Premiering a daily series is possibly one of the biggest challenges for a television channel, especially in these times of television fragmentation. It involves hiring hundreds of people, high production costs and, in addition, trusting them with a portion of the programming from Monday to Friday. If the operation works, the channel can toast without skimping on the cava: it has a way of building audience loyalty every afternoon. And, in the case of Dreams of Freedom, at Atresmedia they can uncork sparkling wines because the series is being a double success.
The directors placed the first episode in primetime on Antena 3 on Sunday to ensure that it had exposure and, with luck, draw the audience to its after-dinner broadcast the following day. As we mentioned, Rtve had a counterprogramming maneuver with the broadcast of two episodes of The Promise that same night. Dreams of freedom won: it gained 1.8 million viewers and a 12.8% screen share, ahead of the La1 episodes, which gathered 1.2 million and 1.3 million and 8.7% and 11.2% respectively.
That was, as we said, a first round. Then it was time to show that the public enjoyed the letter of introduction of the De la Reina family, the owners of a perfumery company who in the 1950s ran the local economy with their industrial colony, and gave it a chance in its daily broadcast. On its first Monday, with 1.5 million viewers and 14.9%, it had the best audience figure of all the afternoon series and helped Amar es para siempre to have growth, which maintained 1.2 million and a 13.6%.
The results are understandable when seeing these initial chapters with Alain Hernández, Natalia Sánchez, Dani Tatay, Nancho Novo and Ana Fernández in the main roles. The parameters of good after-dinner fiction are not exactly the same as those of primetime. The writing and production times are more limited, the plot and character maps have to be very choral to ensure that there are plots and dynamics to exploit for five hours a week, and the plot demands are also different due to the viewer profile and its consumption habits.
In this sense, Dreams of Freedom does not reinvent the wheel of the soap opera. It presents the Queen’s people, marked by the quarrels between brothers (or, rather, by the Queen’s Jesus played by Alain Hernández, who is an evil bastard) and by the arrival of a daughter-in-law who is more modern than would be best for them. a good family like this.
There are the workers, among them the colony’s new doctor, who is discarded because of her sex in the job interview but who proves her worth when there is an accident at the factory. And, if there weren’t enough incentives, the first scene of the first episode showed the villain pointing his shotgun at his wife, his daughter, and his brother. How does he get there? We will have to see it.
The first episode, as the tradition of the format dictates, highlighted the plots that we can see: reckless romantic tensions, children capable of killing their parents, family secrets that can affect the present, a lesbian plot in homophobic times and, well, a look in a feminist key from past times. Just in case someone missed the nuances, the characters loudly proclaimed any kinship relationship or sexist reasoning, that the after-dinner meal is not designed for subtlety.
But, understanding the strip, Dreams of Freedom moves with sympathy through these common places and recognizable plots of the period: the scriptwriters and directors detonate the drama, anticipate the tragedy, but intersperse the story with light scenes and the necessary routine so as not to exhaust it. to the viewer. It emerges victorious where The Moderna, with which it competes for a few minutes, failed in its letter of introduction, with an essence so sweetened that it was even indigestible.
And, with Alain Hernández as the villain of the show (hating Jesús de la Reina will be a duty), Marta Belmonte with her affected sympathy or Ana Fernández who transmits decades of suffering, the script coordinator Eulàlia Carrillo has interpretive pillars that understand its characters and the format from the beginning and on which to build a drama that aims to produce hundreds of episodes. The main challenge he will have will be to give personality to a story on afternoon television where the times have become predictable.
