Chapter 5 - Telenovelas and music-based youth films

Summary

Television was imported from the USA to Argentina in 1951 by media tycoon Jaime Yankelevich, who made a deal with the government to broadcast the first transmission on 17 October, as part of the national commemoration day known as ‘Loyalty Day’, which marks Perón's release from prison in the wake of massive labour strikes and the origin of Peronism (Taquini and Trilnick 1993: 11). The fact that Darín appeared in a TV programme for the first time just a few years after this date, when he was still a baby, makes him a true ‘television native’, who has observed almost literally from the cradle the challenges that the new medium represented for established actors and actresses (Valdéz 2011). By the time he reached his twenties, he had spent most of his life in television studios and was very comfortable in that environment, surpassing any of the challenges experienced by his predecessors. It was in those years, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, when he became a TV celebrity, and when his small-screen fame and personality started to feed into his film and theatre performances. In relation to this should also be noted – as Tierney, Ruétalo and Ortiz do in their study on new Latin American Stardom (2017) – the important role played by television in determining stardom in national contexts. And, as they correctly explain, ‘this is particularly the case’ when it comes to ‘Latin American television's most popular format, the telenovela’ (2017: 165).

Most performers in Latin America who have reached a high level of public recognition and have crossed over to become big film stars have passed through the rite of passage of telenovelas. In recent decades, with the upsurge of Latino demographics in the USA, this tendency has also had a strong impact in Hollywood. In 2013, NBC Latino reporter Nina Terrero explained that ‘over the last ten years, novela exports from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and other Latin American countries have dominated the U.S. Hispanic television market, creating an avenue for scheming villains, lovelorn hunks and poor maids to become Hollywood heavyweights’.