Carta a Eva Remediation and Transnational Quality TV

This chapter focuses on Carta a Eva (TVE1 2012), a miniseries directed by the established cinematic director Agustí Villaronga. Despite a large and increasing corpus of works dedicated to the evaluation of films and television that focus on the Civil War and Francoism, as far as we are aware, this production has received little scholarly attention. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which it forms part of a resurgence of the miniseries, which explore recent periods in Spain’s history. However, unlike other similar productions, it centres gender as a key mediator of this national history. We situate this melodrama in a specific cultural context in which the debates surrounding Spain’s memory of this period were central to political and mediatised debates and the industrial context of Spanish TV funding was altered by legislative change. Like Chap. 5 , the series exploits the rich archive of Noticiarios y Documentales (News and Documentaries) available to RTVE to hybridise fact and fiction as well as history and memory in the drama. High production values and well-known actors signal a cinematic heritage that, along with our historical knowledge of the main characters, remediates both history and memory through a female lens. This form and the remediation enable a revaluation of the previously masculine assumptions that framed Quality TV.