As loved as hated, today Sálvame comes to an end. More than 14 years filling television afternoons, 14 years receiving as many caresses as sticks. As Lydia Lozano tells this newspaper, “all those who criticize us are our biggest spectators.” This is one of the legs that make up Sálvame’s television legacy: not having left anyone indifferent. However, now that it is over, in its lowest hours, the blows it has received are stronger. Is Sálvame as bad as they make it out to be or is it as good as those who adore it say? Actually, Save Me was always the sum of the two things. As Sandra Barneda affirms, “history of television with its lights and its shadows”.
“Sometimes it is more important who and how they criticize you than the support,” says Kiko Matamoros, one of the program’s star collaborators. “Behind the criticism there is mostly an ideological background. There is a kind of moral and intellectual superiority that only shows its undemocratic contempt for the freedom of the people to choose their form of entertainment,” she adds. What he refers to is that hackneyed phrase of ‘what do you say! I don’t watch programs like Sálvame’, but tune in as soon as possible. It happened with Big Brother, it happened with Tómbola, it happened with Salsa Rosa and years later, in the past, no one doubts now that those programs made television history. Something similar happens with Sálvame, they criticize him, they despise him, but no one denies his legacy.
“Sálvame’s main legacy is a 14-year-old social service. We have entertained people, but we have also raised awareness among a good part of the audience with a positive message in many areas. I am talking about social rights, the fight against discrimination and acceptance of any way of understanding sexuality, for example,” says Matamoros. On May 5, when this newspaper reported the exclusive news of the end of Sálvame, the social networks were filled with comments in which the biggest argument for not ending the program was that: “And now, what do I entertain myself with every afternoon? “.
As Óscar Cornejo, director of La Fábrica de la Tele, producer of Sálvame, says, Sálvame’s greatest legacy these 14 years has been “having made millions of people happy.” “It has been a neighborhood soap opera without actors, without papier-mâché sets that has managed to evade the viewer with dramas in which comedy always ended up winning,” he says.
Indeed, during the years of the fat cows, of the scandalous audience ratings -it came to mark screen shares of more than 22% for a long time-, of the overwhelming success, Sálvame was adored inside and outside. Now its detractors are more deadly than before: “trash TV”, “low-grade television”, “television drugs”… Nor has Sálvame denied that many mistakes were made and that, of course, things were done wrong, but, despite Despite all the criticism, no one doubts that Sálvame “has made history on television.”
They broke all the rules and all the conventions that until then were marked on television
“The success of Sálvame is the ease and intelligence with which they made television,” explains Javier Gómez Santander, screenwriter for Money Heist and creator of La Sexta Columna, a program that competed for some time with Sálvame. “What Sálvame did was remove the corsets from television,” he says bluntly. “There is no way to make television and have those results over the years if it is not good television. There are different functions of television and they have fulfilled some of them with excellence and the data is there,” he adds.
This journalist is in no hurry to admit that even though he was not “any expert” on Sálvame during the years of La Sexta Columna, he did have to be constantly aware of what Jorge Javier Vázquez and his collaborators were doing and the rhythm that Sálvame gave him. So despite the fact that his program had nothing to do with its contents, he knows very well why Sálvame has made history and why Sálvame “changed the concept of doing television”: “While in other channels we were still thinking about whether to have the mobile phone or computer on the table, they were already making live calls and placing the mobile phone in the microphones. They broke all the rules and all the conventions that until then had been set on television”.
“Sálvame has been the true engine of Mediaset content and audience for 14 years,” recalls the journalist Isabel Rábago, who never worked for La Fábrica de Tele, but did collaborate with the program and it did have its ups and downs. Even so, Rábago is clear about it: “In his low hours it is very easy for enemies to come out who never dared to come out when Sálvame was at the top. I have been in production companies where there were big confrontations with Sálvame but we must admit that he fed back to the entire chain. He will be greatly missed,” he says.
The story of Save Me is not the usual story of a TV show. Golfo, which was originally called that, was born as a weekly late night in which Survivors were discussed. However, the almost 26% share of the screen that it had in its first programs led the then leadership of Mediaset, led by Paolo Vasile, to make a decision: Golfo had to have another future. The audiences were overwhelming, the cost of the program was low, it had everything to be a success. So on April 27, 2009, Golfo ceased to exist and Sálvame Diario was born. “In politics the 15M emerged and on television we,” says Cornejo, who insists that it was never something premeditated, “it just happened.” “Pop culture products like Sálvame arise from the conjuncture, from the historical moment and emerge directly from the people,” he adds.
A vision that the screenwriter of La casa de papel also shares. For Gómez Santander, the way La Fábrica de la Tele, Telecinco and, therefore, Sálvame make television has been “an exercise in freedom.” He points out that they were the first to start showing what was behind the sets, what the corridors of the chain were hiding or those who did not stop consulting their mobile phones in full direct and began to read even their own messages. “That exercise of freedom and breaking with all formalities turned them into renewing agents from which all the rest of us have learned.”
In fact, Cornejo insists that what Sálvame did was “break down the fourth wall”: “Our ability to generate suspense for four hours a day continues to amaze me even today. We have done four and five hours of TV a day and the viewer was always hooked. I think Hitchcock would have been proud of us because we managed to maintain the suspense with a long and totally insubstantial program.”
In politics the 15M was born and in television we emerged, although it was never premeditated
That is, Save me, introduced a format on television that had never been seen before, but which has now been included in sports programs, political tables or debates. Nobody criticizes now that a collaborator of a political table releases the first thing that comes to mind or loses the papers during a discussion that turns on more than necessary. This was introduced by Sálvame, this made it the most successful show on television and this also dug its grave. Despite the fact that right now Sálvame continues to be the most watched program in Telecinco’s afternoons, that “freedom” that Gómez Santander talks about was the key to its success and was the reason for its end. The new Mediaset wants new content and more control and Sálvame “is uncontrollable”, they say from within.
There is an anecdote that the scriptwriter remembers and that serves as an example to explain the television revolution that marked Sálvame, which is the day the program shows Antonio David the images of Rocío Carrasco revealing that he mistreated her. “It was something brutal, something to teach in universities,” he says. Antonio David Flores entered the set blindfolded and wearing headphones. Everyone had already seen the trailer for the docuseries Rocío, telling the truth to stay alive except for him. And it was that reaction, that moment when the program was put on live that Javier Gómez Santander considers an example of “television history”: “The contained anger was so brutal that at some point I have even said that it was to put it on to the actors for the type of gesture he had, for how he wanted to cover it, for the two frequencies he was in: the will and what you want to keep in. He wanted to give an image of solidity, but anger got the better of him until it exploded “.
Save me was never a heart program to use, like the ones that existed before he was born. It wasn’t a Here’s a tomato, nor a Where are you, sweetheart, but it wasn’t a magazine either. La Fábrica de Tele, Paolo Vasile, Mediaset and Telecinco had created a non-existent television format that was impossible to imagine years before. Not only has it been a format that many have later copied, it has been a program that has served as inspiration for formats that have little or nothing to do with this type of television or with Sálvame. As Brays Efe said to this newspaper, “Save me is real life.”
“In 14 years we will have had hundreds of negative reviews on the one hand and millions of viewers on the other, but it would not change if a thousand reviews disappeared for even one of our viewers,” Cornejo concludes.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project