Novelas turn a new page

The economic slump is offering producers of telenovelas new opportunities, Telemundo’s Melissa Pillow tells Clive Whittingham.

Maid in Manhattan

One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity, and it’s certainly proving to be that way in Europe for telenovela producers.

Money is scarce, pubcasters are having their budgets slashed, channels that were moving into original production have abandoned the idea – but schedules still need filling.

Step forward the telenovela, a channel manager’s dream, providing series running to between 120 and 130 episodes that can be stripped across six months at a relatively low cost. “People have less money to spend and that’s working in our favour,” says Melissa Pillow, sales director for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) for Telemundo Internacional.

“It’s no secret that usually what works best in any region is self-produced programmes. Everybody had been getting the idea of producing telenovelas themselves, as they do in Russia and Poland. The rest of CEE never caught on to that and during the economic crisis there came a point where production stopped. Companies in CEE that were thinking about producing have put it off into the future and now they’re once again investing in our telenovelas.”

Telemundo Internacional is the sales division of the US Spanish-language channel Telemundo, which moved into producing its own content a decade ago and now makes 99% of everything it airs. The melodramatic stories of forbidden love riddled with complications that stretch over 130 episodes or more are incredibly popular with the Spanish-speaking audience.

Recently, Telemundo has been trying to diversify the genre, airing more modern novelas where the main thrust of the story is more likely to be about murder than romance. “Consumption of our telenovelas has always been high in CEE, and since the crisis started it has been higher because there is very little production going on and much more investment in foreign series,” says Pillow.

She recently concluded a deal with TV2 in Hungary for Maid in Manhattan, a telenovela based on the 2002 film starring Jennifer Lopez that follows the love story of a rich businessman and a maid he meets in his New York hotel.

Melissa Pillow

But despite improved market conditions for Telemundo, competition is increasing from others looking to cash in on the same opportunity. “We’ve always faced competition from Europe and Asia,” Pillow says. “There are a lot of Korean series on the market, some of which we distribute, and there is competition from Russian producers and German telenovelas also work very well in Europe. But now we also have productions from Turkey. There is a lot of competition from outside Latin America.

“We are always striving to better compete with these European series but for obvious reasons the German and Turkish series are culturally more similar to the CEE’s way of thought.”

The one saving grace for Telemundo is that the European series tend to air in primetime, whereas theirs fill daytime schedules. “We have to be sure we are working to produce what the international market asks for because effectively we have to compete with these foreign producers,” says Pillow. “Right now, it’s not such an issue; our sales are up at the moment and the number of slots we have on air in Europe is up.”

As broadcasters start to see light at the end of the tunnel and money for regional productions becomes more readily available, Pillow says her main aim for the coming 12 months is to kick-start the company’s format sales business.

She carries not only the Telemundo catalogue of finished series but also format ideas from TVN in Chile, many of which are non-traditional telenovelas featuring comedy and thriller elements that air locally with little-known actors and make ideal formats for export.

“It used to be a good business before the crisis hit, and it still is a good business, but for obvious reasons there isn’t so much production going on,” she says. “Now the wheels are turning again, production and the advertising market is up in Russia. We’re seeing the same going on in Poland and other areas of Europe. Now is a good time to start heavily pushing our formats again.”