‘Save Me’ didn’t start out as the monster it has become. Really. When it premiered on March 19, 2009, it was just a simple debate on ‘Survivors’ told with a lot of bad milk and humor, in the style of the gossip shows of that time. After all, it was born at the dawn of ‘Here there is tomato’, which, being a magazine from the heart, had an unbridled irony that was common in Telecinco back then: more gossip than information. But things have changed, and time has made it a gigantic terrifying ecosystem whose time has come.
come swim to me
Telecinco has always been considered trash TV. When it started, the Mama Chicho and the obligatory striptease. Later, Pepe Navarro and Mississippi. Some time later, the first reality shows. Finally, the heart programs. But what we used to consider “junk TV” has been totally watered down by what the chain has perpetrated over the last decade, blowing up any self-imposed moral limits. Along with ‘Sálvame’, ‘Tonight we crossed the Mississippi’ is art and essay.
In just ten years, Telecinco has created an ecosystem based on ‘Sálvame’ that revolves exclusively around it. Leaving out the news, the rest of the network’s programming lives to feed off each other, in a continuous cycle that not so long ago hooked the viewer and forced him to stick to the television day after day to see twists, surprise characters, debates about trifles, loves and heartbreaks: the Mediaset universe ended up having plots so complex that they have lasted for years based on twists presented live in a way that is as insistent as it is effective.
Between lovers, ex-partners, reality show contestants and second-rate celebrities, the average viewer of the network has control over a huge number of characters whose plot twists take place not in a series or a controlled environment, but in the pure jungle: a live set forced to give content for five hours nonstop. It’s not easy to make ‘Sálvame’, although it seems like it is, and I’m not here to deny it its merit: for years, before settling in, it was pure television. But in this world everything goes by waves, as in life, and Mediaset’s has been foam for a long time. They just don’t want to accept it because after the end only uncertainty remains.
the house of cards
The late ending of ‘Sálvame’ is the culmination of a way of doing television in which Telecinco has fallen asleep, believing that autopilot would work fine forever. But far away are the days of glory in which almost two million daily viewers embraced: now, the program is satisfied with the crumbs that Antena 3 leaves for it, increasingly aware that his flame is going out, his celebrities are no longer of interest and his reality shows are no longer conversational.
The pandemic has changed many things and has led to internal discussions, possibly inadvertent, about our own leisure and the entertainment we consume, and how this fills us more or less. And at a time when we needed goofiness, fun and humor, ‘Sálvame’ revealed itself as an empty product. During confinement, there were not a few who saw the naked king and the true face of the Wizard of Oz: beyond the memes and the eternal company, this was no longer fun.
It affects, of course, the quality of the famous Mediaset has plummeted: when they were not aware of “creating plots” so that they would be talked about, the bombings seemed more realthe most catastrophic infidelities and the interviews in the ‘Deluxe’ were a source of information and content for the entire following month.
But celebrities who are not regular contributors to the format have gradually drifted away from it, and the evening show has to rely on vice-verses, lovers of second-rate celebrity exes and foreign celebrities. The wheel that used to turn smoothly has run aground, like when in the last season of a series they change all the secondary characters and move the protagonist to another place in the hope of surprising the viewer. Only this one is not dumb and he is aware that he has very, very little left and they are artificially breathing life into him.
Well, now what?
With Paolo Vasile out of the equation, Telecinco has to consider its own DNA again: no matter how much it crowds realities (‘Nightmare in paradise’, ‘Secret Story’, ‘Survivors’), not even ‘The island of temptations’ has worked enough to give them a break, and his return to soap operas has failed with ‘Pasión de gavilanes 2’ and ‘Café con aroma de mujer’.
Now comes a period of reflection, tests and ideas that will design the future of a chain that was convinced that it would reign forever repeating the same format cycle over and over again. Aware that ‘Sálvame’ no longer works, but refusing to let the format go completely because it has nothing to replace it with, Telecinco is going to try to shoot a daily series, a contest with Christian Gálvez, the return of ‘Sálvame Mediafest’ … In the fight for an increasingly pyrrhic audience, the Fuencarral chain she has forgotten what made her an audience leader: to make television bullshit in its purest form.
As much as they pretend that we take seriously a debate about the last couple of Anabel Pantoja’s ex that she met at the farm of ‘Nightmare in paradise’, the truth is that by losing the mumbo jumbo and the more or less involuntary naive humor, Telecinco has lost much of its hallmark. That’s why ‘Sálvame Mediafest’ works and ‘Sálvame’ doesn’t, because it recovers something lost in the last few hours, yelling, dimes, diretes, reality shows and snacks: have fun from within to amuse those on the outside.
The disappearance of ‘Sálvame’ is what, paradoxically, can save Telecinco from a very dark future: obsessing over repeating what the audience no longer wants to see, with faces that are too recognizable and plots that always sound familiar makes no sense. Jumping into the void is scary, but staying on the ground, right now, is more dangerous. No one knows what awaits in the future of the old “friend chain”, but it can’t be worse than a worn out and repetitive ecosystem that has gone from being hooked by being groundbreaking to becoming a boring scourge. That this agony ends is, without a doubt, the best thing that can happen to Telecinco as a network and to us as viewers. If it is that, after the debacle, there is still one.