A couple weeks ago, I found out from the El Cohete blog that
Galavisión would no
longer be airing Televisa’s 2003-2004 youth-oriented novela CLAP: El Lugar de Tus Sueños
after August 11. Admittedly I had not
been watching the show since it began, but I half-hoped the listings were wrong
concerning CLAP’s cancellation. So last
Friday (August 11, 2017) I managed to catch the final few minutes of CLAP, in which Jazmin handed Juan Pablo (Ari
Borovoy) a letter that was supposed to have some bearing on the future of his
relationship with Valentina (Ana Layevska).
Monday, August 14, instead of the resolution of this situation on CLAP, I saw the opening of its
replacement, Aventuras En El Tiempo.
I later read a Twitter tweet by a woman disturbed by the decision by Galavisión
to drop CLAP from its schedule after
only 55 of its 95 episodes; and she said “no es justo.” And she’s right: it isn’t right.
But why did this happen?
Was it because of the ratings?
Maybe, but it was a rerun. (Get
over yourself, Galavisión.) And don’t tell me Galavisión didn’t know how many episodes there were in this
teen soap, which was set in a high school for the performing arts, because it
knew, but it dropped the show from its schedule without finishing it
anyway. Maybe Galavisión scheduled CLAP’s August 11 departure from the
schedule months in advance, perhaps intending at some point to run this show
for two hours a day, but CLAP never
did run for two consecutive hours a day.
If Galavisión
had decided to double-strip CLAP, by my estimate it would’ve had to
start doing so by no later than June 19, the beginning of its fourth week, in
order to get in the entire novela by August 11 without obvious cutting. Without double-stripping, CLAP should not have ended its Galavisión run for another eight
weeks. Besides, Galavisión’s
6AM novela, Cuidado Con El Angel, ended
the day before CLAP disappeared, so
Galavisión could’ve
moved CLAP to 6AM.
Instead, viewers of CLAP, some of whom missed its original Univisión run thirteen years
ago, were left with this as their final image of the show: Juan Pablo getting a
letter handed to him by his sister amid lingering uncertainty about whether or
not he and Valentina would get back together.
Nice going, Galavisión!
And the worst part is that this is not the first time in
recent years that an Univisión-affiliated
network dropped a Televisa novela from its schedule in medias res without even bothering to finish it. Three years ago, Univisión dropped the encore run
of Para Volver A Amar from its Sunday
morning schedule with about 36 episodes to go.
And I thought Univisión
only did this to Venevisión’s
novelas. (But I may be wrong with this allegation; with the lone possible
exception of the teen title ꜟQue Clase de Amor! on Telefutura in
early 2012, Univisión
really never failed to “finish” Venevisión’s and RCTV’s novelas, no matter how
much slicing and dicing of them Univisión
ordered.)
It really doesn’t sit well with me that Galavisión dropped CLAP the way it did, and it shouldn’t
sit well with you, the viewers, either. But since Galavisión probably won’t
reinstate CLAP, what can you do? If
you want to know how CLAP actually
ended in its original run, go to YouTube or Hulu and look for any episode from
#56 to #95, and excerpts from the final minutes of the Gran Final can be found
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kepqJHUxkPg.
Also, check to see if either Univisión
or Televisa is streaming CLAP online. You can also visit an archived version of the
Telenovela World plot summaries for CLAP at https://web.archive.org/web/20140810001422/http://foro.telenovela-world.com/~diane/clap/SumUniv1.HTM. By the way, the last CLAP episode shown on Galavisión originally aired in the USA on June 14, 2004.
