Assuming you have cable, Hulu, Roku, Apple TV or any other streaming services out there, you may have heard of a little show on ABC called ‘Cristela‘. If you don’t know about it, this should catch you up:
http://en.emedemujer.com/trending/entertainment/cristela-alonzo-rise-ambitious-latina-roles/
So what’s the big deal? Did you read the article?! ‘Cristela’ is going down in TV history as the first major network show to be created, produced, written and starring a Latina actress. Those are a lot of titles for one person! Add to that the fact that the writing team was comprised solely of Latino talent, and I’m sure you can deduce just what makes the creation, and now cancellation, of this show such a significant piece of entertainment industry history.
Before I go any further, I will go ahead and say that ‘Cristela’ did not resonate with me at all, so the cancellation doesn’t come as a total surprise.
But just because the humor didn’t land on me doesn’t mean it didn’t tickle the funny bones of millions of others (it did) or that I don’t have a great deal of respect for the show. Cristela Alonzo has done something no one else has! The show is a HUGE positive step in adding diversity to the talent both on-camera and behind the scenes, and the fact that the show got cancelled doesn’t negate its importance and relevance to our modern culture. But Tinseltown is judgemental and slow to change, and I would hate for networks and producers to adopt the attitude of ‘this show didn’t get as many views as we’d like, therefore we won’t invest in any more Latino-centered shows for a while’. Latino viewers are some of the largest consumers of media in the U.S. and we need more of ‘us’ on the screen to represent how things actually are out in the real world. Hopefully with the growing success of this season’s ‘Jane the Virgin‘, Cristela and her writing team will be able to go on to create something new, perhaps in a more forgiving format.
