Speaking Young Latinos' Language

Q&A With Si TV SVP Maria Perez-Brown

by Laura Martinez -- Multichannel News, 1/20/2010 7:20:00 PM

Maria Perez-Brown knows a thing or two about TV programming targeting Latinos. Before joining Si­ TV two and a half years ago as senior vice president of programming, the Puerto Rico native had developed several drama and sitcom scripts for Touchstone Television and Nickelodeon, including award-winning Taina, a live-action comedy series about a 15-year-old Latina caught in between two cultures. As Si­ TV this month premiered Latino 101, an original series profiling Latino life in America with an irreverent twist, Hispanic TV Update spoke with Perez-Brown, who reflected about Latino stereotypes, Don Francisco and the humor gap that exists between Spanish- and English-dominant Latinos. An edited excerpt follows:

 


MPB: The show was actually brought to us by a couple of writers, Jason Nieves and Keu Reyes, who came to us to pitch a bunch of ideas and the one that resonated with us was Latino 101. It is a comedy show featuring commentary by Latino comedians about Latino topics. The whole show is modeled like a classroom: It's sort of like going to college to learn everything about Latino culture. So you'll learn a lot about Latinos' take on history, politics, art or popular culture -- with a humorous twist.

The show is not hosted: a narrator introduces the subject matter, welcomes you to "the class" and then you see a bunch of comics making their commentary about one particular subject. All of this happens while in the background you get a lot of graphics, and pictures.

 

MCN: You have described this show as an "outrageously funny experiment in programming." Why?

MPB: [Laughs] Well, I guess that is really what it is. I mean, it is really a departure from what we do. Most of our shows are scripted, but Latino 101 is a mix of both scripted and unscripted material. We have a script that the comedians follow, but then we allow them to go back to the set, without the script, and improvise. I can tell you that half the time the non-scripted stuff was hilarious.

 

MCN: You have only aired two episodes so far ... but can you give us an idea as to what kind of feedback you've received so far?

MPB: We do our own internal, not-very-scientific focus groups, because a lot of people that work on our network are actually the same people who watch our network: They are very young; they are our own demographic. So basically, we test our own people and we've found out the sensibility is right, the jokes are playing, everybody's laughing and they enjoy the work that has been done. Especially when they are sort of edgy or unapologetic or may be a commentary on what could be a stereotype about Latinos, we want these comedians to be able to hit it head-on and to address it.

 

MCN: How do you go about dealing with stereotypes?

MPB: You can make a statement about what Latinos wear: for example, that Latinos in the Bronx wear stretch pants. I would tell you, 'cause I ride the train, that it's true! Of course you don't want to make that the rule about all Latinos in the world, but if you have a comedian who can talk from his or her own experience and say: "My sister is 300 pounds and wears stretch pants," that is a very different joke because it's telling this from his experience. I'm very careful about those sort of things. As a network you have the responsibility as what you're putting on the air. But at the same time you want to give your writers creative freedom.

 

MCN: Would you say the humor -- and jokes -- targeting Latinos in English-language TV are different from what you see on Spanish-language TV?

MPB: I am very well aware of programming for Spanish-language TV, but what we do here targets a younger generation; we are more 'Americanized' Latino programming. When I look at comedy in, say, Univision or Telemundo, it's comedy that -- to me -- it's like it's 1950s all over again. I watch my mother watching [Univision's] Don Francisco and I cringe! I can't believe you sit here for these many hours to watch this. Then she'd go: "¡Mira, mira! Someone falls down!" I mean, someone comes out, gets hit with a chicken on the head and falls down, and then everybody cracks up in my house, and I wonder: what is going on here?

But it is when I see my mom enjoying that type of comedy that I realize how interesting this multigenerational difference is in comedy. Our young comedians, for instance, can talk about their parents watching Don Francisco and how he has [in his shows] all these half naked running around. We can make fun of ourselves and we can make commentary on Spanish-language television.

 

MCN: What's the Latino 101 take on Spanish-language television?

MPB: One of our comedians, Judy Reyes, makes this hilarious take about Spanish-language newscasters. She talks about how dramatic everything is, even the news. At one point, she says: "First of all, your boobs have to be very big," and then she grabs her boobs and talks about some tragedy out there, showing lots of dead bodies. Again: the news sensibility is very different in American television. If you are a Latino growing up in America, watching NBC news, chances are you have not been exposed to that kind of television.

 

MCN: I see networks like yours that continue to push the envelope to produce nontraditional programming for Latinos. Yet, most of the advertising dollars still go to telenovelas and Spanish-only TV. How would you change this?

MPB: Well, that's a daily struggle for us. We want our advertising dollars to increase, to prove that our audience is extremely lucrative, that they have high household incomes. But whenever we confront advertisers, we give them our data, they say: "OK, but we're going to make our buy with Spanish-language TV because it delivers better value, etc."

The problem is: We are caught between the advertising world in the traditional sense, where they say, "Well, if you Latinos speak English, then you're going to be watching ABC anyway so I reach you through those networks. And if you speak Spanish then we'll spend our money over at Univision or Telemundo."

 

MCN: Do you think or hope the 2010 Census will change this?

MPB: I am hoping the Census is going to prove that the largest and the fastest-growing number of Latinos in this country speak English and want to consume their media in English. That's a very subtle point but I want to make it. And I speak Spanish, but I watch ABC, NBC, Si­ TV, anything that has me reflected in it. It has nothing to do with language but preference in how you consume your media.

 

MCN: What would you say is this year's No. 1 challenge for Si­ TV?

MPB: The biggest challenge is really advertisers' understanding that we are a very lucrative and viable market for them and spending more ad dollars on us. Because the more ad dollars we get, the more programming we can produce. When you are a small network, you need to make choices regarding how you allocate your budget.

 

MCN: As a Puerto Rico native in her early 40s, who consumes media in English and Spanish, what's your favorite TV show?

MPB: No one had ever asked me that before. But I would have to say I really, really like Ugly Betty, because it's a light comedy, but it is also smart. Of course I also like Desperate Housewives and one of my favorite guilty pleasures is to watch anything on HBO and Showtime. I like what these networks do with their programming; they have a way of carving universes in ways we've never seen before.