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Woman of My Life: The soap opera we had for seven years
What you need to know:
- Woman of My Life introduced the audience to Mario Cimaro and Natalia Streignard, who would later grace the TV sets but on another TV station.
There was a time when local TV was not the home of any sort of drama. For instance, in the 1990s, there were dramas, but many of these were intense with their content. Besides that, many were very Eurocentric, such as Riviera from France or Home and Away from Australia.
It is late 1990s, for instance, 1998, that introduced Ugandans to daily soaps such as The Young and Restless and Sunset Beach. Both on the now defunct Sanyu TV, they started a culture of hooking Ugandans on TV on a daily basis.
And Sunset Beach indeed got Ugandans hooked, notwithstanding the fact that it was mundane; people watched it, and radio presenters often discussed the episodes during shows.
But then we got to 2001. WBS TV had started testing signals in 1998, and they had promised to change the face of Ugandan TV. They launched at the end of 1998, and in the shortest time, they had Uganda paying attention to them.
With shows such as Power Rangers, Ghost Busters, and Transformers, they changed the face of TV, but it was only the beginning.
In 2001, WBS premiered La Mujer de Mi Vida, also known as Woman of My Life, the soap opera from Venezuela, which aired on weekends every Sunday.
The show used the known template of telenovelas: a poor girl falls in love with a rich boy, and everyone is fighting the relationship.
The story was simple: Barbarita Ruiz (Natalia Streignard) is a sweet and modest young woman who works in a fashion boutique in Miami. One day, as part of her job as a seamstress, she goes to the mansion of the rich widow Ricarda Thompson (Anna Silvetti) to do a dress fitting for her.
There, she meets her older son Valentino, a single and dishonest man who is always used to getting what he wants. On seeing Barbarita, he is captivated by her beauty and plans on seducing her. But, after spending time with her and getting to know her good nature, he falls in love with her, much to the dismay of her mother, who is opposed to the relationship and who goes to great lengths in order to separate the two.
The show aired once every week; thus, by the end of the month, only four episodes would have screened; this meant that the show ended up staying on air longer than most of such shows are meant to be on air.
The show started in 2001 and ended in 2007. Between that time, WBS introduced and dumped TV shows, from Power Rangers, Sinbad Show, to No Where Man. Things came, but Sunday at 8 pm was a constant fixture.
Woman of My Life introduced the audience to Mario Cimaro and Natalia Streignard, who would later grace the TV sets but on another TV station, Mario on El Cuepo Del Deseo as Salvador and Natalia as Maria Theresa in La Tormenta, both on NTV.
But it is hard to know if novelas would have gained such traction if Woman of My Life had not had the audience in a chokehold for seven years. The fact that two of the most successful novelas after Woman of My Life still had their leads in Mario and Natalia also speaks volumes.
Woman of My Life was not the best show to come out of Venezuela, Mexico, or even the entire Telemundo catalogue, but it is the show that stayed with many TV enthusiasts that they started comparing everything to it. Unknowingly, the show set the tone of all the Latino dramas that Ugandan TVs acquired after that.
Later in the years, programmers opted for shows between underdogs and the big, bad rich people against them, and it worked every time.
Well, it did work until someone decided to bring the whole Telemundo and added it to their pay TV offering, but that is a story for another day.
