Coming to PBS’s Voces series tomorrow, Friday, April 24: NOW EN ESPAÑOL
Andrea Meller’s behind-the-scenes look at TV’s efforts to serve Spanish-speaking audiences made its world premiere at Santa Barbara earlier this year. Other fests have included Big Sky, CineFestival, and Chicago Latino, in addition to community screenings around the country.
Meller’s film explores the challenges faced by non-white actors in a still far too whitewashed Hollywood by exploring the experiences of the five Latina actresses cast as the Spanish voice cast for ABC’s DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES series, part of a short-lived initiative by the network to reach broader Spanish-speaking audiences by providing dubbed versions. With a cast consisting of two Mexicans, a Venezuelan, an Uruguayan, and an American of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, the trashy nighttime comedy/drama soap cast easily conveys the diversity that exists within a generically oversimplified “race” which is usually confined to stereotypical services or background roles in film and TV, if that. Still, where Meller falters is in trying to adopt DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’ cheeky tone – while the show was successful enough to last eight seasons, it lost its mass popularity early on and hasn’t been on the air for three years. In tying her work too slavishly to a now-defunct series rather than opening it up to move beyond a single show, Meller’s documentary very quickly begins to feels very dated and very niche. Still despite this structuring drawback, she has managed to find engaging subjects who make pointed observations about the limited opportunities afforded to Latino/a performers in a backward thinking entertainment industry.
what (not) to doc 