Spanish TV - What We Watch on The TV Nowadays?

Looking at what people watch on TV may say a lot of about a culture. What do Spaniards watch on the TV?

If you look at the audience results of TV programs there is something that will win for sure: football. Specially when Real Madrid or Barcelona are one of the teams playing, football will be the topic in next day's break at work.

If there is not football, the news are usually the winner. The news in Spain usually informs about the same everyday (I sometimes wonder why we call them the news instead of the everyday stories): The Catalan independence fight, some accidents or natural disasters, a politician saying something stupid and sports... I mean football. Yes, in Spanish news it is very unlikely that you will see a single news about any sport that is not football.

Another succesful program is talk show called El Hormiguero (Ant's nest). However, it seems Spaniards weren't willing to listen to the interviews and now it has develope into a kind of show with a guest doing different games. It also has a section with science experiments. I have to say the program is engaging, and is the only TV show in which you can see international stars as guests, like Will Smith, from time to time.

Then we have the Quizzes. These programs with questions and answers that have different formats but in the end they are all the same. As curiosity, Spain has some kind of professional contestants and you are likely to see the same person in one contest and then in other winning prizes.The audience likes to watch a known face and the performance of this people is usually so great that they always beat their opposition.

For example, now there is a program called Boom in which two teams of four people play against each other. One of the teams has four contestants that already played individually in another classic contest. They are very good and this next morning they will be playing and likely winning for their 400th program in a row, having won prizes for more than 2 millions euros. If one day these guys loose or win the jackpot in which case they would need to leave the show, I am sure the audience of the show would go down.

Between TV series, the ones with most followers are The Simpsons and Big Bang Theory. You have them almost all the time in one of the many channels available and they always have good audience results.