Everyone in their own place, in the "Spain is doing well" sidebar, an approach to the ideological aspects of the TV series "Médico de familia" (Family Doctor).

Abstract

A new character has been included in the series Kft Family, which has been a great success on Hungarian television this season, at the initiative of the Ministry of Defence. This is a military officer whose role is, with the help of the dialogue provided for this purpose in the script, to praise the merits of Hungary's accession to NATO. This case may seem an anecdote, but it illustrates perfectly how television fiction, because of the large audiences it reaches, is used more or less explicitly to generate a consensus among viewers around postulates that are desirable for those who control the audiovisual media.

In the Spanish case, where private television channels have been fully established since the beginning of the decade and are the ones with the largest and most successful fiction offer, the presence of governmental campaigns is less evident. However, the logic of the market prevails and it is the advertisers and sponsors of the programmes who breathe into fiction their vision of a society in which citizens become consumers.

The Spanish report recently presented at the annual meeting of the Eurofiction observatory states that, during 1996, Spanish television broadcasters broadcast 459 hours of fiction, 62 percent of which were series, with family comedy predominating (16 titles, 66 percent of the fiction broadcast) as opposed to drama (6 titles, 34 percent of the fiction broadcast).

According to the report, the common characteristics of all these series are their family, intergenerational and interclass vocation, their non-confrontational treatment of social issues, their urban setting and the fact that most of them revolve around a famous character. The most obvious example of this type of series is Médico de familia.