This is how the premiere of ‘Rueda la letra’ has been: Telecinco’s prodigal son boldly challenges ‘Pasapalabra’

“The return of the prodigal son home,” announced Carlos Sobera at the beginning of Rueda la letra. Telecinco premiered this Monday the contest created expressly to host El rosco, that television icon that managed to snatch a few months ago from Antena 3. If anyone had any doubt whether the eternal legal dispute around Pasapalabra had any chapters left to come, the host took barely a minute to make it clear that there are quite a few left. “We have the most famous test on television: El rosco, which is now La rueda,” he explained to the viewer. The Basque pronounced the forbidden word (“Rosco”) several times while seemingly staring at the lawyers of the British production company ITV, the company that produces the Antena 3 contest and which, although it cannot use the test, retains the rights to the brand.

Read more La Primitiva: draw on Monday, September 7

Sobera, trained as a lawyer, already hinted at this during the presentation of Rueda la letra last week. These kinds of legal entanglements take a long time to resolve. Even with a possible unfavorable ruling in the future, Telecinco has time to make a few more jumps with its new program.

As if it were a Pasapalabra test, the audience was able this Monday to play at finding the differences between both formats. Almost impossible to detect seven. In Rueda la letra there are two legendary Pasapalabra contestants, Fran and Lilit. Each is accompanied by two famous guests, who sit around Sobera at the same table. Throughout four preliminary tests, they try to accumulate as many seconds as possible for the final test. And we can continue. The same split screen, the same stickers for the guests’ names as those used by the original Pasapalabra, the same camera movements, the same big screen in the background, a set with a color spectrum very similar to that of Antena 3… With so many reasonable similarities, anyone would say that Ana Rosa Quintana — accused of plagiarism in her brief stint as a writer — is also the producer of this show, as she is of almost all those broadcast on Telecinco from early morning until late afternoon.

Rueda la letra arrived on the channel a few minutes after seven in the evening. Jorge Javier Vázquez was saying goodbye to his live vaudeville, El diario de Jorge — it must be recognized that there is no genre that resists the former dictator of Sálvame — celebrating the arrival of Telecinco’s new contest as if Spain had just won another World Cup. We will see if he is right in considering this Monday a historic day for the channel; like that light at the end of a very long and increasingly narrow tunnel to stop so many historic lows in its audience shares.

The celebrities who accompanied Fran and Lilit in their new debut were model Laura Sánchez and actors Iván Sánchez and Miguel Ángel Silvestre. All of them have appeared more than 40 times on Pasapalabra, according to the Internet Movie Database. The quartet was completed by Samantha Vallejo-Nájera, formerly a MasterChef judge, who has frequented the contest much less. It is clear that Mediaset is not afraid of lawsuits nor of memes or the trending topic on social networks.

After accumulating seconds by guessing quotes from illustrious characters (from Albert Einstein to Paco Porras and Aramis Fuster) and playing a musical test with a buzzer that reminds us a bit of something that happens on Antena 3 every afternoon, the contestants faced their real challenge: not saying “pasapalabra” every time they did not know the answer to one of the definitions of La rueda. The initial jackpot of 200,000 euros grew to 206,000 euros, as Fran and Lilit tied with 18 correct answers and neither completed their circle. Meanwhile, Sobera struggled to keep up with the devilish pace of the statements, although this was practically the only moment of his own personality throughout the entire broadcast, distancing himself almost immediately from Roberto Leal’s style.

We will see tomorrow’s ratings. In principle, it seems a good decision that Telecinco has chosen to air Rueda la letra just before Pasapalabra, placing the artist formerly known as El rosco ahead of the Antena 3 contest, which starts at eight in the evening. It tries to provoke viewer fatigue, who may think it makes no sense to watch Pasapalabra if they have already seen El rosco, which until now was its highlight. Besides not facing its enemy head-on, Telecinco’s new program and Sobera choose a much weaker rival —Y ahora, Sonsoles—, which in this first duel counterattacked by airing the supposed last television interview of bullfighter Fran Rivera.

Read more Eurodreams: check Monday, September 7 draw