This Wednesday there was an unusual competition on current Spanish television: the three main generalists faced each other in primetime face to face with their own series. La1 offered an episode of the final season of Tell Me How It Happened, Antena 3 premiered Cristo y Rey after its run on Atresplayer, and Telecinco premiered the new season of La que se cerca after having ceded this honor to Amazon with the previous seasons. Everyone was going for it. And, while it is tempting to talk about a winner on a night of high stakes, the headline should be something else: “Everyone Lost.”
The neighbors of Contubernio 49, those written by Alberto Caballero, had to settle for 975,000 viewers and a 10.6% screen share. The episode dedicated to María in Cuéntame, which will be followed by the last three, had 1,230,000 viewers and 11.3%. And finally, the biopic of the turbulent relationship between Ángel Cristo and Bárbara Rey gathered 1,196,000 viewers and scored 12%.
If we get technical, we can talk about two winners: the Alcántara family in terms of maximum viewers and the circus drama in share. Taking into account the very moderate figures of all the proposals (who was going to tell us that a million viewers could be called a success!), what Wednesday's data predicts is the death of fiction as the main course of prime time (because the state of health of after-dinner fiction is very different, with similar figures and a cost much smaller).
It is a reality that, in a way, was already on the table. Mediaset long ago abandoned a head-and-head fiction strategy. It gave up primetime to reality television in a clear business model: a grid with content that feeds on each other and always with the lowest possible cost per minute, with formats that could be extended until late at night. It is a model that is now in decline and, consequently, all of Telecinco's programming is faltering. And, when it produces series that often seem like outtakes from twenty years ago, the series premiere on Amazon.
From Atresmedia, the trend is also clear: primetime was an ideal place to squeeze out cheaper Turkish series with excellent results, while its own productions first had to be amortized by Atresplayer, denying Antena 3 the scoop. Of course, beyond that of the presence of fiction on its main channel, as a corporation it does have a clear fiction strategy. They combine series designed for the general public such as Alba, Honor or the return of Los hombres de Paco, others that more explicitly seek critical recognition such as The Nights of Tefía and Cristo y Rey, and they even dedicate part of the budget to the production of authorial anomalies such as Cardo and Déjate ver.
It must be recognized that the television context of 2023 is not the same as in 2003 when Cuéntame could exceed seven million viewers. A sector of the public chooses to consume content on demand on platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video, Filmin or HBO Spain, there are some DTT channels that take a significant portion of conventional television and, to top it off, since series are not formats live, they don't have the same sense of urgency as the reality shows they often compete against.
But talking about this week's data as if the channels were passive subjects in this television context is also a complacent and convenient attitude. Tell me, for example, it has a disastrous run for its final season, no matter how you look at it. Its inability to turn the farewell into a television phenomenon with two decades of history (and a brutal impact on the Spanish popular imagination) forces us to question both the creative work, which led to an absolute disconnection of the veteran audience, and the useless promotional campaign. orchestrated by Rtve. How can it be that, in times of nostalgia, it has not been able to recover a portion of the lost audience?
Regarding Christ and the King, its premiere paled with a title with similar characteristics: Veneno, also based on a celebrity and previously released on Atresplayer. Where Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi got 2.5 million three years ago, Cristo y Rey settled for less than half. But, of course, Veneno arrived after being a critical phenomenon and Cristo y Rey, a priori with more popular characters, landed on the grid at the wrong time, without the same critical acclaim and with the sauce related to Bárbara Rey already squeezed out.
And, from Telecinco, the Caballero brothers had to see how Mediaset used La que se cerca as a throwing weapon at a time when the fictional viewer had to be taken care of. The public got tired of it and then gave the premiere of the episodes to Amazon when it was still doing well as the most successful Spanish comedy on the scene. Consequently, the public took the hint: it was a series of reruns, not a priority. Less than a million viewers confirm this.
What television channels are guilty of is wearing down both free-to-air original fiction and primetime itself. In a context in which they compete with streaming, they have not known how to innovate in the promotion of their fiction proposals on the shelves, transmitting the sense of urgency that, for example, remains in force in the United Kingdom with certain productions, especially the thrillers. If you don't treat your content like a star product, why will your audience prioritize it?
But, possibly the most outrageous thing is the short-term view of the channels in their primetime programming in the last two decades. They progressively moved away the big bets from 10 p.m. because, as their studies indicated, it was after a few minutes that there was a greater number of viewers in front of the television. So, instead of assuming rational schedules that would help attract the viewer, what they did was expel the mass audience from their own content, between late starts and eternal formats that ended at ungodly hours.
This is why it is especially painful to see a fight with three weights as heavy as those on Wednesday. Instead of being a spectacle of colossi, audiences indicate that it was like three doves fighting over four crumbs under the table. The channels contributed to accelerating the erosion of the audience on their own, thinking only of exploiting the public instead of taking care of it, and from that dust, this sludge.
