"All of our producers and directors are focused on this," McNamara said. "Honestly, it's an obsession with me."
He likens the situation to Americans trying to watch British television shows, such as "The Office" or "Are You Being Served?" and wrestling with various U.K. accents. Likewise, U.S. local news anchors speak in an accent-neutral manner to appeal to as many viewers as possible, knowing that some may switch off a newscaster who has a Cajun, Brooklyn or Boston Back Bay accent.
Telemundo's president, James M. McNamara, says embracing the Mexican dialect is good business.
(Damian Dovarganes -- AP)
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At its Miami area headquarters, Telemundo employs veteran Mexican actress and producer Adriana Barraza, who drills the network's actors on accent. She focuses on an accent's "melody," attempting to make it "musically flat," she explained in an e-mail translated into English by Telemundo staff. Then, she tries to standardize the way actors pronounce their vowels and consonants, which vary from country to country.
For example, in Argentina, "pollo," Spanish for "chicken," is pronounced "pojz-joh," where in Cuba it sounds like "po-eeoh." Barraza tries to get everyone to say the universally understood "poh-yoh." Argentine and Uruguayan accents are the hardest to flatten, she said. But an apt student from any country can make the transition to Mexican-neutral in 15 days.
Her first job, however, is to mentally prepare the actor for the training.
"The feeling of losing your identity . . . the fear of ridicule and mockery . . . the feeling of being an impostor by taking an accent that is not theirs by birth" are the toughest hurdles to overcome, she wrote. Some of her students never master the skill and end up "only able to work in their [home] country or [they] completely disappeared from Mexico's acting scene," she wrote.
For McNamara, who was born in Panama, the son of a Defense Department contractor, embracing the Mexican dialect is good business. About 80 percent of Telemundo's potential audience -- households whose viewing habits are monitored by Nielsen -- is Mexican.
Telemundo needs any advantage it can devise against Univision, a titan whose reach over its potential audience is so great its analogue does not exist in American English-speaking media.
Telemundo is the nation's No. 2 Spanish-language network. It is dwarfed by Univision, which owns 25 full- and low-power television stations and has 56 broadcast affiliates, reaching 98 percent of Spanish-speaking households. Univision also owns the TeleFutura broadcast network (which is nipping at Telemundo's heels) and Galavision cable network, 68 U.S. radio stations, a music company whose artists constitute more than 40 percent of all Latin acts on the charts, and the most popular Spanish-language Web site.
By comparison, Telemundo owns 24 full- and low-power television stations and has 32 affiliates, reaching 91 percent of U.S. Spanish-speaking households. But in cities where Univision and Telemundo stations go head to head, Univision stations dominate. For instance, all of the top 20 Spanish-language television programs during the week of July 25 aired on Univision, according to Nielsen Media Research. Telemundo's highest-rated show checked in at No. 26.
