Every afternoon, a legion of Spaniards complies with a television ritual that does not stop even in summer: watch their soap opera . Due to longevity and audience, these series achieve better data than many prime time competitors. Even so, many consider Amar to be forever , The Secret of Old Bridge , Acacias 38 or Serve and Protect are minor products and hardly receive public recognition or awards from the sector.

And that these four productions are an essential engine of the audiovisual industry. Each has more than 120 workers who operate with the precision of a surgeon to record about 250 chapters a year , which usually exceed one million viewers a day. And all with limited budgets that, in many cases, require juggling to meet deadlines.

It is the daily miracle of the soap opera.

The dean of the family is Amar is forever : after debuting in 2005 as Amar in troubled times, in 2013 she moved to Antena 3, where she continues to prosper. Eduardo Casanova, its director and executive producer, explains his method of work: «To start a season in September we need to start working the Bible in January» , he tells about the master document, prior to the script, which includes all the relevant information: the plot lines to the description of the characters. Once approved, the casting process begins, which usually extends between two and three months.

"Meanwhile, it's already being recorded," he says. « We have not stopped broadcasting for 13 years , so, in parallel, the script team continues to write, at the rate of six chapters per week. Every Sunday we get the scripts that are going to work. First they pass by me, then I meet with the directors who are going to record them and then I rehearse with the actors and start the meetings with hairdressing, makeup and costumes ».

The script department is made up of 14 people in front of the half-dozen who, at most, work in most series . "The team is being documented daily: we have two people dedicated to see what events we can use and historians to whom we pass the scripts," adds the director. Each day, they record a chapter and a third, approximately, spread over two sets. "We have five directors who rotate so that, after recording, they mount their block of six chapters, go through postproduction and prepare the next block," continues Santamaría, who reviews everything that rolls to give homogeneity to the final product. Thus, in most daily series they work with a margin of about three months compared to the broadcast.

-Don't they rest?

-As people have vacations and you also have to build decorated the minimum and maximum stop to not lose that mattress is six weeks. It is a Swiss watch that has to mesh perfectly.

Shooting of 'Puente Viejo'. Pedro Valdezate

Luis Santamaría, executive producer of Puente Viejo and Acacias 38 , insists on the complexity of this puzzle: «For me the daily series have a lot of merit because if you don't have everything perfectly organized there are many factors that can make a shoot or a production go wrong . That an actor gets bad and quickly have to rewrite the scene, that you drop an exterior because it rains and you have the deadline of the broadcast ... We have plans b and c for uncontrollable circumstances .

One of these emergencies was the fire they suffered in 2017. "We burned a whole set, we burned Acacias Street," he recalls. Even so, the show continued: it is the soap opera law.

To rest for a month in July, they record 10 chapters of Old Bridge and 10 of Acacias every nine days. The two series, initially set at the end of the 19th century, although they have already reached the 20th century, were born in Boomerang and are set neighbors, but they compete, at 5.30 pm, on Antena 3 and La 1. "Fortunately, they are living well together" , says Santamaría. "There is something curious and is that if someone puts the TV at that time will see one of our series."

The script coordinator of both productions, Miquel Peidró, explains that they work with bibles of 65 chapters that, as in all daily series, then charge form in the hands of scalerists and dialogueists. In addition, they have a screenwriter on set in case any unforeseen arises.

"In a bible you set out the necessary turns to keep the stories, although the creative part really is on the ladders -which collect the events of each chapter- because that is where the story unfolds," explains the scriptwriter, who works with a dozen partners in each series «Then the glows are produced in the dialogues. In a sequence of emotion on the scale, you tear the plants, but the one who has to take it out is the dialogueist ... We have 25 fixed characters in each one, so we diversify the stories so that they can like as many people as possible.

However, in Spain the quality of these series is not yet appreciated. It doesn't matter that Puente Viejo is broadcast in 60 countries. Or that it is a phenomenon in Italy, just like Acacias , where both edit their own magazine and their protagonists have won several awards. "This contempt is an acquired vice because it has no reason to be," says Peidró. «Moreover, we work with deadlines and intensity that require people of absolute professionalism and proven worth. We can't play with the trial and error method because we don't have time. But that does not mean that everything is worth it. We have to have sufficient concentration and capacity so that, week by week, our work has the quality required of it ».

'Shooting of Serving and Protecting'Pipo Fernández

On the other hand, it ensures that "among professionals there is an implicit recognition" of their work, although public acknowledgments do not abound. In fact, soap operas have always been used as schools to move to larger projects. "Right now we are at a point where they are being taken seriously enough to think it is the opposite," Peidró concludes.

Everyone recognizes that Amar in troubled times marked a before and after in the evaluation of gender . "It's a very respected series for the stories we tell and, above all, for the casts we've had," says Casanova. Rodolfo Sancho, Félix Gómez, Asier Etxeandía, Inma Cuesta, Bárbara Lennie or Álex García are some of the actors that went through it.

In addition, their plots have not fled from sensitive social issues. For example, two famous lesbian couples: first Ana and Teresa (Marina San José and Carlota Olcina) and now Luisita and Amelia (Carol Rovira and Paula Usero). They have also addressed the evolution of the role of women in society and the family from Franco to the 1970s with characters such as the incombustible Manolita (Itziar Miranda). The next thing: an attack in an office of labor lawyers.

In this school he learned Tirso Calero, who made the leap as a creator with Bandolera (2011-2013, Antena 3), in his words, «the first western daily series». Since 2017, command Serve and protect , a police soap opera starring women . "It is very different from the offer of desktop series: apart from that it is contemporary, we work with 50% sentimental melodrama and 50% thriller , so that in each chapter we have a police case," he says. "With our budget we cannot do as many shootings and persecutions as we would like, so we have to take action and think formulas to keep up."

Shooting of Mercado CentralRaúl Tejedor

He does it with a team of 13 writers in addition to the police inspector J. Trillo, who reviews all the scripts. Serving and protecting machinery does not stop even in summer. They usually record one chapter a day and a total of 200 episodes per season. "There are rotating shifts and vacations so people can rest," says Calero, who also boasts of narrating close to reality. "This is the first daily series featuring a transsexual actress, Lara Martorell, to play a transsexual police officer."

For Calero, the future of the daily series is about fleeing the period environments and betting on current stories with greater prominence of young people. At the moment, TVE and Diagonal TV are preparing the premiere of Mercado Central, where merchants and neighbors in a neighborhood will fight to prevent an investment fund from transforming their market into a shopping center.

This series, like its competitors, will require a cocktail of ingenuity, trade and good luck to get ahead and, incidentally, give work to dozens of professionals. "Unfortunately, few screenwriters breastfeed by saying they are in a daily series, but it is also true that few screenwriters earn more money," says Calero. "The same thing happens with the producers: economically it is their salvation table."

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