Features

Domestic TV's foreign adventures

How are adaptations of Catalan and Spanish TV series doing abroad? Polseres vermelles and Los misterios de Laura are two new series on FOX and NBC

Sell­ing their prod­ucts abroad is a key aim of the main Span­ish pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, from Bambú (Vel­vet) and Globo­me­dia (Águila roja) to the Cata­lan com­pany, Di­ag­o­nal TV (Is­abel).

Tele­vi­sion se­ries are not cheap to make, and rep­re­sent even more of an ex­pense in the cur­rent eco­nomic en­vi­ron­ment. To make the task harder, there is also a glut of pro­grammes on offer on today's mar­ket, es­pe­cially from Anglo-Saxon and Eu­ro­pean coun­tries. What's more, au­di­ences have gone from local to global, view­ers' tastes have be­come in­creas­ingly se­lec­tive and so­phis­ti­cated.

That's why pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies have started to look abroad, ei­ther to sell the rights of the orig­i­nal ver­sions or to make adap­ta­tions of hit se­ries. In the Span­ish mar­ket, there are three main groups that buy se­ries – Atres­me­dia, Me­di­aset and RTVE. This makes it dif­fi­cult for the rest of the com­pa­nies to grow and, in the case of the Cata­lan com­pa­nies, the sit­u­a­tion is even more com­pli­cated.

In fact, the lat­est TV3 drama se­ries are co-pro­duc­tions with TVE: there are some tele­vi­sion films wait­ing to pre­miere, such as El cafè de la Ma­rina di­rected by Sílvia Munt, and Fast­man by Joaquim Oristrell, star­ring Juanjo Puigcorbé – a film that was made at the end of last year. TVE and TV3 have also co-pro­duced the mini-se­ries Habita­ciones cer­radas with Di­ag­o­nal TV.

Italy's Braccialetti rossi

It's not all about achieving success in the United States alone. A year ago, RAI1 premiered, Braccialetti rossi. Italy was the first country to adapt the series, and it gained an audience share of 7.2 million, 25% of the total ratings. Each chapter was an audience leader every Sunday night in Italy. Last month, the second season of the series started.

Red Band Society, cancelled

The fact that Steven Spielberg showed interest in the Catalan series Polseres vermelles was a great success for TV3. It was important for the Catalan television channel to see how a series of its own could became successful abroad. The American adaptation of the series was not easy. First, it was the ABC channel which showed interest but finally Spielberg's production company created it for Fox hoping that Red Band Society would have enough potential to become a hit among teenagers. Although it got good reviews from critics, the series did not get enough ratings. Finally, the channel pulled the series.

Velvet: next stop the US

The latest hit on the Antena 3 TV channel has already been shown in Italy, and the French channel M6 has also bought the rights for the original version. The production company Bambú is now working on getting the series on to televisions in the US. Velvet is set in a big general store in the 1950s.

Refugiados with the BBC

Shot in English with a cast of British actors and a very Anglo-Saxon format of 50 minutes, the series is aimed at a global audience but with the “made in Spain” seal of Atresmedia (Antena 3 and La Sexta) and the production company Bambú (Velvet). Los Refugiados aims to create a new style in the audiovisual industry.

Polseres in Russia and Ukraine

Despite flopping in the US, this year, the adaptation of the popular drama series will premiere on Channel One and STB, two of the main channels in Russia and Ukraine. For the sequences in the swimming pool where Roc “lives”, the Russian filming team travelled all the way to Barcelona and shot them in Montjuïc's municipal diving centre.

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