Notes on Prison Saga El Marginal: New Alliances and Transformations in the Argentine Serial Narrative

SORIA, CAROLINA

Crisis TV: Hispanic Television Narratives after 2008

SUNY (The State University of New York)

Año: 2023;

El Marginal (2016) stormed through Argentine television in a way that was as powerful as it was unexpected, quickly becoming an undisputed success. The story — whose narrative universe centers on a Buenos Aires prison — was created by Sebastián Ortega and Adrián Caetano, directed by Luis Ortega, Javier Pérez and Alejandro Ciancio and produced by Underground. Five years after its premiere, the launch of the fourth season is scheduled for mid-2021. Initially conceived as a project of thirty episodes of less than half an hour each, it became a series of thirteen one-hour chapters, a more convenient format for exportation to other audiovisual markets. The series premiered on Televisión Pública on June 2, 2016. It was clear from the critics and the high audience ratings that the first season had been exceptionally well received, which immediately opened new paths for the show´s creators. El Marginal´s notoriety made it possible for the series to be shown in alternative exhibition spaces other than the traditional television screen. That allowed the story to transcend Argentine borders, which decisively influenced the expansion of the narrative universe of the series.This work aims to reconstruct the aspects that determined the creation of this prison saga, taking into account both production, exhibition, audience reception, and the narrative scheme of each new season. I argue that the alliance between television and streaming platforms is an effective framework of the audiovisual industry in which production and exhibition are fruitfully determined by each other. Furthermore, the global notoriety achieved by El Marginal when it became available on Netflix from 2016 until the present day demanded the creation of the following seasons, which explore the temporal dimension that allows the incorporation of new narrative lines, points of view, and character development. To this end, I will outline, on the one hand, some questions related to the spatial construction of fiction: the prison is conceived as a stratified and delimited space in which new forms of sociability and mercantile relations are woven. The prisoners move between spheres establishing different pacts of power and alliances of interests that individualize the characters and function as the engine of the various plots. On the other hand, I will address the construction of temporality in each season, one of the structural dimensions that best manages to adapt to the demands of the market and the needs of the public.