Spain kneels before ‘The one that is coming’ with a channel that broadcasts the series all day almost non-stop

Spain loves ‘The one that is coming‘. We can turn our noses up all we want, but the success of a series that is about to premiere its 16th season, tirelessly satirizing the behavior of the average Spaniard, should not go unnoticed by anyone even remotely interested in the curious evolutions of popular culture. This tweet from @casasola_89 corroborates it: Fiction Factory has practically become a monographic channel for the series. With more than stable audiences.

The monographic channel. Fiction Factory broadcast 3,735 hours of ‘The one that is coming’ in 2021 alone, a figure that is equivalent to more than 700 chapters. The trend has gone further and has ended up transforming Mediaset’s thematic channel into a practically monothematic platform, although it is accompanied by films that have already made the corresponding rounds on Telecinco, Cuatro and other DTT channels of the house, as well as some other successful series in the mornings, such as ‘Aida’.

But how much do they emit? Any day of the week (regardless of whether it is Tuesday or Sunday), ‘La que se cerca’ starts its broadcasts late in the morning, around one o’clock. From that hour until well into the prime timewhere a movie is broadcast around eleven at night, we have episodes non-stop. And after the cinema it resumes: between specific betting programs and horoscopes, which barely take a total of half an hour off the grill, the entire early morning once again belongs to the residents of Montepinar, until the telesales at six thirty in the morning.

Spain is doing well. This strategy was initially a resounding success: in September 2011, the series’ specials reached quotas of between 7-11% of screen share, allowing FDF beat your all-time record with a 4.5% monthly average, its maximum to date, in August 2014. Laura Caballero, co-creator of the fiction, recognized this symbiosis years ago: “It has been very good to re-air the series. Those who did not want to see it have seen it almost out of obligation. This has given it its own series identity and so that it does not seem like a copy”, referring to the change from ‘No one lives here’ to ‘The one that is coming’.

Neighborhood saturation. This triumph could not last forever: the omnipresence on the FDF grid of ‘La que se cerca’ generated a paradoxical effect. The increase in broadcast hours, going from 2,909 in 2019 to 3,735 in 2021, led to a drop in audience: from 3.1% and 322,000 viewers in 2019 to 2.5% and 243,000 viewers in 2021, as El Español pointed out. This erosion contributed to FDF losing the annual leadership among thematic channels in 2021 in favor of Nova, after a decade as the most watched channel on DTT, averaging a 2.4% audience share. However, in 2024 FDF has recovered ground with 2.6%, surpassing Energy (2.4%) and leading again among DTT themes. And since 2018 (which is said soon: seven years), its audiences are stable.

The one that comes 24/7. Why then does this continue to broadcast ‘The one that is coming’, why doesn’t FDF try other options to recover that 4.5% of share that he had. Very simple: the rebroadcasts of ‘The one that is coming’ never cease to interest the least, the new seasons on Prime Video (where it’s going great) and Telecinco provide FDF with occasional audience boosts and the transformation of “Canal para las Ficciones de Mediaset” into “Canal La que se cerca” is an identity seal that suits the platform. Make no mistake: this series will outlive us all.

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