TELENOVELA WATCH: Two Univision Novelas, 'De Que Te Quiero, Te Quiero' and 'Qué Pobres Tan Ricos,' Featured Gay-Themed Storylines Last Week; Plus, Thoughts 'El Señor de los Cielos' Season 2, Favorites for the Week

Two Univision novelas featured gay-themed storylines last week.

By a scheduling coincidence, Univision aired episodes this week from two Mexican telenovelas produced by Televisa that featured gay-themed plot lines - De Que Te Quiero, Te Quiero (weeknights at 7 p.m. ET) and Qué Pobres Tan Ricos (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET). A demonstration of the ambivalence at Televisa toward this subject matter – the former featured a negative portrayal, the latter a positive.

I confess I often have a difficult time grasping the tone of De Que Te Quiero, Te Quiero. While enjoying the performances from Cynthia Klitbo, Marcelo Córdoba, Marisol del Olmo, Aarón Hernán and Juan Diego Covarrubias, I find the telenovela too often lapsing in taste - such as a scene where the protagonist winds up in blackface or a scene where an obese couple eats everything offered on the menu – to watch without frequent exasperation. This week featured a caricature Italian man whose demonstrative affection for a young man that he knows to be his son is confused by other characters for a come on. The attitudes expressed by the young man’s loved ones – the telenovela's favorable characters – come across as near panic at the possibility he may be gay; their relief is palpable at discovering it was all a misunderstanding and he is okay, i.e., straight.

While Qué Pobres Tan Ricos features a positive portrayal of its potential gay couple, it progresses with the baby steps not uncommon for a network’s initial forays into gay themes. The couple is cutesy, wholesome, old-fashioned – the first admittance of desire is through a poem – and to this point, absolutely devoid of even a hint of sexuality.

In a weird way, this fits into the overall tone of Qué Pobres Tan Ricos which is a peculiarly asexual telenovela. Part of that is a consequence of starring Jaime Camil, a leading man who always comes off in his telenovelas more like the gay best friend of the leading ladies rather than lover. This aspect of Camil’s screen persona is even commented upon in Qué Pobres Tan Ricos where the macho fruit vendor dismisses him as a potential rival for the leading lady, believing him to be gay. The fruit vendor’s homophobia expressed in these scenes is a set up because his son is gay and the evolving of his attitudes will no doubt be a forthcoming story strand.


El Señor de los Cielos 2
I've made clear in previous columns my antipathy toward El Señor de los Cielos (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET on Telemundo), and I try not to waste time in this column “piling on” negative criticism, but a final word covering the second season is appropriate.

After managing to stomach four episodes, it seems they are not even bothering to tell a story. The plot is like kids in the schoolyard playing war: one mindless, badly staged shoot out after another, literally at least one in every episode. I find it not only repetitive and tedious to sit through, but outright numbing due to my utter apathy toward the characters engaging in the shootings – all murderous thugs - so who cares which of them lives or dies?

Last week, describing the cheap gimmick these narco-novelas use to manipulate audience sympathy for the narco protagonists, I wrote: “The wife/child of the narco protagonist is incessantly imperiled by the "bad" narco antagonist, allowing the viewer to identify with the murders the narco protagonist commits in an effort to save/protect his loved ones.” Only one week in, and El Señor de los Cielos has already had his mother kidnapped and his small children threatened at knifepoint. Predictable and shameless, but El Señor de los Cielos features an added detriment of blackening the only gray character carrying over from the first season, whom the narco protagonist’s wife left him for. The show, never failing to stack the deck in favor of the narco protagonist, engages in some revisionist writing to blacken that character, implicitly saying the wife is stupid for not worshiping the stud narco protagonist as much as the show does and for attempting to take her kids away from their depraved sociopath father.

The acting remains mostly mediocre. Not necessarily the fault of the cast: the male characters are given little to do other than monotonous machismo blustering and the female characters are given even less than that. Only Mauricio Ochmann manages to show any life at all. So far, Fernanda Castillo is more interesting than she was last season, but her ludicrous scenes were like something out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, only less coherent.


FAVORITES FOR WEEK OF MAY 23-29

Favorite telenovela: Lo Que La Vida Me Robó

Favorite performer: Cynthia Klitbo

Favorite scene: from De Que Te Quiero, Te Quiero, Carmen, the heroine’s mother played by Cynthia Klitbo, dancing in the foyer of her daughter’s fiancé’s mansion; a performance by Klitbo that was such an effusive and funny expression of her character’s joie de vivre, it bordered on life-affirming.


R.G. Morin writes a regular column for We Love Soaps, "Telenovela Watch: A weekly look at the world of telenovelas for non-Spanish speakers." For feedback or questions, you can email R.G. Morin at [email protected].