Becario Colfuturo 2013

The University of Warwick

MA in Creative and Media Enterprises

The Global Audience

2014 Becario Colfuturo 2013

“Colombianizing” Breaking Bad: Setting-Up an Audience for The Future?

Metástasis, a Colombian remake1 of the award-winning 5 season series created by Vince Gillian, Breaking Bad, will premiere in Latin America in the second semester of 2014 on the basic-cable television channel MundoFOX2. The remake’s success is still to be seen, but Internet blogs and news sites commenting upon it reveal that fans of the original series are really upset, predicting it to be a complete failure. While identifying and explaining the process of adapting both the particular character and the “world” portrayed in Breaking Bad to make them as believable as possible for the Latin American audience, this essay will discuss whom its target audience might be. Thus, based on an analysis on cable television, it will propose that a stronger reason for the realization of this remake is to set-up a new audience in Latin America for the future benefit of United States television networks.

A teaser trailer of what Metástasis will be can be found in the following YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoH2gu7snwc Becario Colfuturo 2013

“…the transformation of the drama series illustrated by programs such as Breaking Bad and a few others – for the most part associated with the HBO phenomenon- may be the sign of a kind of “permanent revolution,”…” (Barrete and Picard, 2014, p.132)

Chapter 1. Understanding the Breaking Bad Phenomena

Breaking Bad was produced by both AMC, a basic cable TV channel known before for just showing American Movie Classics and Sony Entertainment Television, a global entertainment network. Among the successful original series produced by AMC are Mad Men and Walking Dead, which positioned the channel almost at the same level of recognition as the one HBO has for its original content. Vince Gillian, executive producer of highly successful TV series like The X-Files pitched the idea of Breaking Bad to AMC and Sony Television executives as the story about a character that goes from “Mr. Chips to Scarface” (Vince Gillian, 2013). The Pilot was aired in September 28 2008 under the attractive premise “A high school chemistry teacher is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and resorts to selling methamphetamine to provide for his family when he is dead” (IMDB). Eliot Logan (2013, p-156) describes Breaking Bad as “movements between the prosaic and acceptable, and the extraordinary and unacceptable”. Logan’s approach to Breaking Bad will be helpful later for the purpose of identifying the “worlds” portrayed in this series and the complexity of its transformation into acceptable ones in Latin America. For now, Logan’s analysis can be used to explain a key aspect of Breaking Bad: this is the story of an average, but very smart guy living a normal United States middle class life gradually turning into an evil drug lord (two personalities) after he finds out he has cancer. The extraordinary events experienced by the main character, Walter White, through the 62 episodes of the series, as well as the other characters around him, won the attention of millions of people around the world. Breaking Bad phenomena was so big that months after the final episode was broadcasted, fans are still producing their own material based on the series. Becario Colfuturo 2013

Walter White’s story wasn’t that successful from the beginning. The first season averaged 1.3 million viewers in the United States, far away from the average of 8 million viewers the series had for its last season, and even further away from the 10.3 million viewers it had for its final episode (Pomerantz, 2013). What happened in between? Attention has been put on the exceptional writing by Gilligan, the compelling storytelling used by the directors and cinematographers, the award- winning performances of Bryan Cranston and his fellow actors… but, all that just made Breaking Bad a nice show (Dodds, 2013; Adalian, 2013). According to Eric Dodds (2013) from Time Entertainment, the availability of Breaking Bad´s first seasons on Netflix played a crucial role on the later success of the series. People were able to catch up with the previous seasons in a matter of days and after that they could continue to watch the series as it premiered on AMC. As many TV series that are also shown on Netflix don’t have the same successful story, it’s important to clarify that the Breaking Bad case is probably due to many factors, including the ones mentioned earlier like the great acting, writing and directing as well as the new distribution factor proposed by Dodds (2013) or Adalian (2013). Also, social networks, blogs and specialized fan based sites served to propagate a substantially good word of mouth for the series and, eventually, all these factors lead to the creation of a community around Breaking Bad. This community not only watches the series, but, as mentioned before, also produces material around it and distributes it openly on the Internet. Even further, in cases like this, the considered “Scholar fans” that write theories and pieces about the series, as Andy Ruddock puts it, “play a role in forming the very objects they set out to study” (Ruddock, 2007, p.80). Breaking Bad, as with series like The X-Files or Sex and The City in their moment (Ruddock, 2013), has its own high contributing scholar fans. Fandom was so important for Braking Bad that a new series called Talking Bad was created to run during the days the last eight episodes of Breaking Bad premiered on AMC. Talking Bad was an interview type show hosted by Chris Hardwick that had Vince Gilligan as a guest next to a super-star-fan of Breaking Bad. Mr. Gilligan would answer questions about the series and, at the end of Becario Colfuturo 2013 the show, he would reveal a secret or give something away about the next episode. (Talking Bad, 2013)

Breaking Bad fans range from film stars to business millionaires, like Warren Buffet, to film and TV critics and scholars to average middle class Americans. Some of these fans are in Colombia. They were able to watch the series on premium cable television, Netflix, or pirate websites. In the United States, cable television channels look to attract audiences between 18-49 years old, because that’s where the target audience for the advertising companies is (Beam, 2012). Breaking Bad has accomplished something great, and that is to narrow down the highest demographic audience of the show to the 18-35 years old (Beam, 2012), which is the audience that will engage productively with the series, spreading content and using social networks to talk about it. This also could be the audience in universities and of those who still have a very active social life, which means they have the need to be updated in the latest social experiences like TV shows so they can be part of a conversation with their peers. This audience profile could extent to many countries with a similar social structure to the United States, but the question that concerns this essay and that I will analyze in depth later is if it translates directly to the audience in Latin America, in countries with a very different social, political and economic structure. Breaking Bad has big numbers in United States cable television, but it doesn’t come close to the numbers TV shows from regular open networks (American Idol) have, meaning that the series is successful in a niche group that is big in the United States but not necessarily in Latin America. Doing a Breaking Bad remake implies adapting the basic middle-class American world portrayed in the show to one that is “real” for the Latin American audience. Those are very different worlds. Becario Colfuturo 2013

Chapter 2. Adapting Worlds.

Difficult Men For Brett Martin (2013), something happened by the end of the 20th century when Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) first showed his face on the TV screen. It was the beginning of the “Third Golden Age” of television, portraying “Difficult Men” as lead characters that the audience will love despite their “self-absorption, horniness, alternating cruelty and regret, gnawing unease (all because), give or take Prozac and one or two murders, (they were) the American Everyman” (Martin, 2013, p. 84). Don Draper (Mad Men), Tony Soprano and Walter White had all that in common and more: they represented the middle-class, post-modern man´s desire or “longing for a life outside the bounds of convention” (Martin, 2013, p.88). As Logan (2013) suggests, what Walter White experiences is this transition (sometimes in the same chapter) between his prosaic-world socially accepted undermined personality, and that unaccepted glory that he obtains from being the boss in the underworld where he is known as Heisenberg. Characters like these could be found in novels and films, but they were not common or accepted in television, Martin (2013) suggests because of the possible interference between the advertisers that didn’t want their products to be related with a type of show that didn’t represent their core values. As HBO wasn’t concerned about advertisers, they took the chance with David Chase’ The Sopranos, and that changed cable television forever. In the “world” of Tony Soprano, killing a man with your own hands because that man “is a rat” and then kissing your wife, was totally OK (Martin, 2013). Further more, these men were loved because they were the best at what they did, they were always the smartest guy in the room and that made them heroes (Martin, 2013). How is a world like the one Walter White inhabits translated into a possible one in Colombia? In a society inhabited by the presence of “real” drug lords ghosts from the past, how acceptable is Walter’s transformation?

A Colombian Difficult Man The six minutes trailer of Metástasis available on YouTube shows an almost exactly translated script from the original. Situations that take place in the pilot of Breaking Bad Becario Colfuturo 2013 happen also in Metástasis but with slight and necessary changes of circumstances, one of the most obvious one being the replacement of the recreational vehicle (RV) lab for an old school bus, since in Colombia RVs are not common at all. Language use and manners are also “Colombianized” according to the way the Colombian version of the characters would talk, given their social status or job. It is yet to be seen how Aaron Paul’s character, Jesse Pinkman immortalized expression “bitch” will be translated by his Colombian equal, actor Roberto Urbina. But, besides the minor details, the TV series seems to be exactly the same, which brings the bigger question that is ‘What is Walter White’s “difficult man” Colombian version?’ In Breaking Bad, as in Metástasis, both United States and Colombian Walter have two jobs so they can provide for their family. The tricky part is that United States suburbs home with a pool in the backyard will hardly be seen as a complicated economic position in Colombia. The middle-class man’s life in Colombia will be slightly different (certainly it wouldn’t include a pool in your house backyard), first of all, because of what is considered middle-class in United States, for the majority of the country, is not the same as in Colombia. Recent changes in Latin American economy that will be analyzed in the next chapter have created a new middle-class, especially in Colombia, but which is still far away from the one portrayed in the original show and that is essential for the idea of the “Difficult Men” described by Martin (2013) to work. It’s not easy to distinguish from the trailer available, but it would seem that Metastasis is aiming to portray a character that is slightly different, one that is part of a struggling recently new Latin American middle-class that might not fall yet in the description of the modern man tormented by his plain pathetic existence. Metastasis’ Walter Blanco will “break bad” mostly for need, rather than for an existential reason towards his social condition. In a continent, and specifically a country where extreme social conditions have brought people into illegal activities like drug dealing, it’s not easy to imagine Walter will have the same effect on its audience. It’s also imaginable that some news media and opinion makers will be against the act of driving people to fall in love with a character that makes the choice of entering a business that in real life has scattered so much suffering and dead, particularly to Colombians. Albuquerque, New Mexico is far away from Bogotá, and Walter’s transformation might be not as well received. Becario Colfuturo 2013

Comments on the YouTube page where the Metástasis trailer is hosted exhibit a very angry audience of the original Breaking Bad from all over the world condemning the very existence of the remake. It’s hard to think that Sony Television will attempt to do the remake of such a highly acclaimed series to target the same public they did with the original. Questioning ‘why did Sony Television decided to do this in Latin America?’ might answer that the audience they are targeting as a network is one that Walter Blanco will incarnate himself. It’s highly possible that Metástasis won’t start the outstanding fandom revolution Breaking Bad did because of its particular circumstance of being a remake of a world known show, but as later explained it does have a big and growing audience demanding content as a target.

Chapter 3. Why a Remake for Latin America?

Cable Television Later after the Second World War, broadcast television was made available in places where terrain or other physical circumstances didn’t allow its proper performance by cable television (Johnson, 2009). In that sense, according to Victoria E. Johnson, cable television was an ally for the broadcast networks, but this later changed when cable channels started producing their own content (2009). By 1970’s and 1980’s a discussion between big networks and cable networks began on whom where they serving as an audience. Networks, which claimed to reach everyone in the United States, agued to be serving a broadmass audience with content produced for everyone, while cable industry alleged that producing for a mass “would seem to produce merely the least objectionable programming for anyone” (Johnson, 2009, p.59). In this sense, television consumption was understood not only as something people do, but also as a social scale where people could be measured according to the type of content they consumed. As Johnson (2009, p.59) explains, ““Broadcast culture” could be represented as a mass market populated with discounted goods, while “cable culture” is portrayed as a collection of “boutique” shops.” Becario Colfuturo 2013

Even though the United States’ government deregulation after the 1980’s allowed broadcast networks to purchase cable networks, or ended up putting them together under bigger corporations (Disney, for example), and despite the high penetration of cable television in American homes (nearly 80%), the discussion between the type of content showed by both and the differentiation of audience that generates still exists (Johnson, 2009). When this differentiation outlined by the type of content extends not only to a SES (Socio Economic Status) factor but also to ethnicity and language, Latinos in the United States and in Latin America start to play a major role in networks decisions.

Latino Audience Taking a look back to HBO’s (Home Box Office) history with the Latino audience could be one way to understand the thinking process a premium cable network does before pursuing or creating a new audience. If HBO is considered a “pioneer, a risk-taker, and even as a channel to which the title of “auteur” can be applied” (Martínez, 2007, p. 194.), then it perfectly suits the type of cultural media Breaking Bad represents. The premium network’s approach to the Latino market in the United States took place in the late 1980’s, before the “Latino revolution” that came with the rise of stars like Jennifer Lopez or Ricky Martin, meaning that for the executives of HBO attacking this, though a visible growing market, was not an obvious decision (Martínez, 2007). The first step was to offer selected programs with secondary audio programming (SAP), which meant Latino viewers that wanted to watch shows in Spanish could do it with just a click. By the same time, HBO was already opening to Latin American countries through cable television and satellite television providers in the region. Still, the programing was just the usual HBO programming (studios’ movies) with the possibility of experiencing it in the Spanish language. The 1990’s saw HBO En Español (in Spanish), HBO Olé, and all the programming available with SAP. But the real difference came by the end of the 90’s with HBO Latino, the channel that showed special programming made for Latinos living in the United States, where even though Spanish language was available, the real focus was put on the content. Recognized United States’-Latino stars like Andy García, John Leguizamo, Oscar de la Hoya and others were part of the programming in different Becario Colfuturo 2013 forms, and they were allowed to use English or Spanish, or Spanglish, since that was the “real” use of the language by the Latinos living in the US. This focus on content and context and not on language was one of the key points in the HBO strategy to capture the Latino audience in US, as Senior Vice President, Affiliate & Product Marketing at HBO Bernadette Aulestia describes regarding HBO Latino:

“One of the reasons we avoided (the word “Spanish” in the title) is because HBO Latino is very different today than it was when it launched and I’m sure it will be very different five years from now. And I think what we wanted to do was to keep it as flexible as possible. The goal of the channel clearly was just always to continue to emerge and evolve as our business needs emerged and evolved and as our audience emerged and evolved” 3 (Aulestia, 2007, p.203)

Aulestia’s understanding of the audience as an emerging and evolving entity is crucial to answer the question ‘Why not just dub Breaking Bad into Spanish?’ Even though there might be an audience for a dubbed version of the series in Latin America, this niche audience located in the high and medium-high SES of the region already exists, and the language is not a barrier for them. Proof of this, is the original content HBO has produced in Latin America in Spanish Language (Epitafios, Capadocia) that has been equally successful to and coexists with the English Language subtitled programming, delivered for their high and medium-high SES target audience. This Latin American HBO audience is a small-solid one, straitened to cable or satellite television premium packages, paying expensive rates for what they consider is the best content on television, content only available to a lower income sector through piracy.4 The audience Metástasis is looking for is a new one, one yet to be fully exploited and developed, but the path to reach this audience has the same bases as the path HBO had or still has to reach the Latino audience in United States: Risk-taking quality content, putting things in context, and understand the audience and business capability to evolve. Becario Colfuturo 2013

Cable Television Penetration In Latin America: The New Medium SES5 Latin American countries like Chile, Colombia and Peru have experienced a substantial increment in their middle class populations. According to the World Bank, middle-class has grown 50% in Latin America from 2003 to 2009, and 54% of Colombians improved their economic status between 1992 and 2008, “but social an economic mobility does not mean the same thing to different people or in different context” (Ferreira, Messina, Rigolini, López-Calva, Lugo, Vakis. 2013, P.1). What the World Bank report (2013)6 explores is that even though a substantial part of the population in Latin America has moved from poverty to a middle-income, the region is still on the way to becoming a middle-class region as the term is understood in developed countries. Poverty and inequality numbers are still high in many countries in Latin America, including Colombia. Latin America’s socio economical shift is reflected in many factors and one of them is cable television subscription. From 2008 to 2012 the region experienced a 30% increment in cable subscriptions (LAMAC). As a major example, Colombia, during the same period, saw an 80% increment in people paying TV subscriptions. By 2014, households with pay TV represent a 57,65% of the Latin America’s population of almost 600 million (figure 1a). According to LAMAC (Latin American Multichannel Advertising Council) this is due to the expansion of pay TV providers across the region and subsequently low cost options for the customers. Increment in pay TV subscriptions in low SES and medium SES has been of the 32% and 28% respectively. Thus, even though air TV is still big in the low SES, it’s loosing terrain against pay TV (figure 1b). In one of the most relevant demographic SES for cable TV providers because of their acquisition power, high-medium income men from 18-49 years old, a significant shift towards pay TV can also be seen (figure 1c). Becario Colfuturo 2013

Figure 1a

Figure 1b

! Becario Colfuturo 2013

Figure 1c

Considering the creation of Metástasis as a “put in context” process of a proven high quality content portraying a “Difficult Men” type of character, one could answer the question ‘Why a remake For Latin America?’ as an attempt of Sonny Television to capture an audience located in the new cable television subscribers, introducing them into a new wave of television and media culture. What’s significantly different about Metástasis is that, even though in the past five years original content has been produced by basic-cable channels in Latin America, none of these shows could be identified as part of the “creative revolution” (Martin, 2013) that was and still is being experienced in the United States since the beginning of the new century and that started with The Sopranos. Metástasis means an attempt of the Pay TV networks to introduce a new type of character to the new rising socio economical sector of Latin America.

Conclusions A particular option is considering Metástasis as a way of democratizing what’s understood by scholars as “quality content”, making it available for a particular audience in its own language and terms. Content like the one Breaking Bad/Metástasis explores radically differs from the usual plain Telenovela broadcasted by the local Becario Colfuturo 2013 networks, meaning that the process, if successful, involves the creation of a new audience. Diego Trujillo the actor incarnating Walter White explains: “I was used to working on soap operas, where the characters are so two-dimensional—black or white, good or bad. And they stay the same from beginning to end of a series. But Walter White transforms. For the first time, I had no idea how to play the part.” (Trujillo, 2014)

If Metástasis succeeds in finding its own fans in its own demographic target of new medium SES, they will be confronted in battle in what Ruddock (2007, pp.83-84) calls the “Fan Politics” terrain, regulated by, in this case, class and power struggles where the fans of the original series will claim a higher taste and consequently a lack of taste of those speaking in favor of Metástasis, a situation that they will directly link to their SES position in a still highly inequitable region. This confrontation will be inevitable, but what could be observed as content made for a complete different audience than the original, might be a strategy to bring them together in the future.

Metástasis’s greater role will possibly be an attempt to educate a rapidly growing audience into the new TV formats being produced by American Networks, formats that in some near future, I believe will also be pursued by Latin American Networks if the audience response is favorable. But, even if successful, the final question will be how big and attractive will the new Latin American cable television content niche audience be, specifically for companies to try to reach them and advertise their products to them. Because at the end, it all comes to a business exercise of how much I’m spending and how much I’m getting back. Becario Colfuturo 2013

Bibliography

• Aulestia, Bernadette. 2007. Cited by Katynka Z. Martínez in “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV; HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex” in Sarah Banet-Weisler, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (ed.): “Cable Visions; Television Beyond Broadcasting”. (New York: New York University Press, 2007) p.203. • Adalian, Josef. 2013. “What Networks Can Learn From Breaking Bad’s Ratings Explosions” in Vulture.com http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/lessons-from-breaking-bads-ratings- explosion.html • Barrete, Pierre and Picard, Yves, 2014. “Breaking the Waves” in David P. Pierson (ed): “Breaking Bad, Critical essays on the context, politics, style, and reception of the television series” (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014), p.121-138. • Beam, Randy. 2012. Cited in the article “Close up: The Rise of AMC” by Nathaniel Reeves in Dailyuw.com http://dailyuw.com/archive/2012/12/03/arts-leisure/close-rise- amc#.UyiH7q0hCfY • Dodds, Eric. 2013. “Why you are hooked on Breaking Bad” in entertainment.time.com http:// entertainment.time.com/2013/09/28/why-youre-hooked-on-breaking-bad/ • Ferreira, Francisco; Messina, Julian; Rigolini, Jamele; López-Calva, Luis Felipe; Lugo, Maria Ana and Vakis, Renos. 2013. “Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class.” (Washington D.C: The World Bank) • Gillian, Vince. 2013. Talking Bad. Season 1, Episode 1. “Talking Bad on Blood Money”. Netflix. • IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/episodes?year=2008&ref_=tt_eps_yr_2008 • Johnson, Victoria E. 2009. “Historicizing TV Networking. Broadcasting, Cable and the Case od ESPN” in Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (ed.): “Media Industries, History, Theory, and Method”. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 57-61. • L.A.M.A.C (Latin American Multichannel Advertising Council) http://www.lamac.org/america-latina-ingles/publications/investigation/pay-tv-charms-latin- americans-rating-grew-30-within-the-past-3-years2/ http://www.lamac.org/america-latina-ingles/metrics/pay-per-view-total/ http://www.lamac.org/america-latina-ingles/metrics/audience-composition/ http://www.lamac.org/america-latina-ingles/metrics/share/ • Logan, Elliot. 2013. “Unacceptability and Prosaic Life in Breaking Bad” in John Potts and John Scannell (ed.):“The Unacceptable”. (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), pp. 156-167. • Katynka Z. Martínez, 2007. “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV; HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex” in Sarah Banet-Weisler, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (ed.): “Cable Visions; Television Beyond Broadcasting”. (New York: New York University Press, 2007)pp. 194-212. • Pomerantz, Dorothy. 2013. “Breaking Bad Finale is Big But Not AMC’s Biggest” in Forbes.comhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2013/09/30/breaking-bad-finale-is- big-but-not-amcs-biggest/ Becario Colfuturo 2013

• Ruddok, Andy. 2007.“Fans,Power and Communication” in “Investigating Audiences” (London: Sage publications, 2007), pp. 80-98. • Talking Bad. 2013. Produced by: Sony Pictures Television and Embassy Row. Executive Produced by: Michael Davies and Jen Patton. Distributed by AMC (2013). Version referenced here as seen on Netflix. • Brett, Martin. 2013. “Difficult Men” (London: Faber and Faber, 2013) • Trujillo, Diego (2014). Cited by Laura Bennett in her article “Meet Walter Blanco behind the scenes of ‘Breaking Bad’ en Español” in NewRepublic.comhttp://www.newrepublic.com/ article/116427/breaking-bad-spanish-remake-behind-scenes-metastasis

Notes 1Even though the remake is being produced in Colombia, the series’ first season will be premiered in most Latin American countries, according to news statements presented by Sony Pictures Television. Reasons for producing the series in Colombia might include security problems in Mexico; Colombia’s highly developed infrastructure and crew for TV producing; Latin American familiarity with Colombian accent and words because of a long tradition of exporting television content.http://www.enter.co/cultura-digital/ entretenimiento/detalles-exclusivos-de-metastasis-la-adaptacion-de-breaking-bad/

2 There is not too much information about where will the series premiere, but this article explains MundoFOX has announced they will be showing the series for all Latin America http://www.cinepremiere.com.mx/33503-mundofox-transmitira-metastasis- en-2014.html

3 By the time of this statement Bernadette Aulestia was Senior Vice President, Affiliate & Product Marketing at HBO. She is currently Senior Vice President, Domestic Network Distribution at HBO.

4 In Colombia, a cable or satellite television provider will charge an average of 60 USD a month for the premium service that includes HBO. The Colombian Government has set the minimum wage for 2014 at 308 USD a month, meaning that for a person who earns the minimum wage (more than 55% of the country’s population) subscribing to HBO would represent 20% of their total monthly income.

5 All the data used as an example for this subchapter has been collected from LAMAC’s web page. The graphics also belong to this organization and were taken from their web page http://www.lamac.org/america-latina-ingles

6 “Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class” https:// openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11858