Look, I’m never one to celebrate when someone loses a gig; being unemployed is difficult and the landscape across all forms of art media is a long and potentially unnavigable stretch of quicksand with no guarantees.
But it’s because I love and respect Eva Longoria and her work that I am somewhat relieved that Telenovela was cancelled today, according to The Hollywood Reporter, because while we desperately need more representations of Latinas in media, we also need those representations to be better and more diverse, and unfortunately Telenovela took a great idea—a soapy, campy spoof of the drama that plays out in novelas—that seemed like it would have forth some truly complex, smart, thoughtful plotlines—Longoria’s character was non-Spanish speaking, worried about aging out of plum roles, and working with her ex—but ended up clunking uphill after the first two episodes before landing with a depressing thud. I stopped watching it because I wanted it to be so great and it wasn’t and that really sucked for me as a viewer and true believer in the comedic acumen of Ms. Longoria.
So I am sad for her and her castmates, and for the Latinos who wrote on the show who are now potentially out of work, surely as I was sad when Cristela was cancelled, and now spend my days fav’ing Cristela Alonzo’s tweets about the next dates on her stand-up comedy tours. Some might think the cancellation of Telenovela (and Cristela for that matter) is due to the fact that mediocre vehicles for Latinas don’t get the kind of shine that, say, mediocre vehicles for white women do; or because the concept of the telenovela narrated from an on-set perspective (as opposed to the novela scenes in the more popular Jane the Virgin or Ugly Betty) didn’t quite translate; or because of all these things, but most of all, it’s because it was not a good show. I’m very sad about that, but it was not.
I’m not sad about Undateable, though, because that shit sucked.
Jane the Virgin and Superstore are still on television. NBC also cancelled something called Game of Silence.
