Showing posts with label La Viuda Negra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label La Viuda Negra. Show all posts

Monday, May 26, 2014

TELENOVELA WATCH: 'El Señor de los Cielos' Season 2 Premieres; Plus, 'La Viuda Negra,' 'El Capo 3,' 'Camelia La Texana,' Favorites for the Week and More

A scene from LA VIUDA NEGRA (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET on UniMás) illustrates the root of my antipathy for the so-called narco-novelas. The title anti-heroine is at a cemetery to visit the grave of her mother. Police arrive at the cemetery to arrest her for the murder of a teenager her gang kidnapped and shot dead. The supposed suspense of the scene is whether the anti-heroine will escape. In a ludicrous showdown with the police, her right-hand man manages to shoot dead six to eight officers. The show expects me to be relieved the anti-heroine has escaped, thrilled at the ingenuity and skill with which the henchman killed the officers, but my only feelings are of repulsion, my sympathies lying solely with the murdered police officers.

Good writers and producers can find entry points into this material to make it more palatable. One of the first full-hog narco-novelas and one of the best, SIN TETAS NO HAY PARAÍSO, adopted a “cautionary tale” approach to the material. It glamorizes the narco lifestyle, but that glamorization is presented through the eyes of a stupid teenage girl, a framing device that allows authorial detachment for comment and criticism. The story itself contrasts the girl’s fantasies of a narco life with the grim and destructive realities when she actually becomes a part of that world.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

TELENOVELA WATCH: Surprise Hit 'La Viuda Negra', Final Episodes of 'Siempre Mi Amore', New MundoFox Series

The success of La Viuda Negra (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET on UniMás) is the surprise of the year so far in the world of telenovelas. This heavily fictionalized telling of the life of the “Queen of Cocaine” Griselda Blanco, a Colombian production from RTI, Caracol and Televisa, has tripled the ratings of the previous novela on the network, La Selección, and topped Telemundo’s time-slot competitor, the narco-novela Camelia La Texana, nine weeks in a row with the gap widening in recent weeks. A few weeks, La Viuda Negra has outdrawn the entire Telemundo lineup of telenovelas, a feat no UniMás series has accomplished since Rosario Tijeras in 2010 back when the network was named Telefutura.

Is La Viuda Negra any good? The direction and editing is the standard customary to Colombian produced narco-novelas, which is to say a better than we’ve seen thus far from Argos/Telemundo. The scripts are a hodgepodge of the now standard narco-clichés with smidgens of fact from Griselda Blanco’s actual life popping up now and again. But make no mistake, this is a drug fantasy, as ludicrous at times as Telemundo’s El Señor de los Cielos or Fox’s El Capo series.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Second Episode of LA VIUDA NEGRA Averaged 1.4 Million Viewers and Made UniMás No.2 Spanish-Language Network in Adults 18-34

The second episode of LA VIUDA NEGRA (The Black Widow) on Monday, February 24 at 10 p.m. ET/PT (9 p.m. Central) on UniMás averaged 1.4 million Total Viewers 2+, 835,000 Adults 18-49 and 424,000 Adults 18-34, out-delivering the finale of Telemundo's SANTA DIABLA by strong margins among Viewers 2+ (+15%), Adults 18-49 (+21%) and Adults 18-34 (+43%). The success of the second telecast builds on the breakthrough premiere of LA VIUDA NEGRA which reached 5.8 million Viewers 2+ who tuned in to all or part of the one-hour broadcast on Sunday, February 23. The second episode also made UniMás the No. 2 Spanish-language network, beating Telemundo for the entire night, among Adults 18-34. With double the audience compared to the same period last year, LA VIUDA NEGRA helped UniMás deliver its highest-rated Monday performance (8 p.m. – 11 p.m.) in the current 2013/2014 season among Total Viewers 2+, Adults 18-49 and Adults 18-34.

Highlights from Second Episode:

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

LA VIUDA NEGRA Reaches 5.8 Total Viewers in Simulcast Premiere Across Univision UniMás and Galavisión

The world premiere of the new dramatic series LA VIUDA NEGRA (The Black Widow) on Sunday, February 23 reached 5.8 million Viewers 2+ who tuned in to all or part of the one-hour broadcast and averaged nearly 3.8 million Total Viewers 2+, 2.1 million Adults 18-49 and 1.1 million Adults 18-34 during its simulcast on Univision, UniMás and Galavisión at 10 p.m. ET/PT (9 p.m. Central).

The premiere telecast also made Univision the No. 2 broadcast network in the 10 p.m. hour, ahead of ABC and CBS, among Adults 18-34 and 18-49 as well as the No. 3 broadcast network among Total Viewers 2+. LA VIUDA NEGRA was the third most-watched program on all of broadcast television with more Adult 18-34 viewers than ABC's movie presentation of The Proposal and the 24th season premiere of CBS' THE AMAZING RACE: ALL-STARS.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

TELENOVELA WATCH: Four New Shows Premiere This Week

Four telenovelas make their US premieres this week, two of them – LA VIUDA NEGRA and CAMELIA, LA TEXANA - are world premieres. Both LA VIUDA NEGRA and CAMELIA, LA TEXANA are examples of that often disreputable genre that follows the lives of drug traffickers dubbed narco-novelas.

Indeed, 2014 looks to be overbrimming with narco-novelas with a second series of EL SEÑOR DE LOS CIELOS coming later this year to Telemundo, a third series of EL CAPO planned for March on MundoFox, all coming on the heels of the recently concluded reruns of LA REINA DEL SUR and ESCOBAR: EL PATRÓN DEL MAL on Telemundo and the currently airing ALIAS EL MEXICANO on MundoFox.

There have been two prevailing approaches to the material in the recent string of narco-novelas. The first takes a true crime angle, presenting the story of a real person, often fictionalized and with many names changed, but an attempt to tell the story with at the very least, a docu-drama style of realism. The best of these and by estimation, the only masterpiece of the narco-novela genre as a whole, the only one to demonstrate the moral seriousness the material demands while also telling its story in an engrossing manner, is ESCOBAR: EL PATRÓN DEL MAL.