Operación Triunfo is back, and it does it in style. Prime Video has presented this Tuesday the new edition of the historic musical talent that was born 22 years ago and will become the first live program broadcast on a streaming platform in Spain. As a metaphor for closing the circle, vital and television, Chenoa has put on the bell-bottom jeans that she wore in that 2001 test in Valencia with a performance of Donna Summer’s Last Dance that took her directly to stardom. Yes, they fit her like a glove: “I go with everything,” she advises, “and no elastane.”
The singer broke the television “barrier” six years ago as a jury of Tu cara me suena and acknowledges that it has not been easy at all: “They pigeonhole you in music and it seems that you can’t do anything else,” she says, “it gave birth to me OT and in these 20 years I have tried to learn and unlearn everything that I took from there”. Her return to the show where it all started is like “coming home,” from the big headlines to the little details: Many of the cameras that followed her on her pageant will now focus on her again as host. She faces the challenge with emotion, and warns: “I have no filter, for better or for worse, and I have been sitting at the table where the contestants will be, it is impossible not to empathize a lot. That is not forgotten, it is engraved on fire “.
I have no filter, for better or for worse, and it is impossible not to empathize with the contestants. That is not forgotten, it is engraved on fire
As advice for the new generations, pick up the one that Lolita gave her when she left her audition, the one in the flared jeans, livid with pure shock: “What is there to do here?”, asked the young twenty-something applicant. “To be you,” Lola Flores’s daughter replied laconic. “That is the most difficult thing,” adds the Argentine, who applies two maxims that she learned, indeed, in the academy: “First, always pay attention to those who are in charge; second, not lose my naturalness, is what connects with the people”. And she gets graphic: “My eyebrow rises up to Cuenca when something is not cool and I say a lot of tacos, I grew up without social networks and I suppose I will have to get used to criticism, I am already quite seasoned.”
Chenoa will thus become the visible face of an experiment that will see the light of day at the end of the year but whose castings will start on July 3 in Barcelona and will continue until September 19 in Madrid in nine Spanish cities “with a break during the month of August to vote and take vacations”, remarks Noemí Galera, who repeats as director of the academy and of the selection tests. The mythical director of the horn-rimmed glasses who does not leave a puppet with a head – “total meme meat”, she admits herself – is not the only classic that returns to OT 2023.
“The fans are very Taliban and they don’t want us to change the format too much,” confesses Tinet Rubira, director of Gestmusic Endemol, the production company that created the program. So the faculty will be full of familiar faces: Manu Guix will be the musical director of the OT academy; Mamen Márquez, the vocal tuning coach; and Vicky Gómez will devise the choreographies. “The hard core of teachers connects with tradition,” confirms Rubira, who advances, without going into details: “Almost all the rest will be new faces. We have already contacted some of them; others are waiting for our call.”
The academy will be much bigger, with natural light and a lot of green, and the studio will be inside again as in the first edition
The environment will also experience a return to its origins, with the studio in the same facilities where the contestants and teachers will live, although the academy, on the outskirts of Barcelona, ??will be “much bigger, with more natural light and a lot of greenery, which eco-sustainable as possible”, advances the producer. The new times of hyperconnection will make the isolation of the participants more necessary than ever, a basic of the format that prevents even the team from talking to them during rehearsals to minimize interference in the purely musical.
Operación Triunfo revolutionized television in the early 2000s. Not surprisingly, the final in which Rosa from Spain emerged victorious continues to be, to this day, the most watched in the history of Spanish television. Once again, the musical contest par excellence is the spearhead of a cathodic experiment. For around three and a half months, Prime Video will broadcast a live 90-minute weekly gala, in which the performances, the jury deliberations and the saves will be seen, following the pattern of the last two decades.
After this appointment there will be a special in which the protagonists, expelled and winners, will open up on the channel in extensive interviews, and a daily magazine will keep fans up to date on everything that happens at the academy. Off the platform, each contestant will have their own profiles on Instagram and TikTok, and both the castings and the 24-hour academy can be followed on YouTube. The most classic format will become an innovative experiment. A new door to entertainment or not, only time will tell.
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