Before the broadcast of the ending of Tell Me How It Happened, a fan theory was that the Alcántaras would say goodbye on September 13, 2001 with the premiere of Tell Me How It Happened. The meta always has followers and the fact that Carlitos was a writer and the narrator of the series led one to think that this conclusion was plausible. That’s how it went. In the last shot, the brothers walked in front of a television store where the series began. As if the scriptwriters of Amar es para siempre had been taking notes, the residents of Chamberí opted for the same outcome.
Marce (Manu Baqueiro) and Manolita (Itziar Miranda), who imagined themselves alone in the neighborhood after Pelayo’s (José Antonio Sayagués) decision to retire and spend El Asturiano, discovered that they would not be left alone. They had the support of their children who, instead of going off to discover the world, chose to put down roots with their parents when they needed them. And, with the excuse that Leonor (Natalia Rodríguez) had written a novel about her family, the neighbors gathered at the Gómez bar a year later to watch the television adaptation on an afternoon in 1983.
As if the viewer could overlook the parallels between fiction (as a television work) and fiction (as the story that is told through the television), the characters dropped a multitude of comments: that “it may last many chapters,” that “I predict a lot of success for this series”, that “it will be broadcast for many years”… And, to excite the viewer, a reflection was dropped on the essence of Amar es para siempre.
“I just hope that they honor our story, which in the end is the story of many families,” Leonor said to which her mother responded: “Note that I only hope that it reflects the love we have for each other, a love that will be for always”. A note, by the way, that puts on the table the extent to which Spanish television networks have a centralist mentality similar to that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso when she said “Madrid is Spain within Spain.” What happens in the capital is taken as universal when the State is not uniform even though it has a uniformizing instinct, especially with respect to dissident national identities.
It was not a particularly personal, climatic or original ending (we had just seen it in Cuéntame!) for a fictional universe that began in September 2005 on La1 as Amar en tiempo revueltos, created by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Antonio Onetti and Rodolf Sirera, and which in 2013 underwent a change of network and name when it moved to Antena 3 with the title Amar es para siempre. A total of 19 seasons and 4,536 episodes that, in parallel to the Alcántara, tried to take advantage of the social changes in Spain (passing through Madrid, like all the infrastructures of the State) to promote their plots and, at the same time, become a constant for the present society.
In these almost two decades that it has been on broadcast, it has lived and been part of a paradigm shift in free-to-air television. It began in a panorama where, when talking about series, people thought of primetime productions such as Aída, which had more than five million viewers, or Here there is no one who lives, which that year could reach seven million with some episodes. The two million that Amar averaged in troubled times, in its first season that began with the outbreak of the Civil War, paled in comparison.
With the farewell of Amar es para siempre, the sequel that continued the plots, the idea of ??an afternoon series has been revalued, not only because of its audience loyalty but also because of the lesser erosion of its audience as a fiction format. The majority of primetime proposals have to settle for data below two million: you only have to see Cristo y Rey, which averaged 1.1 million, while Amar es para siempre obtained a similar data in the afternoon.
With afternoon series that coexisted with the Amar brand such as El secreto de Puente Viejo, Acacias 38 or Serve and Protect, it turned the format into a safe value for the networks and a companion for the public. Atresmedia, furthermore, is not lame. The maneuver of introducing Dreams of Freedom in the afternoons of its main channel has been more than fruitful: this Monday it gathered almost 1.5 million viewers and took 14.8% of the screen share. There is relief.
