Hey folks, just a short rant on design, before i get to the drama at hand. I usually don’t discuss this aspect here, but I should. I’ve been a graphic designer for many years now, and obviously look at every detail of a home DVD release, and the marketing materials as well. So, it’s hard for me to understand why stuff like this continuously happens:
I’m about 99.9% sure that this spicy telenovela starring Kate De Castillo, was well in the works and to the print shop before CBS had any fresh ideas for their drab legal action drama. I first noticed the similarities while taking the Q67 bus to work one morning. At the bus stop, the large poster advertising Julianna Margulies in a slightly provocative pose gave me the where-have-i-seen-that-before head scratch. The Good Wife has established excellent ratings despite it’s cliche-ridden premise since it’s first season in 2009. As the bus pulled up, emblazoned on the side panel was the admat for La Reina del Sur, and it literally smacked me on the noggin. Could it be that there was some creative thievery at work here? It’s Good Wife vs. Bad Girl in this cross-cultural slugfest.
What’s funny is how similar the images and layout are, despite the fact that they are polar opposites in character and plot device. La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South) produced by Telemundo, is based on a novel of the same name by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte. The drama depicts the rise of Teresa Mendoza, a young woman from Mexico, who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in southern Spain. With a $10 million budget, La Reina del Sur was the most expensive telenovela they’d ever produced, and garnered the network’s highest rated premiere for a soap to date. Chock full of bullet ballet gunfights, seedy cockfights, enough catfights to satiate even the most jaded femme-fatale action fans, and impossibly hunky Ivan Sanchez, wow, how could you watch anything else?
Being a spicy soap, it wasn’t without some real-life controversy, something we all like, heh. Stars Kate del Castillo and Cristina Urgel publicly spoke out against media censorship when a scene featuring a kiss between their characters was edited out before broadcast on Mexican television. Due to its controversial subject matter, the program has been criticized by some for its glamorous depiction of the life of a narco-trafficker, with one Mexican government official calling the series “an apology for organized crime“. In Spain, the dramas locale, it was edited down to a mere 13 episodes, with the original novel’s author calling it putrid garbage, as opposed to the full length 63 episode extravaganza shown in the Americas. I’m searching out the bootleg DVDs as we speak, as I have some time until Rebelde sexbomb Angelique Boyer’s Teresa comes out.
