Prime-time soaps sizzle in Spanish but fall flat in English (oh, I could say a lot about this one)

“The contrast couldn’t be more stark: Last week, a new television network with a schedule of all English-language telenovelas admitted defeat, abandoning the format in the face of devastatingly low ratings. And Monday night, the Spanish-language network Telemundo rolls out a new big-budget telenovela version of Zorro, shot in high-definition and festooned with pricey bells and whistles like a theme song by Beyoncé and Mexican pop star Alejandro Fernandez.

Its one of the big questions of television, why Spanish-language viewers love telenovelas so much, and English-language viewers won’t watch them at all, said Derena Allen, an executive with a Hispanic marketing company. “Everybody’s trying to figure it out.”

To me it is like asking “Why don’t all Hispanics of Mexican descent eat at Taco Bell?”

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