Stuck in a reboot vacuum
ORIGINAL SHOWS LIKE ‘GENTEFIED’ AND ‘VIDA’ REFLECT A WIDER WORLDVIEW THAN THE REHASHED NARRATIVES OF THE PAST EVER CAN
Pop quiz! Name five Mexican states, four Mexican wrestlers and three telenovelas starring Thalía. Now dance convincingly to a remix of “El Chaca Chaca,” identify Mexican candies while blindfolded and juggle a soccer ball like Chucky Lozano. Extra credit: Belt out a resonant grito.
Aced it? Congratulations! You now have the great privilege of calling yourself Mexican.
Don’t worry if you failed. This is not a real test. It’s a cheeky plot point from the 2020 Netflix series “Gentefied.” Aspiring chef Chris Morales (played by the affable Carlos Santos) has his Mexican bona fides challenged by a fellow cook after he informs his colleagues that, no, he did not catch the latest Chivas match on TV.
“¿Que clase de mexicano eres?” asks a cook. What kind of Mexican are you?
Chris declares that he’s more Mexican than everyone in the room. “Test me!” he demands.
Thus, an improvised SAT of Mexican-ness is born, played out in an antic sequence in which Chris eats, drinks, dances and kicks — and gets the name of every last Mexican wrestler wrong.
The bit is a jab at rigid notions of authenticity in identity politics, ones deployed as much by non-Latinos (cue the refrain You don’t look Latino )asby Latinos against one another. Anybody who has ever had their claim to their identity challenged can empathize with Chris’ frantic attempts to prove himself. And his rendition of Mexican dances make for great physical comedy.
Moments such as these are an exceedingly rare on U.S. television. A Nielsen report from December notes that Latinos account for 5.5% of screen time on feature television programs across broadcast and streaming platforms — despite the fact that Latinos are almost a fifth of the U.S. population.
Rarer still are projects such as “Gentefied,” conceived by Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez, who both have Mexican roots, and produced and directed by Latinos (among them, actor and director America Ferrera). It features a writers room full of Latinos and a largely Latino cast. It’s also an outlier for its original narrative, shaped by Latino points of view.
“I wanted to do something that felt Chicano, that’s cinematic ... about identity,” Lemus told Vulture. “For the characters to look and talk like me.”
In the 1990s and early aughts, diversity on television meant throwing a Latino or two into an ensemble show: the cop on the right, the paramedic on the left, the nurse in the back. Occasionally, a show might feature a Latino lawyer or doctor.
Now studios seem to have developed another strategy to add representation. Enter: the reboot.
In 2017, Netflix relaunched Norman Lear’s ’70s-era sitcom “One Day at a Time” with a Latino cast and set the story in modern-day Echo Park. The CW followed in 2018 with a Latina reboot of “Charmed,” about a trio of witchy sisters. In 2019, the network dusted off the ’90s series “Roswell,” about alien kids at a Roswell, N.M., high school and rebooted it as “Roswell, New Mexico” with a Latina protagonist. And last year, the Freeform channel reconceived the ’90s drama “Party of Five,” about five children orphaned after their parents die in a car accident, as a story of Mexican American kids left to care for one another after their parents are deported.
In some cases, the rebooted series originate in Latin America. This includes the mid-aughts dramedy “Ugly Betty,” based on the Colombian telenovela “Yo soy Betty, la fea” and featured Ferrera in the title role. “Queen of the South,” an adaption of the smash Mexican series “La Reina del Sur,” about a female drug lord, is in its fifth and final season on the USA Network. And, of course, there was “Jane the Virgin,” adapted from Venezuelan telenovela “Juana la Virgen,” about a young virgin artificially inseminated accidentally at the gynecologist. It launched to critical acclaim in 2014 with Gina Rodriguez in the title role and concluded in 2019.
For the most part, however, it appears that TV studios are hellbent on recycling old U.S. properties and dressing them up with a veneer of Latino.
But they can also be a lazy default for fixing issues of representation while setting narrative traps: programming that fits into Hollywood’s narrow vision of what is Latino rather than programs that provide a more nuanced Latino worldview. At a time when the lack of Latino representation has created a cultural vacuum — one that has been eagerly filled by xenophobic politicians — original stories are critical.
Of course, one show headed for a reboot — “Fantasy Island” (1977-84), being remade by Fox with Black and Latino actors (Kiara Barnes and John Gabriel Rodriguez, respectively) as two of the protagonists — was that rare television series with an iconic Latino lead: Ricardo Montalbán. In his dapper white suits and mellifluous accent, he played against Hollywood’s stereotypical vision of the servile Latino. His regal Mr. Roarke is always in charge.
As Montalbán stated in a 2002 Archive of American Television interview: “I always tried to play people of different nationalities with the dignity that I wished Americans would show when they play Mexicans.”
In the new version, the island’s mysterious proprietor will be Roarke’s granddaughter, Elena. The role has yet to be cast.
I’d like to nominate “Queen of the South’s” Verónica Falcón for the role. Better yet, scrap that.
Just give Falcón, a veteran Mexican stage and film actress — who has the chops to play women who are authoritative and sultry in English and Spanish — something original to work with. Because the endless reboots are starting to feel like TV’s big plan for Latinos is feeding us nothing but leftovers.
“We have been absent from the narrative for so long,” Tanya Saracho, one of the creators for the Starz network’s sexy Latinx drama, “Vida,” told my colleague Yvonne Villarreal in 2019. “And that is not a Hollywood thing. That is an American thing.”
Like “Gentefied,” “Vida” — which wrapped last year after three seasons — was a unicorn on TV: an original show by Latinx creators that reflected a range of experiences.
None of this is to say that some of the reboots haven’t been a source of entertaining television.
“Jane the Virgin,” in particular, was a revelation — more of an exception than the rule because it was less a reboot than a wholesale reinvention of how stories can be told. Improving on a formula established by “Ugly Betty,” the show embraced the tropes of Latin
American soaps (the melodramatic plot twists, the cliffhangers, the evil twins), but fused them with the pace and form of a U.S. family comedy. Fantasy sequences and ridiculous costumes nodded to the high cheese of Latin American slapstick. The snappy dialogue reflected the very real ways in which multigenerational Latin American families in the U.S. communicate: Grandma Alba spoke Spanish, Jane responded in English; somehow everyone made themselves understood.
Beyond that, the show’s contorted, romance-novel plot lines addressed universal themes related to love, loss, family and women’s friendships, all with a protagonist who defied the Hollywood convention of fiery Latina sexpot. Jane was an anal retentive young mom whose professional dream was to become a bestselling novelist.
Other reboots were intriguing reimaginings of their predecessors. If the original “One Day at a Time” was about a single mom trying to find her place in the world after a divorce, the Latino reboot smartly added more layers. Like her predecessor, Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado) is a divorced mother of two. She is also a nurse and Army vet contending with PTSD, the alcoholism of her ex-husband and sundry slings she faces as a Latina professional. Plus, she has to manage her theatrical Cuban mother (Rita Moreno) and her two kids, who continuously find ways to defy her authority as well as tradition.
The original “Party of Five” centered on the white, middle-class Salingers, a family that lived in a comfortable San Francisco townhouse and operated a stylish, white-napkin restaurant.
The 2020 reboot, set in Los Angeles, centered on the Acostas, whose economic existence was far more tenuous. It debuted shortly before the pandemic and lasted just one season. But it accomplished a lot in its brief life.
Emilio, the only adult-aged child (played by Brandon Larracuente), not only became head of the household, he had his own fragile immigration status to reckon with as a DACA recipient in the xenophobic Trump era.
The show’s plot made the show feel like more than a reboot. But it was a reboot nonetheless. The reboot concept can trap a show into a preexisting narrative framework that might grant the existence of Latino characters but does not always allow for a Latino worldview.
“One Day at a Time” felt contemporary, broaching topics such as gentrification, racism and female sexuality at middle age, but the format — a situation comedy complete with laugh track — felt like a throwback.
On reboots such as “Charmed” and “Roswell, New Mexico,” Latino identity is either treated as incidental or comes off as archetype: the undocumented family member, the schoolbook Spanglish,
or the saintly, one-dimensional elder who calls you m’hija.
It is precisely this issue that makes original programs such as “Gentefied” and “Vida,” as well as “Los Espookys” on HBO, so vital. These shows aren’t about reinventing white forms with brown faces but have aspects of Latino life embedded into their narrative DNA.
“Gentefied” subverts nostalgia and has characters chatter away in blazingly musical and off-color Spanglish.
Best of all, the program consistently delivered visuals unlike anything showcased on the average U.S. family drama, including a a queer quinceañera ,agay wedding that featured a handsome couple decked out in ornate Norteñostyle suits and an alluring scene in which Lyn, one of the sisters at the heart of the series (portrayed by “In the Heights’ ” Melissa Barrera) dances on a rooftop with Doña Tita, the no-nonsense old lady who lives down the hall. It is full of warmth and magic.
And of course, there is the sublimely bizarre “Los Espookys,” which is unlike anything else on TV.
The show was created by Fred Armisen in collaboration with comedians Ana Fabrega and Julio Torres. Torres, a staff writer at “Saturday Night Live,” is the demented genius responsible for that show’s wildly absurd “Papyrus” skit, in which Ryan Gosling goes mad over the type font used for “Avatar.” “Los Espookys” is similarly bizarre: about a band of weirdos who create fright experiences for a range of batty clients, all featured within a comedic framework that draws from the narrative conventions of horror, surrealism and Latin American melodrama.
While the show’s plots need polish, it is the rare program to dispense with all the tropes of Latinos on TV. No strumming guitar soundtrack. No storylines about immigration. No expository dialogue about not being able to speak Spanish. The show, instead, is all mood. And the Latin-meets-Dark Wave soundtrack is perfect in every way.
“Los Espookys” speaks perfectly to what television networks desperately need more of: a willingness to embrace new narratives and stories that don’t quite fit the mold. And they need to support that storytelling with equitable production budgets and adequate marketing muscle. Moreover, these experiments need to be allowed to fail without serving as a referendum for everything Latino on television.
It raised an outcry in 2019 when Netflix announced it was canceling the critically beloved “One Day at a Time.” “We just couldn’t find the broad audience we hoped it could get,” Cindy Holland, Netflix VP of content, said at Recode’s Code Conference. The move raised questions about the platform’s commitment to doing anything Latino that wasn’t about drug trafficking (see: “Narcos”). The network has since introduced “Gentefied,” as well as “Selena,” now in its second season — though the latter program is afflicted by an acute case of low-budget syndrome. (Couldn’t Netflix have diverted just a fraction of the “Emily in Paris” promotion budget to getting Selena’s wigs — not to mention her character — right?)
But ultimately there should be more Latino-focused programs.
I often wonder what “One Day at a Time” might have been if Calderón Kellett, and her co-creator Mike Royce, had been given the opportunity — and the resources — to tell the story of a Cuban family in Echo Park in their own narrative voice. True representation isn’t simply about putting a few Latino faces on TV. It’s about who tells stories and how they are told. A reboot can force a story into a template. The best storytelling breaks it.
As a trickle of Latino creators slip through the few available open doors in Hollywood, they are having narratives thrust upon them. It’s high time they be allowed to shape them too.