What I liked most in QUÉ POBRES TAN RICOS were a trio of double acts: Sylvia Pasquel and Diego de Erice, Mark Tacher and Tiaré Scanda (whose presence is very much missed in the final weeks), and Ingrid Martz and Raquel Pankowsky who are both ludicrously, cartoonishly over the top and I loved every second of them. The other performances I liked in this novela were from Manual “Flaco” Ibáñez, Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, the young couple played by Jonathan Becerra and Natasha Dupeyrón, Arturo Peniche, Gabriela Zamora, Abril Rivera, and late arriver Cecilia Gabriela.
LA MALQUERIDA premieres
LA MALQUERIDA replaces QUÉ POBRES TAN RICOS on Univision’s schedule on Monday at 10 p.m. ET. This Mexican telenovela from Televisa produced by José Alberto Castro (LA QUE NO PODÍA AMAR; TERESA) is inspired by unusually lofty source material – a 1913 play of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning author Jacinto Benavente that also spawned a famous 1949 movie adaptation from Emilio Fernández.
The success of La Viuda Negra (weeknights at 10 p.m. ET on UniMás) is the surprise of the year so far in the world of telenovelas. This heavily fictionalized telling of the life of the “Queen of Cocaine” Griselda Blanco, a Colombian production from RTI, Caracol and Televisa, has tripled the ratings of the previous novela on the network, La Selección, and topped Telemundo’s time-slot competitor, the narco-novela Camelia La Texana, nine weeks in a row with the gap widening in recent weeks. A few weeks, La Viuda Negra has outdrawn the entire Telemundo lineup of telenovelas, a feat no UniMás series has accomplished since Rosario Tijeras in 2010 back when the network was named Telefutura.
DE QUE TE QUIERO, TE QUIERO (weeknights at 7 p.m. ET on Univision), a breezy Televisa adaptation of the 1999 Venezuelan telenovela CARITA PINTADA, managed to annoy me so much with its plot contrivances in the opening episodes that I wonder if it can recover. The whole central misunderstanding between the protagonists exists merely because neither character is able to say the right thing at the right time, to make the obvious revelation. The heroine somehow never manages to reveal the crime she believes the hero committed – attempting to rape her; and the hero somehow never manages to reveal he has a twin brother. That the hero can’t figure out his twin brother must have done something to the girl to make her so frightened of him defies all sense. The telenovela also features several scenes of fairly appalling taste including the meet cute of the protagonists which features the hero in blackface, a scene ridiculing an obese couple in a restaurant, and an ersatz ZZ Top guitar riff accompanying each entrance of the “sexy” cop played by Cecilia Galliano. That said, the cast is appealing and mix well, the protagonists are fresh and capable so far, and Marisol del Olmo’s arrival into the story are enough to keep me watching a bit longer.
DE QUE TE QUIERO, TE QUIERO premieres tonight at 7 p.m. ET on Univision just as this Televisa telenovela is finishing up its run in Mexico. A moderate success south of the border, DE QUE TE QUIERO, TE QUIERO is a Mexican adaptation of CARITA PINTADA, a Venezuelan telenovela from 1999 by Valentina Párraga. It is produced by Lucero Suárez whose previous novela was another Párraga adaptation, AMORCITO CORAZÓN.