• RODRIGO TERRASA

    @rterrasa

    Madrid

  • ESTHER MUCIENTES

    @emucientes

  • ILLUSTRATIONS: JOSETXU L. PIÑEIRO

    @nunhapedra

Updated Friday,5May2023-19:06

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"The end of Save Me is not near," Belén Esteban predicted only a few weeks ago in these same pages. He was wrong... Just a month after his interview in this newspaper, in which the so-called princess of the people, perhaps the most popular face of what has been the most influential program on television in the last two decades, claimed Sálvame as "the greatest television creation of the twentieth century, the XXI and the XXII", Mediaset has decided to end it. In a fulminant way. The end of Save Me is here.

As EL MUNDO has learned, the company that directs Telecinco will make public in the next few hours the decision to cancel the program that has been the flagship of the chain since its premiere in April 2009, a format that took the programs of the heart to a new dimension, from which debates and gatherings of all kinds have drunk and that has been a tireless factory of controversies, characters, plots and crazy audience figures.

It's all over now. On Friday, June 16, the program will be broadcast for the last time. Sálvame and all its branches will disappear forever from the Telecinco grid, which will take advantage of the cancellation of the already mythical program to thoroughly restructure its programming for the new season.

And here comes the other bombshell that Mediaset will announce imminently. This newspaper has been able to confirm that from September it will be Ana Rosa Quintana, undisputed leader of the mornings with an average audience of more than 18%, who occupies the after-dinner of the channel. The Madrid journalist will continue to direct the political debate of her program early in the morning – at least until the next general elections pass – but the rest of the space will be in the hands of Joaquín Prat, her co-presenter so far and also host of Ya es mediodía, and the rest of his collaborators.

Find out more

Belén Esteban, 25 years of total fame.

"Those who want to see us off TV are going to be screwed"

  • Writing: RODRIGO TERRASA Madrid
  • Writing: PHOTOGRAPHS: ÁNGEL NAVARRETE

"Those who want to see us off TV are going to be screwed"

Contents.

'Volantazo' in Mediaset: end of the trash or facelift?

  • Writing: ESTHER MUCIENTES Madrid
  • Writing: ILLUSTRATION: JOSETXU L. PIÑEIRO

'Volantazo' in Mediaset: end of the trash or facelift?

The dance of names is not casual. Nothing is in this story full of veiled messages, appointments, tensions and headlines. In the center, the remodeling of Mediaset after the departure of Paolo Vasile as CEO of the company at the end of last year and the arrival of the new CEO, also Italian Alessandro Salem. And below, two producers faced under the same spotlights of Telecinco. On one side, Unicorn Content, the company of which Ana Rosa Quintana is president and which produces her programs. On the other, La Fábrica de la Tele, responsible for Sálvame but also Socialité or Todo es mentira. The two producers are 33% owned by Mediaset itself, both have faced with more or less subtlety two very different styles of making television and both have behind several of the most iconic faces of the chain, those who hang in the corridors of the TV in Fuencarral.

The cold war that both have maintained already has a winner: Mediaset has decided to cement its new image in the figure of Ana Rosa and liquidate the most visceral style represented by Sálvame. "Salem wanted to change the image and contents of the chain since he arrived," Mediaset sources tell EL MUNDO. "He wants a family, respectful, kind TV."

Within this new strategy is also framed the agreement with Kosmos, the company of former footballer Gerard Piqué, to broadcast in Cuatro the matches of the next season of the Kings League. "It's a risky decision, but the plan is to make a different television and look for new audiences," they insist.

And that means breaking with part of the past. Sálvame, as a great icon of what Telecinco has been in the last 20 years, was in the spotlight since Mediaset decided to dispense with Vasile as the head of the company. The new management of the company, with Alessandro Salem at the helm and Borja Prado as the new executive president, set itself the goal of changing the face of Telecinco and away from the noise and stigma of the so-called telebasura.

"Sometimes we have made trash, yes, but everyone does it," Belén Esteban defended herself in her interview with this newspaper. "I don't think Sálvame is a trash show. I love El programa de Ana Rosa, but it also has a heart... Is that trash?" he wondered.

Nothing was casual here either.

The headline of that talk with Belén Esteban read: "Those who want to see us off TV are going to screw up." And from Mediaset that message was understood as a kind of vindication of La Fábrica de la Tele before the chain through its most popular face. Only a few days before, the producer had made public for the first time the renewal of the collaborator with a long-term contract that in the corridors of Telecinco was also interpreted as a show of strength in the midst of turbulence.

The future of Belén Esteban, like that of the rest of Sálvame's collaborators linked to the production company, is now unknown. From Mediaset they do ensure that Jorge Javier Vázquez, who has a contract with the chain, will continue to present Survivors and will continue to be one of the great assets in the entertainment formats of Telecinco.

"I have a contract. I have two years left, until 2025. What they decide, will be fine, "said the presenter himself last week during an interview on TVE in relation to his professional future. "I work in television, television is not mine. A management team comes in and I understand what they want to do with the people who are working or with the dolls that we go on television whatever they want."

"In Telecinco there are many presenters, but there are only two stars," they sentence from the chain in reference to the weight of Jorge Javier Vázquez and Ana Rosa Quintana. Therefore, they justify, the gap left by the program of the first could only be filled by the program of the second. "Content like Save Me can only be replaced by something very top."

The tensions between Mediaset and everything that Sálvame still represents were evident since the arrival of the new management of the company. One of the first measures of the Salem and Prado team was to update the company's code of ethics, approved by the Board of Directors of Mediaset Spain in 2012. An apparently cosmetic decision that hid a first warning to the program presented by Jorge Javier Vázquez. "It is a controlled blasting of everything that Vasile represented," they leaked then from the house.

The network first banned all its programs from broadcasting images or not even mentioning 13 characters that have nourished for years the thousands of hours of broadcast of Telecinco entertainment programs, with all versions of Save Me in the lead. In that black list appeared from Rocío Carrasco to Kiko Rivera through the bullfighter José Ortega Cano or the former vedette Bárbara Rey. The objective, according to the company itself, was to end the feedback of content in the chain, look for new characters and, above all, strengthen "new editorial content".

Only a few days later, Mediaset informed its employees of the update of its internal regulations and the appearance of a new heading: guiding principles in entertainment programs. Second notice to sailors for Save Me.

The now famous ethical code forbade for the first time its presenters and collaborators "to express opinions, preferences or political comments within the program", in clear reference to the messages that both Jorge Javier Vázquez and Belén Esteban herself – each from their ideological spectrum – had repeatedly launched from their set. The chain warned that this rule did not affect the News, obviously, but neither to El programa de Ana Rosa.

Another point of the new regulation recalled that it would no longer be allowed to "attack or criticize any other program of the company or its presenters and collaborators." New reference to Sálvame and his particular war with Ana Rosa after the broadcast of a docuseries about Rocío Carrasco produced by La Fábrica de la Tele and that confronted the collaborators of Sálvame with those of El programa de Ana Rosa.

Mediaset's code of ethics also prohibited presenters from leaving the set of their live programs without just cause, revealing data from third parties that are not public or broadcasting content that was not in accordance with their time slot. Everything pointed back to Save Me.

Just a year ago, the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) sanctioned Mediaset for the broadcast of inappropriate content during children's hours and for the issuance of covert advertising. Both infractions occurred on the sets of Sálvame Naranja and Sálvame Deluxe.

The pressure on Jorge Javier Vázquez's program is also inevitably linked to the fall in his popularity. The death of Sálvame comes in the midst of an audience crisis, despite the fact that the program is still the most watched program in its schedule. "The model is wearing out and it is evident that the trend was downward," they explain from the chain. Telecinco led television audiences until July 2021, when it ended a historic streak of 35 months and ceded the first place to Antena 3. Since then, the Mediaset chain fell to historic lows and with it the impact of Sálvame was also deflated.

In 2009, the year of the premiere of Sálvame, the program registered an average screen share of 16.1% and became the most watched format of the afternoons on linear television. The years of the fat cows arrived until touching the 2 million spectators (18.1% share) in 2011. For more than a decade it never fell below that 16.1% of its first season. Sálvame, Telecinco and Mediaset were undisputed leaders during those years. In 2022, the program lost more than three audience points compared to the previous year: it went from 16.4 to 13.2%.

Sálvame has continued to lead its time slot since then, but its first symptoms of weakness were interpreted as the beginning of a decadence that has served as the perfect excuse to liquidate the space.

On May 1, Mediaset regained leadership as an audiovisual group against Atresmedia. "The changes are beginning to bear fruit," they celebrated from the company. Mediaset celebrated with a spot in which images of all its programs appeared, all but three: Sálvame, Sálvame Deluxe and Socialité, the three flagship programs of La Fábrica de la Tele.

In the video, which the company shared from its social networks, the main figures of Cuatro and Telecinco also thank their viewers. The last in the ad is Jorge Javier Vázquez. He is the only face of Sálvame that appears in the promotion but he does it, in addition, from the set of Survivors. The first is Ana Rosa Quintana.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more

  • Telecinco
  • Mediaset
  • Bethlehem Stephen
  • Jorge Javier Vazquez
  • Save me
  • Ana Rosa Quintana Hortal
  • Ana Rosa's program