Spanish TV is the new Gold Standard for Lesbian Representation
By: Karen Frost
Resulta que el secreto del éxito es ... lesbianas. Y los españoles lo tienen claro. Vamos a ver cómo.
Several years ago, I made the following argument: TV shows can drastically increase the size of their viewership by adding a well-written and well-acted lesbian storyline. This is because well-publicized, popular queer female couples accessible internationally through YouTube or other streaming can rally domestic queer audiences while simultaneously drawing in hundreds of thousands of global viewers in a way that the show’s heterosexual pairings—except in extremely rare circumstances—don’t. To support my argument, I used four case studies: an American daytime soap opera, a primetime sci-fi drama on an American broadcast network, a Brazilian telenovela, and a supernatural Western horror on an American cable network.
Since the mid-2010s, while hundreds of TV shows throughout the Western world have introduced lesbian storylines, Spanish TV has done something extraordinary: it has become such a leader in lesbian storylines that it has turned into a case study on the impact of LGBT inclusivity on viewership. More than that, Spanish TV has become a global gold standard for LGBT representation and queer fan engagement. How did this happen? Admittedly, probably the biggest factor is that Spanish TV leverages the global Spanish-speaking community, which at 400 million native speakers is actually larger than the English-speaking community, but that’s only part of the story. After all, the same could be said of TV programming coming out of Argentina or Mexico. So what sets the Spaniards apart?
Camino and Maite on “38 Acacias”
The working theory of this article is that queer representation on Spanish TV has been so successful since the early 2010s because it has to a large degree avoided falling into toxic tropes, has treated its many queer female couples with dignity and equality, and has taken measures to highlight its lesbian pairings on social media so that they will attract international viewership. (It’s worth noting here that fans have created English subtitling on almost all queer Spanish storylines, making them accessible to the 1.5 billion English speakers in the world who may or may not speak Spanish.) Put another way, Spanish TV has supported and championed its lesbian couples more than is done in many other countries, and this has attracted millions of fansdomestically and internationally. In a world in which content transcends borders, languages and cultures, here is proof—in the form of quantitative metrics, at least—that Spanish TV has seen the potential of the global queer female fandom and is tapping into it by giving viewers with what they want: more lesbian content.
Below is an examination of how queer female content has drastically affected viewership patterns for the internationally accessible social media of two of Spain’s biggest corporations and how the corporations have both responded to and encouraged these patterns.
La 1: Where Lesbian Content Rules
Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española, S.A. (RTVE, Spanish Radio and Television Corporation) is a state-owned, public corporation that happens to be the largest audiovisual group in Spain broadcasting in Spanish. Like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), its offerings range from news to sports to reality TV to series. In the last decade, RTVE has added a bunch of queer female characters to its series on its La 1 channel and highlighted their storylines on their social media. The results speak for themselves:
• Nine of the RTVE Series YouTube channel’s top 10 most viewed videos feature queer female pairings (spanning three different shows). These nine videos beat out 4,710 other videos from at least seven other RTVE series going back two years. When it comes to La 1’s YouTube audience, the primary viewers are clearly being drawn in by lesbian content.
• The top six of the 1,643 “Servir y Proteger” videos on RTVE’s Series YouTube channel are of Nacha with female love interests. The most viewed video for the show, “Servir y Proteger: Nacha y Aitana pasan la noche juntas #Capítulo550” (“Serve and Protect: Nacha and Aitana spend the night together”), has over 8.2 million views. This is significant given the show only averages about 1.1 million viewers per episode. Meanwhile, the top video without lesbian content received only 564k views, or 1/15th the number of views.
• Among RTVE’s 1,773 "Acacias 38” YouTube videos, 11 of the top 15 feature either lesbian pair Maite and Camino as a couple or Camino as an individual. The top viewed video, “Acacias 38: Maite y Camino, la historia de un amor prohibido #Acacias38” (Acacias 38: Maite and Camino, the story of a forbidden love”),has 1.1 million views. The top video without queer female content received only 99k views, or 1/11th the number of views.
• The lesbian storyline on “Amar in Tiempo Revueltos,”which ended for La 1 in 2012, was so popular and groundbreaking that even today, RTVE has dedicated a section of the video library on the show’s website to clips of Ana and Teresa…but no other couple.
It’s possible to speculate that La 1 may have been inspired to proactively champion “Acacias 38” in particular—including through enthusiastic hashtagging and retweeting things associated with #Maitino, compiling “best of” Maitino scenes, sharing Maitino “behind the scenes,” and teasing future scenes—based on the overwhelmingly positive fan response first to Ana and Teresa and then to the pairing of Celia and Aurora on “Seis Hermanas” (2015-2017). The most viewed video of Celia and Aurora on YouTube (which was not uploaded by RTVE) received 14 million views. With massive view counts like that, it’s no wonder LezWatchTV counts six RTVE shows with queer female characters in the last three years. Queer content=viewers, and RTVE is more than happy to encourage international viewership by opening up its videos to anyone who wants to watch.
Antena 3: The Unmatched Global Juggernaut for Lesbian Storylines
What has 45 million views and is the third most popular video out of 13,634 videos on the Atresmedia Youtubechannel? Sara kissing Luisita on “Amar es Para Siempre”(“Sara aprovecha la debilidad de Luisita parabesarla”—“Sara takes advantage of Luisita’s weakness to kiss her”). The fourth most popular video is Alba and Sophie kissing, also from “Amar es Para Siempre,” with 35 million views. It’s hard to contextualize view counts that high in a way that’s graspable. For Americans, 45 million views is almost five times as many views as Jennifer Lopez’s video “How I mastered the Pole Dance | Hustlers BTS Part 1” got and almost three times more views than the trailer for Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” A more graspable comparison for everyone, however, may be this: the population of Spain is 47 million people. View count and individual viewers aren’t the same thing (one viewer can watch a YouTube video up to 30 times before the views are no longer counted), but if every man, woman and teenager in Spain watched the clip of Sara and Luisita, that would be approximately how many times the clip was viewed.Utterly incredible!
Luisita and Amelia on “Amar es Para Siempre”
The tens of millions of views that Antena 3’s lesbian content has received is, to the best of my knowledge, unmatched by any other lesbian pairing anywhere in the world, in any language, at any time. It’s like the difference between Usain Bolt running the 100m at the Olympics and a high school student running it at a local track meet. Every other couple is simply left behind. Regardless of country of origin, the most popular queer female couples almost always max out at 7-14 million YouTube views (suggesting the approximate limitation of the global queer female fandom), but Antena 3 more than tripled this maximum twice in just under two years. Nor was it the first time a lesbian Antena 3 couple became stratospherically popular.The most viewed video of Pepa and Silvia from “Los Hombres de Paco” reached 30 million views even though it aired 10 years ago.
Antena 3 is continuing to lean into its queer content by doubling down on Luimelia, the pairing of Luisita and Amelia on “Amar es Para Siempre.” Beginning on Valentine’s Day, Antena 3 will be airing “#Luimelia,” a six chapter alternate-universe-style, spin-off miniseries set in 2020 on its premium streaming service ATRESplayerPremium. This may, in fact, be the first ever instance of a lesbian TV spin-off (even if in abbreviated form), given the failures of petitions to do the same for couples like Barcedes (Chile’s Perdona Nuestros Pecados) and Juliantina (Mexico’s Amar a Muerte). Leave it to Spain to trailblaze that, too.
Nacha and Rocío from “Servir y Proteger”
Spain’s Place in the Queer TV World Deserves More Recognition
Unfortunately, three of the four shows mentioned at the start of this article, the ones I originally used to prove the size and potential impact of the global queer fandom, were ambivalent about their lesbian pairings. “General Hospital,” which never wanted to commit to its lesbian storyline and did so grudgingly, eliminated its queer female romance before it even had a chance to grow, and the show has never allowed lesbian content again (even though the storyline won one of the actresses an Emmy). “The 100” achieved infamy in the LGBT community by killing off its highly popular lesbian character after actively rallying queer viewers to the show, and in consequence, it lost approximately 1/3 of its viewers. On “Em Familia,” the lesbian couple was only allowed three kisses and no real physical intimacy. Only “Wynonna Earp” actively cultivated and rewarded its queer fan base, and for its trouble, its fans fought tooth and nail to get it a fourth season, filming now.
Unlike the three flawed original case studies, Spanish TV leans into its lesbian storylines, providing a better, less mixed case study for how lesbian storylines positively impact shows. And because its content is so accessible, it’s easy for viewers around the world to watch. Although not all Spanish lesbian TV pairings have been fantastically successful (La 1’s pairing of Ainhoa and Diana on “Centro Médico” never garnered a huge following, for example), nor have all had happy endings (Ana and Teresa when they were moved to “Amar es Para Siempre”, “Tierra de Lobos,” “Los Hombres de Paco”), nevertheless on the balance Spain has produced a lot of quality lesbian content. In the Anglo-centric English language press, Spain’s contributions to queer female pop culture are most often overlooked, but these contributions are significant and have spanned decades. It’s just just Spain’s quantity of lesbian storylines, but their quality. Starting with the extremely influential storyline of Maca and Esther on “Hospital Central” in the mid-2000s, Spanish representation has entertained and uplifted literally millions of queer women around the world. Based on view count alone, Spanish storylines are likely some of the most watched lesbian videos in the world.
And Spain’s not stopping. Based on the consistency of queer content now being added to Spanish shows across multiple networks (Movistar+’s “SKAM España”, “Hockey Girls” on TV3/Netflix, etc.), there’s every reason to believe that Spanish TV will continue to produce quality content in the future. ¡Viva España!
Silvia and Pepa from “Los Hombres de Paco”