La Promesa is the daily series that La 1 premiered last January. It is set in 1913 and has been developed by Bambú Producciones and StudioCanal. Period fiction has settled on the chain’s tabletop, growing in audience over time. RTVE has revealed its cost, in the same way that it has done with the musical ‘talent show’ Cover Night.
According to El Confi TV after consulting the Transparency Portal, the budget for the first season of the production, made up of 122 episodes, amounts to 9,753,052 euros. Of this amount, the public entity pays 8,534,095 euros. Therefore, each chapter costs 69,952 euros to RTVE. All these figures do not include VAT.
The weekly investment in the title, with five installments that are issued from Monday to Friday, represents 349,760 euros without VAT. The aforementioned medium points out that it is “almost half of what a chapter of any Spanish ‘prime time’ series costs”.
The contract with the producers of La Promesa has a clause that allows RTVE to change its broadcast time and day, or even cancel it, in certain circumstances. The objective established by the public entity, as explained by El Confi TV, was to achieve a screen share of 8.5%. If the series stayed below this figure for four consecutive weeks, it could eventually disappear from the grid.
It should be noted that fiction has exceeded La 1’s expectations. In January it had an average audience of 909,000 viewers and a 9.1% ‘share’. The numbers have been growing in subsequent months: 9.7% in February (944,000 viewers) and 10.6% in March (1,001,000 viewers). On Wednesday, April 12, it recorded an 11.2% audience share (1,066,000 viewers).
The aforementioned medium points out that the production has become “TVE’s most successful bet this season” and is “the star content on RTVE Play”. If there are no changes, its first number of chapters will end at the end of June, but a renewal is planned that will extend it at least until the end of 2023.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
