two decades of success with the most stable audiences on television

The same week in April 2006 that La Sexta premiered broadcasts, ‘El Intermedio’ began its career as one of the channel’s flagship programs and Antena 3 launched the current stage of ‘La roulette de laluck’. Two decades later, both programs celebrate their anniversary (one with special panels, the other with Pedro Sánchez wearing borrowed suspenders) and stand out as true anomalies on a grid in eternal motion.

The luck of roulette. ‘The roulette of luck’, a word guessing contest broadcast at two in the afternoon, manages to almost double the share of its own network. In the 2025-2026 season The program presented by Jorge Fernández registers a 21.6% screen share, with an average of 1,564,000 viewers and more than 3.1 million unique viewers. Antena 3, as a network, has averaged 12.4% of share. Its main rivals in that range, ‘Mañaneros 360’, is around 12%, and ‘El Precio Justo’ is timidly approaching 9%. It is not punctual: the format has four consecutive years above 20% and maintains a uninterrupted monthly leadership since May 2020.

Poor beginnings. When the current stage of the contest started in 2006, it returned to the small screen with a 26.9% share and 1,318,000 viewers: promising figures that deteriorated in the following years. However, its number of viewers skyrocketed when it began to occupy the 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. slot that ‘The Simpsons’ had until then had, where television consumption is significantly higher. Curiously, ‘La roulette’ has seen its viewer base decrease since the 2020/2021 season, but the share has gone up. The explanation is that linear television as a whole loses audience, but ‘La roulette’ loses it less than its rivals.

Not just business days. The robustness of the format also extends to weekends. Since 2020, Antena 3 has been broadcasting reruns of the contest on Saturdays and Sundays, and the program also leads in that slot: in the current season it reaches a 17.8% share and 1,258,000 viewers. All for a proposal that, born in the United States, has had some 60 international versions since 1975, and that arrived in Spain in 1990 with the birth of Antena 3, living a brief stage in Telecinco between 1993 and 1997 and a subsequent hiatus until Jorge Fernández took over the baton in his current stage.

The ‘El Intermedio’ case. The satirical news program draws a different, but equally striking curve. In 2026, it averages about 848,000 viewers and reaches between 6% and 7% share (common data in the modest Access Prime Time of La Sexta). All this with specific increases such as the 20th anniversary special broadcast last Thursday, April 16, with which it scored its best quota since February 2022 (10.2%), in an unusually long delivery of more than two hours, and which brought together active politicians (several ministers, Gabriel Rufián or Pedro Sánchez himself) and musicians such as Kiko Veneno, Ana Belén and Víctor Manuel.

A complicated hour. ‘El Intermedio’, unlike ‘La roulette’, has never moved from its original space, perhaps the most hostile strip of the entire schedule: the moment in which the viewer chooses where to spend the night. It has ‘El Hormiguero’ on Antena 3 and ‘La Revuelta’ on La 1 as its last direct competitors, but Wyoming has been resisting for two decades. According to a analysis of Barlovento Comunicaciónin 2012 La Sexta designed a strategic positioning of “vertical programming” focused on political and social news. The programs created then (‘The Intermediate’, ‘Al Rojo Vivo’, ‘Better Late’ or ‘Saved’) had the objective of providing street-level information about current events.

The Atresmedia umbrella. The two programs share something more than the year of birth: both are from Atresmedia, and both operate in time slots where at least part of the competition cannot find alternatives. In the case of ‘El Intermedio’, the Wyoning program has seen in these twenty years how ‘El Hormiguero’ went from competitor to ally‘First Dates’ on Cuatro took shape as a more stable competitor during the last decade and finally, ‘La revuelta’ appeared, which notably politicized the strip.

The numbers. Atresmedia closed 2025 with revenue of 1,002 million euros and maintained its hegemony on television for the fourth consecutive year, with a screen share of 26.1% and a historical advantage of 1.7 points about Mediaset. Antena 3 was once again the most watched channel of the year. These two anniversaries are indicators that the strategy of cheap programs, with rigid structures and a loyal audience continues to be profitable. ‘La roulette’ produces five days a week with a small team and ‘El Intermedio’ works with daily news as raw material, which reduces content development costs. And two decades of holding on.

In Xataka | The “audience war” with ‘La Revuelta’ has been very good for ‘El Hormiguero’. Eight million euros of good