Eva Longoria Bubbles Over in NBC's 'Telenovela'
Eva Longoria seems to be having lots of fun in her return to prime-time TV as the star of NBC’s new comedy Telenovela.
We viewers may have a little less.
Telenovela makes its official debut Jan. 4, but the network is giving us a two-episode sneak preview on Sunday, 10-11 p.m. ET.
Longoria’s character here, Ana Sofia, segues seamlessly from her best-known role, Gabby on the late Desperate Housewives. She’s vain, demanding, self-assured and exasperating, with just enough visible insecurities that we kind of want her to succeed. Most of the time.
Ana is the star of a telenovela, the prime-time soap operas hugely popular in Hispanic television markets. This puts her at the center of a large, quirky cast of characters who are also vain, demanding, self-assured, exasperating and hopelessly neurotic.
The goal, obviously, is that they will also become curiously endearing. Don’t bet a lot of money on that part just yet.
Real-life telenovelas, of course, are known for their outrageous melodrama and various familiar soap accessories, from hot young shirtless guys to ample female cleavage.
While the Spanish-language productions have never quite caught on with English-language audiences, they have enough of a reputation that NBC audiences won’t need to have the premise explained. Most English-language audiences get that they’re often oversized and outlandish.
Accordingly, it’s hard not to see Telenovela as a satire on the genre, which is a problem because it’s an almost impossible mission.
It’s like satirizing reality shows. Where do you find a path that the shows themselves haven’t already traveled? Where do you find a level of absurdity that hasn’t already been explored?
One suspects that the creators of Telenovela, who include Longoria as an executive producer, didn’t try to frame the show as a satire. They seem to approach it more as a sitcom that happens to be set on a TV show.
But that distinction quickly gets lost when the characters here start to behave like caricatures from, well, an over-the-top soap opera.
Dresses fall off. Neuroses surface in the middle of scenes. A ditzy actress says she can’t remember all these lines because, my goodness, she has enough trouble remembering to wear underwear.
Some of the jokes work. Ana’s assistant tells her that the public must love her because otherwise, why would they ever have bought her Christmas album.
Overall, though, it feels rather stilted. That isn’t necessary a fatal flaw -- Desperate Housewives worked some intentional stiffness into its own quirky rhythm – but Telenovela, at least in the first two episodes, gives us little reason to care much about the characters, their endless quirks or their melodramas.