Television in Mexico

Television is a popular form of entertainment in Mexico, with mass entertainment playing an important role in creating a national, unified culture. The ''telenovelas'' are very traditional in Mexico and are translated to many languages and seen all over the world with renowned names like Lucero, Thalía, Verónica Castro, Itati, Leticia Calderón and Victoria Ruffo.

Network television

There are three major television companies in Mexico that own the primary networks and broadcast covering all nation, Televisa, TV Azteca and Imagen Television. Televisa is also the largest producer of Spanish-language content in the world and also the world's largest Spanish-language media network. Media company Grupo Imagen is another national coverage television broadcaster in Mexico, that also owns the newspaper Excélsior. Grupo Multimedios is another media conglomerate with Spanish-language broadcasting in Mexico, Spain, and the United States.

Televisa owns the Las Estrellas and Canal 5 networks, while TV Azteca owns the Azteca 7 and Azteca Uno networks.

There are also several other commercial networks with less than 75% national reach. Chief among these are Televisa's NU9VE, which in some areas shares time with regional programming, and Multimedios Televisión, which broadcasts mostly in northeastern Mexico.

Noncommercially, Canal Once operated by the Instituto Politécnico Nacional is the oldest educational television service in Latin America. The Sistema Público de Radiodifusión del Estado Mexicano (SPR) operates a network of digital retransmitters which offer multiple public television stations, including Canal 22, teveunam, Ingenio TV and its own Canal Catorce. As SPR's national transmitter network complements that of Canal Once, almost all of its stations also retransmit that network.

Television genres

Telenovelas

Mexico is one of the first countries in the world to be known for producing telenovelas aimed at shaping national social behavior – one issue of which is on family planning during the 1970s. The Mexican model of telenovelas (soap opera) – then to be replicated by other telenovela-producing countries in Latin America and Asia for most of the 1990s – usually involves a romantic couple that encounters many problems throughout the show's run, a villain and usually ends with a wedding. One common ending archetype, consists of a wedding, and with the villain dying, going to jail, becoming permanently injured or disabled, or losing his/her mind. The use of sexually themed episodes starring the leading couple of the story has been a common element through most Mexican (and even Latin American) telenovelas. '' Senda prohibida'' was the first telenovela produced in Mexico. It was produced by Telesistema Mexicano and broadcast June 12, 1958, from Monday to Friday.

Televisa and TV Azteca are the largest producers and exporters of Mexican telenovelas. Their main competitor is independent company Argos Comunicación. Telenovelas produced by U.S.-based network Telemundo tend to follow the Mexican model. Previously, telenovelas were often thought to be used as a government tool to distract citizens from national issues, a reason cited for temporary decrease in their credibility and popular appeal. Nowadays, Mexican television has managed to counteract government influence in its telenovelas. In particular, around 1990, Televisa found an enormous market for its telenovelas in other parts of Latin America, post- Cold War Eastern Europe and Asia. This precipitated the so-called 'Telenovela Craze'. Credited by media experts especially to Televisa's move in the early 1990s of exporting its telenovelas to parts of the world, this rivaled the wave of American sitcoms that had been broadcast worldwide in the same period.

During the peak of the global success of Latin American telenovelas in the 1990s and 2000s, several prominent Mexican actors and actresses gained huge following for the telenovelas that they starred and which were viewed in the mentioned regions. For example, Verónica Castro's international fame grew when the novela she had starred in many years earlier, '' Los ricos también lloran'' in 1979, became a major hit in Russia. In the 1982 telenovela Vanessa, Lucía Méndez became the first star of a soap-opera to be killed; however, this was due to her alleged diva attitude which forced retaliation from the writers and producers to "kill Vanessa off", later she stated that she was sick with pneumonia and that's the reason why she couldn't shoot the last scenes. In the same period, Thalía earned the title as the 90's "Queen of Soap Operas" after starring in the so-called ''Las Tres Marias'' or the "Maria Trilogy" telenovelas – '' Maria Mercedes'', '' Marimar'' and ''María la del Barrio'' – and '' Rosalinda'', converting her into one of the world's foremost television icons, as her telenovelas were broadcast in Mexico and more than 180 other countries to almost 2 billion viewers worldwide, earning the all-time highest television ratings both in Mexico and other regions.

Due to the international success of the telenovelas broadcast in and out of Mexico, by the late 1990s, the company claimed that telenovelas were Mexico's leading export product. Many consider the period from 1958 to 2004 to be Televisa's Golden Age of telenovelas, at the same time when the Mexican government loosened its control over television. Telenovelas, primarily those produced by Argos Comunicación, consequently addressed new themes, including poverty, political corruption, immigration and drug smuggling. However, with American drama and comedy series becoming increasingly popular among Mexican audiences through cable or satellite television and unlicensed copying, the television companies opted to adapt stories from Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. These used veteran actors in order to decrease expenses.

Currently, the most successful telenovelas are being created by Argos and Telemundo and are rebroadcast (or adapted) by the main companies. The most successful one, '' La Reina del Sur'', based on the book by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, is based on the true story of a female drug trafficker in Sinaloa.

On November 21, 2016, Televisa released a telenovela titled '' La candidata'' (The Candidate) protagonized by actress Silvia Navarro as Regina Bárcenas (whom acts as the speculated fictional stand-in for Margarita Zavala) and Rafael Sánchez Navarro as her husband Alonso San Roman (which acts as the speculated fictional stand-in for Felipe Calderón). It is heavily speculated this television program, was created in order to favor Zavala in the 2018 elections against MORENA's political candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador whom Televisa did not want as president due to his leftist political points of view.

Television sitcoms

El Chavo del 8 was a Mexican comic television series created by and starring Chespirito. The program deals with the experiences of a group of people who live in a Mexican neighborhood where its protagonist, is a poor orphan nicknamed "El Chavo" (which means "The Kid"). At its peak of popularity during the mid-1970s, it had a Latin American audience of over 350 million viewers per episode. El Chapulín Colorado ('The Red Grasshopper' or as Captain Hopper in the English version of the animated series) was also a Mexican television comedy series that ran from 1973 to 1979 and parodied superhero shows. It was first aired by Televisa in 1973 in Mexico, and then was aired across Latin America and Spain until 1981, alongside El Chavo, which shared the same cast of actors. Jorge Ortiz de Pinedo worked in various successful television series, the most successful of which have been Dr. Cándido Pérez, Cero en conducta, and its sequel, La escuelita VIP, and lastly Una familia de diez. Ortiz de Pinedo was featured in the 2007 book Televisa presenta (presents), which takes a look back at 50 years of network television in Mexico. He has worked as Mexican producer, director, writer, comedian and actor. Modern show include La familia P. Luche it features a dysfunctional family living in a city with a lot of plush fabric with plenty of terms related to family drama and general everyday life and Vecinos the series portrays the life of everyday people in Mexican barrios, where anything can be found — the jealous housewife, the spinster, the strange family, etc. Each episode features the interactions between these peculiar neighbors, where they deal with problems both real and imagined, such as ghosts, treasures, ripoffs, fights, etc.. Contemporary shows consist of '' Lorenza'' starring Bárbara Torres