Love! Power! Squalor! TV Dramas Tune in Politics
www.nytimes.com By JUAN FORERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — The story line is usually simple: poor girl meets rich man, falls in love and is in for madcap high jinks as parallel worlds collide. Or it is about a fiercely independent, successful woman who, following years of loneliness, finds love, loses love, then finds it again.
This is the world of Venezuelan soap operas — the sappy, drippy daily dramas that captivate millions by sticking to a proven formula. For more than 40 years, it has worked — soap operas are as much an symbol of Venezuela as oil and beauty queens. The telenovelas, as they are known, dominate nightly programming and rival their Mexican and Brazilian counterparts for their popularity overseas. Advertisement
However, with Venezuela in political tumult, coming off an economically devastating two-month antigovernment strike, the scriptwriters of such soaps as "My Fat Beauty" and "Intimate Underwear" are asking themselves whether they should not inject something new into the fables.
It is not that love is going by the wayside. "Every telenovela is a story of love," a prominent program director said emphatically.
But several leading scriptwriters are convinced that soaps need to reflect the reality of Venezuela, and that reality is a country roiled by protests and the daily rants of a pugnacious left-leaning president, Hugo Chávez, and his determined opponents. It is a society so polarized that government backers refer to the upper classes as the Squalid Ones, and the president's adversaries see his supporters as uncouth riff-raff.
Leonardo Padrón, a scriptwriter with the huge Venevisión television station, sees delicious possibilities. He plans to be the first to infuse a soap — his next one, "Sweet Thing" — with a bit of today's crumbling Venezuela.
"As a writer, I am absolutely seduced by the idea of making a chronicle about what is happening," said Mr. Padrón, who has made a string of successful soaps over 10 years.
"I'm going to tell a story of love, but in the context of what we are living," he said. "I am going to try to create a cocktail that will have a dose of escapism, a dose of humor, but also a dose of reality."
His work, though, does not promise to be easy in a world where television executives flinch at untested experiments. That is especially true now because Mr. Chávez, angry about antigovernment news programs, is proposing restrictions on the media.
So instead of Mr. Padrón's initial idea — a poor girl from a pro-Chávez barrio falls in love with a Squalid One — his tale will be largely metaphorical. The antagonist, he said, will be the president of a company who becomes intoxicated with power, a clear reference to Mr. Chávez.
"Perhaps by the 15th show, people will say, `That guy is just like Chávez,' but this will be without my saying that I am telling the story of the president," Mr. Padrón said with a wry smile.
Not everyone is convinced a new formula will work. Scripts must speak to the largely poor masses, many of them Chávez supporters who might reject telenovelas with a political bent. Indeed, scriptwriters say the big question they face as they embark on writing 150-hour stories is whether viewers really want more politics in a country where everything is infused with politics.
"The conventional telenovela where the story is about love — that is what the people want to see, romance," said Arquimedes Rivero, a Venevisión producer who has done as much as anyone to create the Venezuelan telenovela. "The people do not want discussion and conflict."
Still, as the two main telenovela studios here prepare to film a new string of soaps this year, scriptwriters and producers are discussing ways of carefully incorporating the everyday into scripts that will remain heavy on love and betrayal, intrigue and jealousy.
"It is inevitable," said José Simón Escalona, who overseas dramatic programming for Radio Caracas Television. "The telenovela looks to appeal to the masses, and to do that it has to explore the intimacies, how the people feel. We look to do telenovelas that talk to Venezuelans, that understand Venezuelans."
It's not that political or social commentary has never made it into soaps. "Along These Streets," a telenovela of the early 1990's written by Ibsen Martínez, used street-smart characters and compelling dialogue to tell stories about poverty, corruption and killings. The program was such a hit that it lasted years, while most telenovelas have eight-month spans.
Scriptwriters like Monica Montañés point to "Along These Streets" as a model for what a political soap could be — and as an expample of how ignoring political realities could lead to a telenovela's downfall.
Ms. Montañés said the telenovela she wrote last year, "La González," sank in the ratings because it avoided mentioning the short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez last April and the turmoil that followed. "It was stupid not to have the characters participating in protests and marches, and I think people resented it," Ms. Montañés said.
That is not to say that scriptwriters are planning hard-hitting real-life dramas about intrigue in the presidential palace.
Instead, there may be subtle references to the political stalemate that has paralyzed Venezuela or plots that incorporate such daily realities as the long gas lines in this oil-rich nation. Radio Caracas Television, in an experiment, is rerunning "Estefania," a 24-year-old telenovela that focused on the waning 1950's-era dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez — clearly drawing a parallel with the Chávez government.
Some scriptwriters said they would follow the old recipe, until Mr. Padrón or others succeed with telenovelas that deal with the political. Perla Farias, a scriptwriter who is sticking to the basics, said, "I do not have anything finished just now, but it is going to be about love, a very complex love story."