CLAP Canceled: Whatever Happened to Finishing What You Started?

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.

Another Telefutura Shakeup, and Univision’s Continued Slighting of Venezuelan Novelas

So much for Telefutura’s first-ever all-novela primetime lineup. During the Univision/Telefutura Fall 2011 upfronts in mid-May, Telefutura announced such ambitious plans to try to knock off Telemundo’s novela lineup, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Yet for the second time in the last six or seven weeks, Telefutura has shaken up its lineup in a big way.  Here is a summary:

Veredicto Final…CANCELLED

Somos Tú Y Yo…Moved to Saturdays at 11AM

Alborada (repeat)…Moved from 10PM to 1PM

La Viuda Joven…Moved from 9PM to 5PM

Cine de las Estrellas returns!

First of all, the rerun of Televisa’s Alborada should never have been given the 10PM timeslot and Telefutura, perhaps realizing its mistake, has moved it to 1PM, effective this Monday (June 13).  Then there’s the matter of Telefutura giving up on its all-novela primetime lineup after just two weeks.  How short-sighted can Telefutura be?  Besides, Telefutura pre-empted, or aired at other than their regular times, several of those novelas to bring us soccer.  How does Telefutura expect to build an audience for its novelas that way?

Most disturbing, however, is the fate of the Venezuelan novelas La Viuda Joven and how it demonstrates the shabby treatment of Venezuelan novelas by Telefutura’s parent network Univision over the last nearly 20 years. When Venevision’s La Viuda Joven premiered less than two weeks ago, we finally had, for the first time in 18 years, a true Venezuelan telenovela airing in the “horario estelar” on an Univision-owned network.  It seemed like the dawning of a new day in which Univision would give a Venezuelan “localista” novela a fair chance to compete in primetime.

But only two weeks?  I mean, come on, Telefutura!  In the summer of 1993, Univision aired Venevision’sRosangelica for two months in primetime before moving it to 11AM. Even the ill-fated Marte Television novela La Loba Herida, another Venezuelan production, had eighteen primetime airings over five weeks before it was cancelled.  Yet Telefutura can’t (or won’t) give La Viuda Joven and Somos Tu Y Yo more than two weeks? 

“But if the ratings were terrible,” you may say, “then Telefutura had every right to cancel or move the shows.” That’s true, but Univision kept the low-rated Televisa novela Un Gancho al Corazon on its primetime schedule for over six months before finally moving it to 3PM.

Some eighteen years after Rosangelica and La Loba Herida, it seems Univision and its sister/daughter networks still refuse to air Venezuelan telenovelas in primetime, at least not for any real length of time.  And it’s somewhat telling that in the eighteen years between Rosangelica and La Viuda Joven, the only Venevision novelas to spend even part of their Univision runs in primetime (Gata Salvaje, Rebecca and Eva Luna) were shot on American soil instead of in and around Caracas, Venezuela.  Furthermore, when RCTV’s novelas were on Telefutura, they never once were given primetime slots. Yet several novelas from Colombia’s RCN have aired on Telefutura’s primetime schedule, as well as a Brazilian novella, and those novelas usually stayed in the primetime lineup from beginning to end.  Why is there such corporate hostility towards Venezuelan novellas at Univision?

As far as I know, Venevision’s Program Licensing Agreement with Univision is still scheduled to end in December 2017.  When that time comes, I think Venevision should sell its share in Univision and start selling its programming to other Spanish language networks, because as long as Televisa stays on Univsion, Venevision’s novelas will never get a fair shake.