On June 23, 2023, Sálvame Telecinco closed. An hour before the end and after various rumors, EL PAÍS announced the news: the Sálvame universe moved to Netflix with a reality show in which eight of its collaborators (Belén Esteban, Terelu Campos, Kiko Matamoros, Lydia Lozano, Chelo García) would appear Cortés, Víctor Sandoval, Kiko Hernández and María Patiño) to Miami and Mexico in search of new work opportunities. This was the result of several weeks of talks between the production company La Fábrica de la Tele and Netflix, an alliance that was formed almost immediately after the announcement of the end of the show on Telecinco.
Now Óscar Cornejo and Adrián Madrid, heads of La Fábrica de la Tele, remember this moment. “Four days after the news broke and two days after it was officially shared with us, we received a call from Netflix letting us know that our doors are open to anything we are considering, regardless of whether it is a project or not, that has to do with Sálvame. “It came to a very delicate moment for us in many ways, especially emotionally,” Óscar Cornejo told EL PAÍS this Friday.
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The idea of removing the collaborators from the controlled environment of the set, outside of the ecosystem that created them as characters, had been on their mind for a long time, but they hadn’t found a way to make it happen. Under the circumstances, it was almost natural for them to do this while looking for work outside Spain. “We take her off the set and away from the country that loves her or hates her, which is the same for us on television,” Cornejo continues.
Adrián Madrid and Óscar Cornejo, responsible for La Fábrica de la Tele, a few days before the Netflix premiere of “Every Man for Himself!” Claudio Alvarez
Netflix wasn’t the only platform that called La Fábrica de la Tele. “There have been several surprise calls this week, but they were all this week, not before. “We feel that from the outside everyone identified us so much with the group and the station and that they saw us so well that no one saw the opportunity to get closer,” says Cornejo. “And we have never bothered to get closer because we were so involved in the Mediaset programming that we were very focused there,” adds Adrián Madrid.
The eight protagonists of Everyone for themselves! – this is the title of the show that emerged from this process and whose first three episodes, set in Miami, will premiere on Netflix on Friday, November 10th at 9:00 p.m.; Three more episodes in Mexico City are reserved for early 2024 – they signed up for this new adventure without hesitation. Cornejo and Madrid recognize that some were afraid to take on the challenge, especially María Patiño. “She had a lot of prejudices about the reality show, she was afraid that it would distort her image as a presenter,” says Adrián Madrid. “He’s a very perfectionist and he told me, ‘I won’t know how to do this,'” recalls Óscar Cornejo. However, upon her return she herself admitted that the experience had been cathartic and healing. In fact, it’s striking how often Patiño gets emotional in the first three episodes.
Kiko Hernández, Lydia Lozano and María Patiño, in the second episode of “Every Man for Himself!”.FELIPE HERNÁNDEZ/NETFLIX
Before you pack your bags: Every man for himself! It involved a lot of work. The trip from Spain had to be prepared with millimeter precision. A production team looked for programs employees could attend and personalities they could meet there. “Our surprise was that they knew her there. Maybe not the viewers, but the television professionals all knew them,” says Cornejo. From there, they started thinking about which employees attended each program and each meeting. “That’s where we started playing what Sálvame has always been, to see what storyline we could put in them and how they would deal with these situations,” the producer continues. Because although there is no script, there is a team of authors behind the program who provoke situations. “Just because the staff is 100% authentic doesn’t mean what happens wasn’t partly prepared by professionals dedicated to entertaining. What is 100% real is their reactions,” says Cornejo.
Chelo García Cortés, Kiko Matamoros, Kiko Hernández, Belén Esteban, Terelu Campos, Víctor Sandoval, María Patiño and Lydia Lozano, the eight employees who travel to Miami in “Every Man for Himself!” FELIPE HERNÁNDEZ/NETFLIX (FELIPE HERNÁNDEZ/NETFLIX )
And so we arrived at the end of July 2023, when a team of 45 people plus eight staff and a total of 86 pieces of luggage set off for America for an 11-day shoot. They traveled more than 19,170 kilometers in four planes and three minibuses. The team occupied four floors of hotels in Miami and Mexico and filmed in 40 different locations with shooting schedules of 14 hours a day. In total, all recordings from this time take up eight terabytes. The 45-person team includes the director (David Valldeperas), assistant directors, cameramen, sound engineers, editors who accompany the collaborators every step of the way and note key moments to facilitate later editing, as well as production staff whose job it is to move on from everything and prepare for the next step… This team also included some of the makeup artists and stylists who had worked with employees at Telecinco for years and had left Mediaset months earlier after the group outsourced those services. .
Belén Esteban, on a beach in Miami in the second episode of “Every Man for Himself!” FELIPE HERNANDEZ/NETFLIX
The result, according to those responsible, is a program in which the participants have freed themselves from the corset of the set. “It was a coexistence in an artificial place, and here are the streets, life itself, the backdrop. It is María Patiño who loses her hotel key seven times in one day. Life creates very Mars-like situations for you, like Terelu, who is distraught at the airport right at the start of the trip and realizes that she hasn’t put her Coke Cao packets in her suitcase. Since there were no loose packets in the airport cafeteria, he spent 35 euros to be able to order all the glasses of milk that corresponded to the consumption of the Cola-Cao packets. A set doesn’t have that, and a screenwriter can’t write it, nobody thinks about it,” says Óscar Cornejo.
These are situations that do not appear in the reality show, nor does the flight, which also produced moments with the crew and other travelers that could have been the stuff of reality. The cameras were constantly recording because “with them you never know when something will spark,” says Adrián Madrid. Once they returned, it was time to select material from all the existing content, a tedious task. At this stage, they considered the audience they wanted to target on Netflix and whether it was the same as the audience they saw in Sálvame. “Will a younger, more mature audience, a new fan audience, see this? That was one of our doubts. You built your relationship with the public on a different program and a different channel, and when you leave, your story is still present. All this influences the choice of material, because the goal of every producer and of Netflix is that it succeeds, but above all that it is understood, entertains, has fun and is not lost,” he says Cornejo.
Óscar Cornejo and Adrián Madrid at the Netflix offices in Madrid. Claudio Alvarez
“I told Adrián that it is like an X-ray of a group of heroes who thought they were defeated, and in this experience they discover that heroes never die. They were immersed in this adventure with a mixture of encouragement, discouragement and relief… And they came back completely renewed, it was cathartic, a turning point,” summarizes Óscar Cornejo. “It’s the most authentic thing the Sálvame universe has had to offer since its arrival on television 14 years ago with a breath of fresh air. It’s a song of freedom, of friendship,” he adds. “For them it was a recognition of all these years of work, at a very sensitive and uncertain time for them. It was a lifesaver,” adds Adrián Madrid. “Netflix made it very easy for us, there were no complaints whatsoever,” adds Madrid. “The freedom with which we worked reminds us of the best days of Mediaset,” adds Cornejo.
Belén Esteban and Terelu Campos, in the second episode of the Netflix reality. FELIPE HERNANDEZ/NETFLIX
Will this new adventure continue after La Fábrica de la Tele and the Sálvame universe have moved beyond Mediaset? “For us, [los colaboradores] They are inexhaustible. This will end the day they want it or the viewers don’t want us or no platform wants to offer them a place. It is an absolutely recognizable group and the idea of belonging to a group has become stronger among them. This strengthens them and gives them incredible strength. If the answer was yes or no…yes,” Cornejo says. “More than a job, with this program they are looking for a way out of their professional future and I think they have found it here. And that is why there will be more travel,” he adds.
Could Jorge Javier Vázquez, host of Sálvame, have a place in this continuity plan for the future? Cornejo and Madrid are silent for five seconds. “We won’t comment,” they say.
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