Iluminace 2023, 35(1):43-64 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1747

#QuedateEnCasa:
How did the Argentine and Spanish TV Industries React to the Outbreak of the Covid Pandemic in 2020?

Concepción Cascajosa Virino¹, Pablo Mendez Shiff²

¹ Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain

² Tel Aviv University, Israel

In March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, television industries had to rapidly adapt to the circumstances. While a substantial number of people were able to spend more time in front of their TVs, the executives had to make choices: should they tell stories about what was going on or should they try to create escapism? This article compares the responses given to these challenging times by the Argentine and Spanish television industries. Whereas both countries have long-standing cultural and economic ties, they were different in the length of their respective lockdowns, and this had an impact on the televisual answer to the crisis. In the case of Spain, commercial and public broadcasters and video-on-demand platforms produced half a dozen fiction series about the lockdown, focusing on the consequences of isolation and new social habits brought about by it. On the entertainment side, gossip talk show Sálvame started to include public-service content in a remarkable transformation. Argentine free-to-air channels decided to re-run old telenovelas and focus on game and cooking adaptations of American and British formats (Family Feud, Masterchef, Bake Off). The public channel made just one online series about the “new normal” that had little success. By combining production studies with textual analysis, we hope to shed light on the responses given to the coronavirus crisis in two of the most important TV industries of the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic.

Keywords: Covid-19, pandemic, media industries, television industry, Spanish TV, Argentine TV

Received: November 18, 2022; Accepted: April 14, 2023; Published: June 29, 2023  Show citation