Cuéntame cómo pasó Popular TV Feminism and Feminist Audiences

This chapter analyses a selection of episodes that foreground gender politics in the domestic space and beyond and centres the transformation of the family as key to an altered conception of gender politics in Spain. Cuéntame cómo pasó (RTVE1 2001–2023) is Spanish television’s longest running and highest rated serial. In 2023, it aired its 22nd and final series. The chapter analyses the ways in which, partly as a consequence of the longevity of the series, what began as a family melodrama is now imbricated in the development of women’s rights in Spain as a result of its place within a rich audiovisual and intermedial archive. Close analysis of the text reveals a preoccupation with the gendered mores of the periods it depicts, while the accompanying material on the TVE website allows the voices of the female actors to mediate and comment on the persistent gendered inequalities witnessed in the 1980s and the present. Following the concepts raised in Chaps. 2 – 4 , we argue for a more nuanced approach to a series that many have dismissed as conservative and politically motivated. We locate emerging feminisms in this series, as they reevaluate historical moments that speak to the present and offer a place for feminism in the domestic and every day, which is key to the national context of TV and history in Spain. We argue that the series deploys recent history to intervene in contemporary debates—enabled now by its transmedia presence—that engage with the complexities of gender politics in the present. If TV is a key educator in Spanish society (as Chap. 4 explores), then this series demonstrates the process of feminist education. Cuéntame is now firmly established as a key cultural mediator of gendered progress and, specifically, of a burgeoning popular feminist discourse on Spanish TV.