Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1463-6204 (Print) 1469-9818 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

INTRODUCTION: NEW APPROACHES TO SPANISH

TELEVISION

Paul Julian Smith

To cite this article: Paul Julian Smith (2007) INTRODUCTION: NEW APPROACHES
TO SPANISH TELEVISION, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 8:1, 1-4, DOI:
10.1080/14636200601148710

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636200601148710

Published online: 21 Feb 2007.

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Paul Julian Smith

INTRODUCTION: NEW APPROACHES

TO SPANISH TELEVISION

Spanish television is the elephant in the living room. Spaniards are amongst the most
devoted watchers of television in the world and the last decade has seen an explosion
of locally produced quality fiction in Spain, albeit one that has gone largely unnoticed
except by avid viewers. The nightly audience for a single Spanish show (such as El
comisario, the police drama that is the subject of one of the essays here) is greater than
the annual audience for all Spanish feature films. Yet popular debate in Spain is
dominated by the controversy over telebasura, and the relatively few academics who
study Spanish television tend to restrict themselves to such topics as government
policy toward the medium. Until Smith’s recent Television in Spain, the only book in
English on Spanish television was Richard Maxwell’s The Spectacle of Democracy (1995),
which focused exclusively on the institutional question of the coming of private
television to Spain in the early 1990s.
Clearly the neglect of Spanish television by academics (with major exceptions such
as Manuel Palacio) corresponds not only to a longstanding contempt for the medium,
especially amongst intellectuals and the press, but also to the practical problem of
addressing a huge and diverse object of study. This situation has changed recently with
the availability of DVD box sets, which testify both to the new status of television
drama, whose formal complexity rewards repeated viewings, and to the emotional
investment of audiences in a medium whose intimate connection with everyday life
renders it ‘‘closer’’ to Spanish viewers than cinema. Television no longer seems as
ephemeral as it once did and scholars in Spain and abroad now have access to a large
corpus of Spanish television which stretches back to the Francoist period.
Spanish TV studies can thus begin to address the question of the text: the specific
aesthetic of the small screen. Yet that formal question must also be placed within an
industrial context. Given the complex nature of TV ‘‘authorship’’ many producers
will be at play here: executives (in state-owned TVE or the private channels),
practitioners in the independent production companies that now provide the majority
of Spanish programming, series creators, screenwriters, and stars. While all of these
agents operate within institutional contexts (such as the extensive legislation on
broadcasting recently passed by the Socialist government), the specific role of the
creativity of producers must also be acknowledged in TV studies, as it is in cinema.
The essays that follow address in variable proportion and from different
perspectives the three fields sketched above (that is to say, texts, producers and
institutions) from the early years of Spanish broadcasting to the present day. In
‘‘Television (Hi)stories: ‘Un escaparate en cada hogar’’’ Tatjana Pavlovic argues that
‘‘the penetration of television coincides with a crucial shift in Spain’s political and
economic framework’’ (from autarchy to apertura), a process which deserves attention
within the new context of Spanish cultural studies. Pavlovic suggests a number of
objects of study, some of which will also be treated by other essays in this collection:
the textual analysis of programmes and genres; the shift from production to reception;
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 8, No. 1 March 2007, pp. 1
4
ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200601148710
2 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

the much debated question of television pleasure; and the role of a domestic medium
in reconstructing the space of the home.
Pavlovic also exploits a wide range of little known sources in order to explore the
lost world of early TV: RTVE’s archive, the popular and specialized press,
advertisements, and the representation of television in feature films. The picture
that emerges from these new sources is different both from the still dominant
institutional approach to Spanish TV and from scholarship on Anglo-American
television. Thus Spain’s own version of television as ‘‘global village’’ combines TV as a
vehicle of exploration (appropriate for a new era of apertura) with a focus on domestic
intimacy. The feature film Historias de la televisión, with its discourse of progress and
consumerism, also reveals aspects of Spain’s passage to modernity in the 1960s.
Pavlovic shows that, despite occasional critiques of television, a certain optimism as to
the potential of the medium prevailed in the period.
In ‘‘El debate sobre el modelo de la televisión pública en España: Dos apuntes
históricos’’, Juan Carlos Ibáñez also addresses the early period of Spanish television,
but focusing on reception and extending the analysis to around 1990. Ibáñez suggests
that there are two models of the audience during this period, the products of a
changing dialogue between supply (programming) and demand (public preferences).
The first model is of ‘‘social profit,’’ linked to the traditional values of public service
(in the final piece in this volume the current Director General of RTVE argues for the
continuing cogency of this model). The second, which takes hold in the 1980s, seeks
to combine the logic of the market and the battle for ratings with ongoing social and
political influence.
Ibáñez notes crucially that this paradigm shift occurs before the coming of private
television, as does the ‘‘hegemonic’’ negative and hostile discourse towards the
medium, which, he argues, arises from a deliberate refusal to engage seriously with it.
Ibáñez’s argument is based on a meticulous appeal to little known specialist materials
on the changing history of audience research in Spain from the primitive Francoist
Departamento de Estudios e Investigación de Audiencia to the more sophisticated, but
much contested, statistical data of private companies such as Ecotel in the 1980s.
In ‘‘High Drama: Low Key; Visual Aesthetics and Subject Positions in the
Domestic Spanish Television Serial,’’ Hugh O’Donnell goes beyond questions of
reception to analyze specific texts: recent long-running serials or soap operas shown
on the public stations of the Spanish state and autonomı´as. His argument focuses on
melodrama, realism, and, more broadly, questions of modernity once more.
Beginning with a brief history of the domestic Spanish television serial, O’Donnell
goes on to examine the genre’s particular forms of story telling and visual style in
some detail, charting the stylistic similarities between the British soap opera and the
serials of the Autonomous Communities in such areas as camerawork, editing, and
music.
O’Donnell continues by charting the points of contact between TVE’s day-time
serials and the very different Latin American telenovelas, focusing on formal elements
such as camerawork and narrative once more. What he stresses, however, is that
the differing visual styles are not simply stylistic, but rather work to locate the viewer
differently according to two subject positions: as physical participant or as
disembodied spectator. In his conclusion O’Donnell suggests that the television
serial in Spain, for all its stylistic and narrative variants, remains a key component of
 N E W A P P R OA C H E S T O S PA N I S H T E L E V I S I O N 3

Spanish (Catalan, Basque) society’s popular public sphere, one which still holds out
the possibility of hope for modernity and progress. It is an optimistic judgement on
current production which is parallel to that of Pavlovic for the 1960s.
Moving away from daytime and soap operas, Paul Julian Smith examines recent
prime time fiction in ‘‘Crime Scenes: Police Drama on Spanish Television.’’ Arguing
that police drama is one of the most important TV genres, critically engaging as it
does with the relation between the media and everyday life, he summarizes the large
literature on police drama on television in the US and UK and draws attention to the
split between scholarship in the humanities (more concerned with representation) and
in the social sciences (centred on relations of cause and effect). In an essay that is more
explicitly theoretical than some of the others in the collection, Smith argues for a
return to the Durkheimian functionalism in three areas: individual and collective
representations, the ‘‘moral fact,’’ and value judgements.
He goes on to examine the two most important Spanish examples of the genre,
which have yet to receive academic attention: Policı´as (2000
3) and El comisario
(1999
). Both are made by independent producers and broadcast on private
networks, Antena 3 and Tele 5, respectively. Policı´as, Smith argues, embraced a
cinematic aesthetic and a conservative viewpoint based on cognition and the values of
the collective, while El comisario represents a smaller scale televisual style, a
progressive politics, and an ideology founded on affect and individualism. In an
example of the close reading also seen in O’Donnell’s study of soap opera, Smith
examines one episode of each series that treats two key social issues: the position of
women and the status of foreign immigrants.
Turning away from private production and bringing this collection fully up to
date, our final academic essay treats ‘‘Spanish Public Television (TVE) and
Contemporary Spain in the Era of José Luı́s Rodrı́guez Zapatero.’’ Beginning with
a historical sketch of TVE, Manuel Palacio stresses its funding model, unique in the
European context of public broadcasting: a hybrid of public service and private
enterprise. Palacio claims that the eighties was an unusually innovative period for TVE
in both form and content. And even under the regime of the Partido Popular,
notorious for meddling in the media, there was some programming that showed
evidence of Spanish society’s growing complexity and contradictions. But Palacio
concentrates on recent changes to the model of public television made by the Leftist
government of Rodrı́guez Zapatero, changes which aimed to transform a medium that
was hitherto dominated by party political interests.
Under the Socialist-appointed Director General of RTVE, Carmen Caffarel, five
new drama series have been produced for TVE. This is an unusually large number,
especially since all of them focus on female characters. Palacio pays special attention
to two: the daytime costume drama Amar en tiempos revueltos (2005
2006) and the
Catalan-set series Abuela de verano (2005). The first is the vehicle for a ‘‘return of
history’’ in Spanish television under Rodrı́guez Zapatero. Like the period dramas of
the golden age of public television in Spain, this programme aims to rewrite the
cultural space of the present by working through the past, in this case the previously
neglected decade of the 1940s. Abuela de verano, also a family drama, aims rather to
establish a picture of contemporary Catalan reality, one that is rarely seen on national
television. Palacio’s final judgement is that Rodrı́guez Zapatero and his nominee at
4 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

RTVE, Carmen Caffarel, have thus made an historic attempt to represent the new
reality of contemporary Spain in television fiction.
The volume concludes with an invaluable contemporary document: a lecture
given by Professor Caffarel herself at a conference on Spanish television held at
Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III on July 14, 2006, which she has kindly agreed to have
reproduced here in its original oral form. Caffarel spoke at a key moment: fifty years
after regular TV broadcasting has started in Spain and two years after the Socialist
government had begun its reform of RTVE. As Caffarel makes clear in her lecture,
that process was still continuing: two months before she spoke a new Law of State
Broadcasting had been ratified, and just two days before the lecture an agreement on
redundancies had been thrashed out with the labour unions. Caffarel is unrepentant in
defending the continuing generalist role of the Spanish public broadcaster, arguing
that it must at all costs resist being reduced to the marginal status of PBS in the United
States. RTVE looks rather to other European public broadcasters as a model for its
own rationalization, paying special attention to the two key areas of regional
broadcasting and the rise of digital. The latter implies a huge ‘‘diversification of offer’’
and hence ever increasing competition for the embattled public service.
Caffarel goes on to treat the complex legal changes introduced by the Socialist
government, which are at once technical (the coming of two new private channels),
ethical (a code to protect children), and economic (the State’s unprecedented
assumption of responsibility for TVE’s huge debt). Her strategic response to the
continuing challenge is ‘‘quality’’ (a hotly debated term in TV studies), defined here
not as minority cultural programming, but as ‘‘quality in all genres’’ (i.e. including
popular entertainment). Caffarel hints here at an obstacle in achieving this goal: the
problem of modernizing TVE’s elderly technical facilities, which remain greatly
inferior to those of its private rivals.
Caffarel ends by summarizing the challenges that TVE still faces, including the
implementation of all the new legislation. Now that the ‘‘foundations’’ have been laid,
she writes, the ‘‘building’’ itself (a Spanish public broadcaster in the service of
democracy and solidarity) has still to be erected. Clearly this is an exciting moment in
the history of Spanish television. In a similar spirit to Caffarel, but on a more modest
scale, this special number of JSCS is intended to form the basis for new approaches to
Spanish television, a medium which is as vital as it is underestimated.

Works cited
Maxwell, Richard. The Spectacle of Democracy. Spanish Television, Nationalism, and Political
Transition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Palacio, Manuel. Historia de la televisión en España. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2001.
Smith, Paul Julian. Television in Spain: Franco to Almodóvar. London: Tamesis, 2006.