Youth Culture on Television: El internado [The Boarding School] (Antena 3, 2007–10), Física o química [Physics or Chemistry] (Antena 3, 2008–11)

Chapter 3 begins with a survey of the youth genre in Spain, a topic little studied in comparison with the US. It goes on to suggest that two titles, once more the object of bitter attack from Spanish critics and politicians, stage an unexpected working through of vital social issues for their youthful audiences. Thus one mystery narrative mounts an elaborate allegory of the historical memory debate, even obliquely alluding to the controversy over the excavation of mass graves of war victims. Another high school drama, hitherto held to be exploitative and even responsible for teen riots, explores youthful homosexuality and immigration in ways that clearly qualify as ethically serious, as well as politically progressive

Transnational Telenovela Redux: Sin tetas no hay paraíso [Without Tits You Won’t Get to Heaven] (Tele 5, 2008–9)

Chapter 2 also focuses on gender politics, but relating to a newly transnational context for Spain and Spanish television. Treating a unique example, the adaptation of a Colombian narco telenovela to the very different Spanish context, the chapter documents the extensive, but complex and contradictory, relation between Spanish and Latin American TV, before focusing on the innovations brought to the original format by the Spanish remake. Chief amongst these is an obsessive focus on the male body (often naked and beaten), a surprising tendency in a series fiercely attacked in Spain itself for objectifying women’s bodies.

HBO Latin America Effect: Capadocia (HBO/Argos, 2008–14)

Chapter 8 treats HBO Latin America’s first series to be made in Mexico. The chapter asks how the “HBO effect,” a paradigm of quality TV that is fully documented in the US, is transformed in a new territory and televisual ecology. The choice of a women’s prison drama thus not only connects the show with grittily realistic transnational titles from the network that addressed law and criminal justice; it also, in this new context, facilitates a connection with the melodramatic national genre of telenovela. The chapter further argues that authorship for the series should be assigned less to HBO than to the Mexican producer, Argos, which had been producing socially conscious and politically progressive dramas for some twenty years before.

Race on TV: Crónica de castas [Chronicle of Castes] (Canal 11, 2014)

Chapter 7 enlarges the focus on gender and sexual politics to embrace race and ethnicity. Beginning with a historical account of the complex representation of race in Mexican visual culture (painting, film, and TV), it goes on treat a unique example of a series focusing on that repressed subject. Shot and set in a working class barrio of Mexico City, this series charts the troubled consequences of ethnic mixing in Mexico, presenting little seen (and heard) indigenous characters of different kinds and enlarging its focus to embrace local Jews, Basques, and working-class transvestites. Race, gender, religion, and social class are thus cut and shuffled in this invaluable drama.

Aesthetic TV: Soy tu fan [I’m Your Fan] (Canal 11, 2010–12), Pacientes [Patients] (Canal 11, 2012–13)

Chapter 6 begins by addressing in detail the Anglo-American debate on aesthetics in TV studies. It goes on to argue that a Mexican revisionist romantic comedy (shot by movie directors and starring a movie actress) can be read as an example of “centrifugal” cinematic television that expands its initial premise to embrace wide ranging social contexts. Conversely, a second series (a small scale drama on group therapy) is “centripetal,” burrowing into the complex psychologies of its characters. Both series thus engage in very different kinds of complexity that have, nonetheless, been linked to the aesthetics of quality television.

Postcolonial TV: El tiempo entre costuras [The Time In Between] (Antena 3, 2013–14); El Príncipe (Telecinco, 2014)

Chapter 4, the last on Spain, deals with post-colonial TV, a subject as yet little studied. Having explored the halting media relationship between the Spanish metropolis and its one time Moroccan protectorate, the chapter gives a close account of two exceptional series. The first is a lush historical romance set in the 1930s, which takes the woman’s work of sewing as a metaphor for international relations. The second is a gritty police drama exploring the drug and terror gangs in the contemporary Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Both series are shot and set in North Africa, a region that embodies a bloody heritage for Spain and which recent cinema has failed to investigate.

Educational Television: XY (Canal 11, 2009–12)

Chapter 5 treats the first of Canal 11’s modern series, which, striking a blow against clichéd machismo, takes as its theme the crisis in contemporary manhood. Set at a fictional magazine, this workplace drama addresses the conflict between public interest and private profit in the media, even as it explores the relationships between varied models of men: old and young, rich and poor, straight and gay. More specifically, the sex scenes between men here provoked complaints to the Mexican authorities. The chapter argues, however, that the educational remit of the channel, previously expressed in dutiful documentaries, is properly extended here in a compelling fiction that charts new paths for men in modern Mexico.

Conclusion: Love Bites

The Conclusion explores the relation between the quality TV treated in this book and the so-called “ordinary television” of Spain and Mexico (telebasura, telenovela). It argues, finally and against canon-formation, that both genres take up their respective places within a common cultural field in which they are inextricable from one another.

The TV Mini-series as Historical Memory: From 23-F [February 23, The King’s Most Difficult Day] (TVE-1, 2009) to Marisol (Antena 3, 2009)

Part I, devoted to Spain, consists of four chapters on major topics and texts, broadcast by both public and private channels. Chapter 1 treats the genre of the mini-series as historical memory in two examples that blur the boundary between fact and fiction. After sketching out the still fraught debate over the heritage of dictatorship and transition to democracy, the chapter first focuses on a dramatization of an attempted military coup, which drew the largest audience in Spanish television history and marked the first time that the King had been depicted by an actor in the medium. The second case study is of a controversial biopic of the greatest singing star of the late Francoist period, who embodies the tensions of the transition.

Introduction: Cold Opens

The Introduction charts the audiovisual field in Spain and Mexico and sets out the empirical and theoretical context for the case studies to come. Citing Raymond Williams, the source of the book’s title, it argues that, beyond distraction and flow, quality drama satisfies in Spanish and Mexican audiences “a need for images, for representations, of what living is now like.”