McCabe cited some seminal shows that followed the traditional unfurling. "Yo soy Betty, La Fea (1999) is the classic ugly duckling story. La Usurpadora (1998) is about twins separated at birth who meet (unknowingly) as adults; one is rich and evil, Paola, and other poor and good, Paulina. Then there's the modern Amigas y Rivales (2001), with a rich kids’ theme, complete with maid!"Carla Estrada, one of the foremost and most celebrated producers of the genre, told the BBC that the script and plot line is crucial. "You need suspense, emotion, love and logic, in order to carry the story through 190 episodes."It's easy to compare the telenovela to the American soap opera as a kind of mind-numbing escapism exercise, however, as many academics in the 1980s would later contest, the telenovela became a shiny and idiosyncratic emblem of native and domestic programming, clearly impacting and reflecting Latin America's cultural landscape.Come the early 1990s, Soviet broadcasters were buying shows like Mexico's También Lloran (The Rich Also Cry), starring Verónica Castro and Rogelio Guerra – a show from the late 1970s. Roughly 200million Russians tuned in to watch the finale . McCabe would argue a smooth adoption in countries like Russia is largely down to a shared "wealth divide between rich and poor, between rulers and the ruled, and a shared experience of established religious and familial structures. in Eastern Europe, the genre has been used to negotiate the shift from a communist to post-communist world."Evidently, their appeal is still such, that in 2015, Netflix made the smart decision to bring Telenovela to a Western mainstream audience by buying 20 of Latin America's most popular Telenovela shows, including the 2010 series, Las Muñecas de la Mafia (basically Mob Wives) and Para Volver a Amar (think SATC).Telenovela, much like soap operas in the UK, while generating lots of interest, divides audiences and can often come under charges of trashiness, sentimentality and just sheer outlandishness. Sure that to dismiss the genre based on its tendencies towards hyperbole was unfair, we decided to speak to a cross-section of Latin Americans about the televisual novel and why they love it so much.Filipa Corvacho, a Portuguese 26-year-old Graphic Designer living in East London, explained how essential the programmes had been to her formative years. "Since I can remember, I have always watched Brazilian telenovelas. Since the age of five, I have watched three shows a day. We have Portuguese telenovelas as well but I was always into the Brazilian ones."