and unexpected cultural connections that go beyond the media hegemony of the US that was once so safely assumed.

Perhaps the most distinguished scholar of this process, and one who is included in the special issue, is Daniel Mato, a pioneer in the attempt to combine economic and cultural analysis.