As Telemundo Turns

As a child growing up in the Mojave Desert, Ricardo Molina remembers watching television with his parents. Immigrants from El Salvador who spoke Spanish as their first language, they usually gravitated toward Telemundo or Univision, the only two networks carrying Spanish-language programming in the U.S.

But Molina wanted more than to simply hear a familiar language. He wanted to see a familiar face as well.

“I didn’t see myself there,” Molina says.

He does now--as the lead in Telemundo’s new police drama “Reyes y Rey,” a remake of ABC’s popular ‘70s action-drama “Starsky and Hutch.” For Telemundo, “Reyes y Rey,” which premiered in November, is not just another new show, but the first wave of a larger programming strategy being put in place by its new owners, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Liberty Media. The hope is that by infusing “Reyes y Rey” with sensibilities and story lines firmly entrenched in the American experience, the drama, and other shows like it, will begin the task of revolutionizing Spanish-language broadcasting by reaching out to young, U.S.-born Latinos.

It’s a big gamble for Sony, which officially took over the network in August. If the Japanese media giant’s new Telemundo executives are right, then dramas like “Reyes y Rey,” being shot at the Baja Norte studios here, could soon become standard--and popular--fare on Spanish-language TV in the U.S.

If they’re wrong and Latinos don’t warm to the drama-and-sitcom model perfected by the Big Four networks, it will ensure that Univision, with its successful lineup of Mexican telenovelas, will continue to dominate Spanish-language prime time well into the next century.

But Sony has its eye on more than just Univision. Long-term, the idea is to use this bicultural programming style to woo viewers away from the English-language networks as well. That vision is a pragmatic one, since Latinos represent the nation’s fastest-growing minority group. In the last year alone, that market--representing roughly 30 million people, 75% of whom watch at least some Spanish-language television--was the target of an estimated $900 million in Spanish-language TV advertising, a jump of about $120 million from 1997.

Before it can take on the Big Four networks, though, Telemundo has to get past Univision, founded by Mexican programming giant Televisa in 1961. Since its purchase by media mogul A. Jerrold Perenchio in 1992, Univision has mushroomed into the fifth-largest network in the country, outpacing both of the fledgling general-market networks, WB and UPN. Week after week, the 20 top-ranked programs in Hispanic households are Univision offerings, while in New York and Miami, network affiliates outperformed general-market stations during the May sweeps.

In contrast, the 11-year-old Telemundo has known chaos for most of its existence. Another major misstep would be costly--at best leaving the network a weakened No. 2, at worst putting its long-term survival seriously in question.

“The problem that the old Telemundo had is that they never knew who their audience was,” says Richard F. Melcombe, president and CEO of Richmel Productions, which produced shows for the network.

So far, the results of Telemundo’s programming experiment have been disappointing--and expected. After an initial bump, the network’s national ratings have fallen about 3% since it began rolling out its new lineup in September, leaving the network with just 11% of the nation’s Hispanic viewership. That’s not rock-bottom, but you can see it from there.

“Any time you shift the paradigm, any time you change the brand and change what you’re going to be about, the first thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to start losing people,” says Telemundo President and CEO Peter Tortorici. “So I’m not surprised that in the beginning we’ve had a little bit of a drop. What I’m encouraged by is that the drop hasn’t been that bad.”

Turning that momentum around will be difficult, as Tortorici knows all too well. A veteran CBS executive, Tortorici headed that network’s entertainment division during the 1994-95 season and took part in developing such successful programs as “Chicago Hope” and “Touched by an Angel.” He also tried to orchestrate an abrupt course change for CBS in an attempt to attract the younger audience advertisers want. But the move resulted in a sudden and significant ratings decline, and he was replaced after a year.

What Tortorici inherited at Telemundo was a financially troubled company with a history of internal problems, little original programming and even less direction. Telemundo had seen its audience share fall by half in five years and, despite three management changes, one reorganization and a bankruptcy filing, it was still bleeding red ink. Nevertheless, Tortorici is optimistic.

“I think what we’re about is something very powerful,” he says. “It’s filling a void. Our central mission is to reflect the lives of Hispanic Americans in this country.”

As a result, the network has moved quickly to position itself as the alternative to Univision’s endless supply of first-rate Televisa novelas--short-run soap operas that have topped the ratings in more than 100 countries. Instead of filling Telemundo with inferior imported shows from Televisa’s rival, Tortorici and chief programmer Nely Galan have sought to attract the younger, more sophisticated audience they believe is Telemundo’s future with a lineup of original programs that reflect the tastes and sensibilities of U.S. Latinos.

“I think they’ve done an excellent job [redefining Telemundo],” says Melcombe. “I like the tag line, ‘The Best of Both Worlds.’ But it’s a very, very different approach.”

“What they’re trying to do,” adds Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, “is capture the experience of the Latino in the United States by setting up plot lines and shows that viewers can relate to. It’s welcomed by many people in the Latino community.”

Plot lines are only part of the equation, however. Telemundo has reportedly invested more than $2 million in development and more that doubled its programming budget--an investment that allows the network to shoot its dramas on 16-millimeter film instead of on less glossy videotape. And the romantic ballads that have traditionally introduced Spanish television shows have been replaced by quicker, hipper rock en espanol tracks.

Then there’s the language question, which is being played out in front of the camera and behind it. Inside the Baja Norte studios, tucked in the back of a nondescript industrial park in the working-class Tijuana barrio of Linda Vista, director Ela Troyano presides over a set no different than any you’d find in Burbank or Hollywood. After walking through a key scene several times, Molina, whose Spanish was perfected with the help of a private teacher, approaches Troyano with a prop change. “Is it OK if I walk on carrying a cup of coffee?” he asks in English. “Esta bien,” Troyano answers. “Vamos a tratarlo.” (“OK. Let’s try it.”)

Although most workers on the set are Mexican, conversations move seamlessly from English to Spanish and back again. It’s a common experience for many in Telemundo’s target audience, since the vast majority of U.S. Latinos either primarily speak English or are bilingual. Only a quarter of U.S. Latinos surveyed by the Rivera Institute watch TV exclusively in either Spanish or English; the vast majority surf between channels and languages. For those still struggling with their Spanish, the network is running English subtitles on three of its shows, while affiliate KTMD-TV in Houston is offering English closed captions of its news and other programming.

“You’re really reaching out to a large segment of the Latino community when you hit that bilingualism,” says Pachon. “It makes demographic sense.”

If any one person embodies the new Telemundo, it would have to be president of programming Nely Galan, a fast-talking, tightly wound bundle of energy who has compiled an impressive resume in Hollywood but so far has left little legacy.

Like the network, Galan, 34, has done everything but really hasn’t done anything.

“I’ve had a pretty successful company that has employed all Latinos, which I think is pretty amazing. But no, we haven’t had a hit show on the air,” says Galan, who left her own production company to join Telemundo four months ago. “Every time that I would try to sell a show, I’d get deals because I know how to sell. But they’d never want to make the thing afterward. Which is why I so much wanted Telemundo.”

Although Galan says it was her mother who came up with the network tag line, “The Best of Both Worlds,” Telemundo’s hip new image most closely mirrors her own personality. It’s brash and sexy, yet sophisticated and playful. It understands English, but prefers Spanish. And most important, it’s maturing.

Four years ago, when Fox Television helped Galan launch her company, Galan Entertainment, she was a tough, demanding boss who could be both charming and arrogant at the same time. “Nely,” says someone who knew her then, “has her days. She can be intimidating and difficult.”

“I’m tough,” Galan admits. “I couldn’t have gotten this far [if I wasn’t]. I’m a perfectionist. [But] I’m very direct and honest.”

The new network executive started out as an editor at Seventeen magazine while she was still in high school, and was hosting a talk show for PBS a year later. At 22, she became the nation’s youngest television station manager when she took charge at Telemundo’s New Jersey affiliate, WNJU-TV, the network’s flagship.

From there she graduated to high-profile assignments with cable channels such as E!, ESPN International, Fox Latin America, Bravo and HBO, where she helped develop the Latin-themed production venture Tropix. She was heralded as the entertainment industry’s guiding light into the burgeoning Latino market in the U.S., so when things were going well, she naturally got the credit. When they failed, however, she’d lash out at others.

But Galan has changed. The low-cut dresses have been replaced by smart business suits, and she’s more apt to ask a question rather than simply telling someone what to think. It’s a management style more suited to the CEO of a major network, which is what Tortorici says Galan will be within the next five years.

Galan, however, seems content with her current assignment. “I get the creative thing. The CEO’s job is much more . . . involved with the board side and the business side and the sales side. I’ve got what I always wanted.”

Now she just has to make it work. To do that, Galan says, she has to make Telemundo the voice of young, bicultural Latinos--the fastest-growing segment of the demographic--who, like Molina, haven’t seen themselves represented in either Spanish- or English-language television. To that end, the network has already rolled out nine original new shows and revamped more than 75% of its lineup.

“A network does have a voice,” Galan says. “You know what Fox is. You know what the voice is. And I would say that our voice is the bicultural Latino who feels that he’s in or she’s in a tug of war between two cultures.”

Tortorici likes to refer to himself and the Cuban-born Galan as the “Lucy and Ricky of Telemundo.” And there’s some truth in that depiction. But in this case, both were raised in an immigrant family, make their living in the entertainment business and once took Hollywood by storm.

And with Telemundo, Tortorici, 49, is getting a second chance. Though he’s being asked to make the same type of programming changes, unlike CBS, this network has nowhere to go but up. And that kind of climb will take time.

“You don’t create a vision overnight, you don’t execute it overnight and you don’t get people to connect to it overnight,” says Tortorici. “We’ve got miles to go.”

Thus far, for every two steps forward, the network has taken at least one back. Although it points to “Reyes y Rey” as the signature show of its first season, the program’s ratings have fallen each week since its debut. And despite the vast resources of the Sony Pictures film library, Telemundo aired a dubbed version of “La Bamba” twice in November alone.

In fact, the only place where the network can claim an unqualified ratings success is in the morning, where its two-hour block of Nickelodeon cartoons, which debuted in November, has doubled viewership over the same period a year ago. But even that victory is bittersweet, since the cartoons replaced infomercials.

“When you have a market that’s segmented [encompassing Cubans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, among others], the natural question is, ‘Well, what can you do to connect them all?’ ” says Tortorici, the grandson of Italian immigrants. “What connects all of those different cultural experiences [is] being here. And they deserve to see programming that’s about that. When I look at the market and see the lack of choice . . . I really intellectually believe that this was a smart idea.”

Initially, the network is hoping to double its ratings--to about 22% of Hispanic households--over the next year. But building the ratings is only part of the challenge. Turning a profit is the real goal, and it’s an especially important one for Telemundo, which lost more than $13 million in 1997. Univision, by comparison, made $104.4 million last year and followed that with the most profitable upfront advertising selling season in its history.

The Telemundo purchase is Sony’s first foray into the U.S. network television market, and it comes at a time when Spanish-language broadcasting is experiencing explosive growth, both in the number of outlets, primarily radio and cable, and the size of the audience. That’s why Telemundo, despite its recent struggles, was seen as a good risk on Wall Street. But investors will eventually have to see a profit, and Jon Feltheimer, president of Columbia TriStar’s television group and the man who--along with executive vice president Andy Kaplan--engineered the network’s $539-million purchase, predicts that Telemundo will be in the black in less than four years.

In the meantime, the parent company will help offset continued losses by airing Telemundo programming on its international satellite channel, Tele Uno. Sony already produces 500 hours of Spanish-language programming for seven international channels.

“They have deep pockets,” says independent producer Melcombe. “They can take a breath and hold it for a couple of years.”

Yet while the network has had little early success in building an audience, it has built a great deal of good will in the advertising community, where many are quietly cheering for Telemundo to chip away at Univision’s virtual lock on the market. Some affiliates are reporting ad revenue increases of as much as 50% over last year and, despite the low ratings, Telemundo’s upfront sales were up 54% over 1997.

“We all want to see them succeed,” says Joe Zubizarreta, executive vice president of Zubi Advertising Services, a national ad-buying firm based in Miami.

Across town from the Baja Norte studios, in the Agua Caliente section of Tijuana, a neighborhood of wide boulevards and sprawling mansions, a crew is on location shooting the fourth episode of “Angeles,” a Telemundo series that will debut in January.

While the gritty “Reyes y Rey” was modeled after “Starsky and Hutch,” it quickly outgrew that narrow template and developed a flavor all its own. Not so with the glamorous “Angeles,” a “Charlie’s Angels” remake that has copied its inspiration all the way down to the logo. Even some of the cast mirrors the original.

“I’m Farrah Fawcett,” says Argentine model Sandra Vidal, brushing her well-coiffed blond hair from her eyes.

Vidal is the only holdover from the show’s original cast, which was disbanded after a pilot episode nobody liked. The delay wreaked havoc with the network’s fall schedule, pushing the show’s debut back two months and cutting its run from 22 episodes to 13. However, it also proved fortuitous since it gave Sony Entertainment time to close a deal with well-known Mexican singer and soap opera star Patricia Manterola that will include English-language film work as well as a leading role in “Angeles.”

But the most provocative casting call was putting Magali Caicedo, a Colombian beauty pageant winner, on screen as the third angel, making her the first black Latina to be cast in a leading role on Spanish-language television in the U.S. That may sound like a minor distinction, but it says a lot about the way Latinos have traditionally been depicted on television in their native language.

“Latinos are not a race. We’re a culture with many races inside,” says Galan. “And nobody ever gets that.”

It’s also a culture with more than two dozen countries inside, another fact that television--in any language--has rarely exploited. Telemundo has tried to set itself apart on that score as well: The six lead characters in its two high-profile dramas represent five countries. And the directors come from a couple more.

Few of these actors would be working regularly in Hollywood--where just 3.9% of TV and feature film roles went to Latinos in 1996--without Telemundo.

Creating jobs, says Galan, is “beyond important. And I think it’s the responsibility of this company to hire Latinos. Do you realize Latinos don’t have job opportunities in this market, and in Mexico and Latin America they do?”

While Telemundo says it already has some 300 Latinos on staff in newly created jobs--mainly in Miami--and plans to hire an additional 30 to 40 in programming and marketing positions in Los Angeles next month, many more of the jobs it has created are in Mexico. Baja Norte studios, for example, have 180 employees--mostly Mexicans--working on its two Telemundo shows in Tijuana.

“The shows are providing steady work, most definitely,” says General Director Omar Veytia.

And not just for technicians, grips and sound engineers. Even the bit parts and background roles in “Angeles” and “Reyes y Rey” are being filled by Mexican actors. Blanca Hernandez, a Baja representative of ANDA, Mexico’s national actors’ union, did a brisk business recruiting new members on the set of “Angeles,” where the union promised each actor no less than $58 a day for 10 hours of work--good pay in a country where the minimum wage is $3.50 a day. Yet it’s just a fraction of what union actors get paid in this country.

“Those rates are, in my opinion, obscenely low,” says Joan Weise, assistant executive director of the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists.

The network is candid about the fact that it’s shooting in Mexico mainly to save money, but that’s at odds with its pledge to create jobs for Latinos in the entertainment industry here. So the network and AFTRA, which already represents talent on the Burbank-based Telemundo sitcom “Solo en America,” are both interested in reaching agreement to produce more programming domestically.

“They want to make it work, and we want to make it work,” says Weise. “It’s not all rosy, but I’m very hopeful.”

For writers, however, the situation is less hopeful. The Writers Guild of America, West says that Latino writers filled 1% of TV jobs over the last seven years. The writing staff employed by Josh Griffith, executive producer of both Baja-based Telemundo dramas, is still predominantly white. As a result, scripts are written first in English, then translated. Telemundo, of course, promises to turn that around as well.

But then Telemundo hasn’t been bleeding red ink for years because of poor language skills; its Spanish has always been fine. Programming, however, has been a problem. Finding the right format and making it work is a process that transcends language, as the success of many subtitled Sony shows overseas proves.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s in Spanish or English . . . they need to have good shows,” says producer Melcombe. “That’s going to be their first challenge.”

And despite all the talk of strategies, demographics and the desire for an alternative to the soap-heavy model traditional to Spanish-language television, the fact is tradition is winning. And it’s becoming a rout.

When Univision introduced its newest novela, “La Mentira,” earlier this month, the network’s flagship station, KMEX-TV in Los Angeles, drew a record audience for a novela debut, swamping a rerun of “Reyes y Rey” on local Telemundo affiliate KVEA-TV.

Two days later another prime-time Univision soap, “Mi Pequena Traviesa,” outperformed the programming on all but one general-market station in Los Angeles. And when Univision rolls out the long-awaited Mexican novela “La Usurpadora” on Jan. 4, its first night is almost certain to generate another record.

Nevertheless, Univision need look no further than Mexico for a cautionary tale. Televisa, the regular supplier of the network’s popular prime-time shows, recently saw its stranglehold on Mexican audiences sink more than 20% over a three-year period when chief rival TV Azteca started investing in original product.

“Telenovelas are very popular because they’re a classic Cinderella story,” says Galan. “Our market’s No. 1 value is love and passion. So, duh! It’s gonna work. But Jerry Springer works. Should a network program all Jerry Springer because it works?

“I may fail miserably,” she says quietly. “But I’m going to fail with the conviction of my vision. I really think it’s the right thing. I do.

“I believe that the good guys win in the end.”