Valeria and female leadership in serialized fiction

Abstract

The production of Spanish fiction series has been strengthened in recent decades and has recently been boosted by the establishment in Madrid of Netflix's European operations center. In this moment of boom, we examine the participation of female professionals in the audiovisual sector, where we start from data that reveal the masculinization of most of the teams. We go through the Netflix catalog and find that only 5 of the 34 series produced in Spain until 2022 have an exclusively female leadership. Valeria stands out among them, where the presence of women is the majority, also in positions of responsibility. Therefore, we turned this fiction into our case study and covered the three seasons broadcast from May 2020 to June 2023. We pay attention to the plots, conflicts and character construction, resorting to a content analysis of its 24 episodes. We are also interested in the experience of the professionals involved, in order to study, through in-depth interviews, the distinctive aspects of the female teams. Our results define Valeria as a creation that avoids the label "for women", with characters inspired by certain archetypes, but who evolve as they struggle to achieve the life they want. The professionals consulted give a positive assessment of the performance within an almost exclusively female, highlighting aspects such as collaboration, work capacity, or the subordination of egos to the need to achieve a good result.