TELENOVELA WATCH: 'El Señor de los Cielos' Season 3, Plus, 'Dueños del Paraíso, 'La Esquina del Diablo' and 'Quiero Amarte'

Left to Right: Carmen Aub, Carmen Villalobos, Rafael Amaya, Fernanda Castillo and Sergio Mur at a private screening of the El Señor de los Cielos third season premiere.  Photo Credit: Telemundo

EL SEÑOR DE LOS CIELOS 3
One episode in and the latest edition of Telemundo’s repugnant narco-novela EL SEÑOR DE LOS CIELOS (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET) is already circling the drain. The same shameless storytelling device that carried the second series is already back in full force: the incessant victimization of the poor little mass-murdering title drug lord with him getting beaten by prison guards, poisoned, and the delivery of a surprise head in a box. This is all set up to excuse the predictable atrocities he will later commit as justified revenge-taking. Rinse, repeat.

Rafael Amaya’s performance has long become monotonous - he mostly just poses menacingly and glares, grimacing through his lines as if it pains him to speak them. He concludes the first episode with a hilariously awful ugly-face fake cry that would make Blanca Soto proud.

Carmen Villalobos’s cop character is an afterthought at this point with the fans of the show just impatiently waiting for her to get murdered, but for them to be satisfied, it has to be at the hands of Amaya’s character and only after she is tortured.

TELENOVELA WATCH: This Week's Finales of 'Los Miserables' (Tonight) and 'Mi Corazón es Tuyo' (Friday)

The Los Miserables finale beings at 8 p.m. ET tonight on Telemundo.

Los Miserables concludes tonight with a two-hour finale on Telemundo starting at 8 p.m. ET. Despite the title and the insistence of the network’s press materials, the telenovela had next to nothing to do with the Victor Hugo novel. Nevertheless, Los Miserables began well and featured protagonist Aracely Arámbula’s first decent performance since her juvenile roles in the mid-1990s. She is by no means a good actress, but after suffering through the likes of Blanca Soto and María Elisa Camargo in recent Telemundo telenovelas, as well as Arámbula’s own horrible performances in Corazón Salvaje in 2010 and La Patrona in 2013, her work here is at least bearable.

Less bearable was the horrific Gabriel Porras who seems to get worse with each telenovela. The opening weeks of Los Miserables were not terrible by Telemundo’s recent standards at least in part because Porras’s role was minimized. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long and soon Porras’s drug lord character was given a twin, so we could see Porras cartoonishly overact two roles. I gave up regular viewing of this telenovela at that point. What happened to the competent actor from those Azteca telenovelas from the early 2000s? The same question fits his Los Miserables co-star Aylín Mujica who was also far better in her work at Azteca than she’s ever been at Telemundo.

Telemundo’s Mexican-produced telenovelas in conjunction with Argos are in a rut. The best of this recent batch is still the first, Rosa Diamante, from 2012. The others: La Patrona, La Impostora, Los Miserables and even the narco-novela Señora Acero all seem part of the same drab, monotonous universe. Budgetary restrictions are noticeable, particularly in how they all feature a seemingly endless parade of characters sent to the same hospital and prison sets. Even the actors are drab in these recent productions, especially the supporting actors and juveniles. Part of this problem may lie in Telemundo/Argos being third in the talent pecking order in Mexico behind Televisa and Azteca. Even with these flaws, the Telemundo/Argos productions are still better than what the network’s been churning out of Miami in the last year, Dueños del Paraíso included.

TELENOVELA WATCH: Drug-Themed Series 'Duenos del Paraiso,' 'Tiro de Gracia' and 'La Esquina del Diablo'

Kate del Castillo, José María Torre and Jorge Zabaleta star in
Telemundo super series Dueños del Paraíso.

Dueños del Paraíso
A trio of narco-novelas premiered in the US last week headlined by the highly anticipated Dueños del Paraíso (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET) on Telemundo. A co-production by Telemundo and the Chilean TVN, but mostly produced in Miami, Dueños del Paraíso marked the return of Mexican actress Kate del Castillo to Spanish language television, her first telenovela since La Reina del Sur in 2011, the only genuine hit in Telemundo’s history and, for its first half at least, the best production to come from the network. Any hopes for another La Reina del Sur dissipate in the opening minutes of Dueños del Paraíso – it’s a clunker: boring and clichéd with contrived, lazy plotting and amateurish direction.

Dueños del Paraíso opens with the heroine’s voice over saying, “There are no good guys or bad guys, no heroes or villains,” already a lie as the next hour proceeds through melodramatic devices to tell the audience exactly who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are going to be in this story.

Anastasia Cardona, the heroine portrayed by Kate del Castillo, is given an absolving sob story in the opening scene when her long-absent mother arrives at her birthday party (really, an old woman is able to waltz uninvited into the birthday party of a drug lord’s wife) and it’s revealed she was a prostitute who abandoned Anastasia. Talk about lazy writing – there is nothing organic or believable in the scene, no reason we should care about these women whose names we’ve literally just learned a few minutes earlier, no reason except one is played by Kate del Castillo who we know is the star and needs to be fed constant opportunities to remind everyone she’s an actress. Anastasia Cardona isn’t a character, she’s an actress reel.