In 2022, the name of Alba Carrillo evoked sofas on sets, Telecinco scandals and pink chronicles in their purest form. Three years later, left-wing media calls her “president” half seriously and half jokingTVE calls her to order for defending taxes and she responds by abandoning the program in which she collaborates directly. Something has happened between ‘Supermodel’ and the Faculty of Philology, and it is not just the maturity that comes with age.
Ghost in the machine. Alba Carrillo made her television debut in 2007 in the ‘Supermodelo’ contest, broadcast on Cuatro when the network was not yet part of Mediaset. I was twenty years old and studying Advertising and Public Relations at the Complutense University. From there came a progressive integration into the Mediaset ecosystem: collaborations in ‘Sálvame’, ‘It’s already midday’, ‘Viva la vida’ and a contestant in ‘Survivientes’, ‘Big Brother VIP’ or ‘Bake Off Famosos’. Carrillo was perfect for the pink world because of her personal background (divorced from former tennis player Feliciano López, mother of Fonsi Nieto’s son) and because of her foul-mouthed and confrontational attitude.
During those fifteen years he also studied Criminology and began to forge a relationship with reading that she herself describes as constitutivebut none of that interfered with her image as a more or less traditional collaborator.
Love is over. The mechanism broke in December 2022, at the Christmas party of Unicorn Content, Ana Rosa Quintana’s production company. Carrillo acknowledged having had an affair with another collaborator of the production company Jorge Pérez, something he denied. Mediaset decided to support Pérez’s version and dispense with Carrillo’s collaboration in all his programs. The dismissal came in mid-2023 and Carrillo responded with a lawsuit.
The complaint against Mediaset España, Unicorn Content and La Fábrica de la Tele accused them of unfair dismissal and fraud of law (due to how she was hired at the network). The two parts they reached an agreement in December 2023 but in the meantime, Carrillo opened a Twitch channel called ‘The Tea Room’ where, in June 2023, he attacked Ana Rosa Quintana and accused Mediaset of rigging the results of some reality shows in which he participated, such as the seventh edition of ‘GH VIP’. It was the first (but not last) time I experimented with the possibility of speak without filter from a platform that could not fire her.
National signing. Alba Carrillo was banned from television for almost a year until RTVE noticed her and in April 2024 she entered several formats of the public network, such as ‘Bake Off: Famosos al oven’, ‘Mañaneros’ and ‘D Corazón’. The reunion with television coincided with an academic turn that led her to study Hispanic Philology. He completed this post-Mediaset stage by signing for Netflix in June 2025, when the platform premiered the Spanish version of the ‘Playing with fire’ format, in which contestants must give up sex to qualify for 100,000 euros.
Left turn. But the space that has transformed her public image, turning her into a kind of progressive pop diva is another. Since April 13, 2026, he has presented ‘El Sótano Club’ on the TEN channel (the same one that hosted the retreaded version of ‘Sálvame’), from Monday to Friday. The program, a current affairs and humor magazine, has given him a platform from which he has been distilling a political speech increasingly explicitand where it addresses topics such as public health, taxation and the machismo of the extreme right.
vs. Paz Vega. His latest fight was due to the announcement of ‘MasterChef Celebrity Legends’ on RTVE. In one of the installments of his program on TEN, Carrillo questioned the presence in the program of Paz Vega (who has a debt with the Treasury) and the influencer Ofelia Hentschel, who went viral for encouraging not paying taxes during Iran attacks to facilities in Dubai. “There are many who are fraudsters and they hire them to cook on RTVE, which bothers me a lot… This could be expensive for me, but I have to say it,” he came to say in a program on RTVE itself, ‘D Corazón’.
Indeed. RTVE gave her a call to attention and she decided not to present himself to ‘D Corazón’ the following Saturday. Of course, this resignation served to allow the Streissand Effect to do its work and RTVE’s attempt to silence the collaborator had the opposite effect. The video circulated on networks and the progressive media spread it with enthusiasm.
Poor audiences. One problem that Alba Carrillo may have in the face of future successes is that her audience figures are not so spectacular. After a month of broadcast‘El Sótano Club’ accumulates an average of 0.5% screen share and 41,000 viewers (half of TEN’s average), well below the formats that previously occupied that slot. ‘Not even if we were Shhh’, heir to ‘Sálvame’, averaged 2.2% in its two seasons. The maximum for Carrillo’s program came on the day of its premiere: 0.9% and 69,000 viewers, the only day in which it equaled the channel’s average.
The controversies generate specific spikes (attacks on María Patiño, the slamming of the door on ‘D Corazón’), but the effect is short-lived. The channel itself, aware of the problem, cut 45 minutes of duration after the first week and now only broadcasts three and a quarter hours.
Progressive diva. The most interesting thing about the Carrillo phenomenon is not so much what he says (which is not so uncommon in Spanish public conversation either) but where he does it from. As Ana Requena Aguilar points outin recent years Carrillo has become a progressive voice that has approached feminist and left-wing discourses, and has used her loudspeaker to spread them without complexes. And at the same time, Carrillo is discredited because she does not completely escape the shadow of the tabloid press, which suffers general contempt for the public with which she is traditionally associated: especially women, older people and middle or lower class.
The audience of the heart, which has never been ideologically neutral (it can reproduce the worst stereotypes about women or convey feminist discourses, depending on who occupies the set, a phenomenon of which Carrillo is the best example), turns out to be a channel for the dissemination of ideas that the media considered “serious” tend to ignore. Carrillo knows this but does not formulate it in those terms: “Sometimes what is done in political journalism is much more shameful than what we do,” he says.
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