Alexia Rivas and Marta López and their face to face in Survivors 2021: how the Telecinco reality show tries to use Merlos Place to create the most macho controversy of the year

The loving trio named Merlos Place that brought so much joy, controversy (and audience) to Telecinco during the confinement due to the coronavirus has had an unexpected son in Survivientes 2021. Trying to give this story of infidelity another turn of the screw The survival reality show has brought together the two female protagonists of the drama Merlos (Marta López and Alexia Rivas) at the same point on the planet and is playing with the times so that the final face-to-face between them translates into a fight of biblical proportions . Is Telecinco playing to provoke a "catfight" (and why is this so tremendously macho)?

In case someone does not remember what Merlos Place was, here is the story: the journalist Alfonso Merlos was very engaged with the television collaborator Marta López when the confinement due to the coronavirus arrived in Spain. While we applauded the toilets on the balconies, Merlos connected live with a television program in an interview via zoom and a woman in her underwear walked behind: the journalist Alexia Rivas. That paseíllo was the beginning of a narrative riddled with macho clichés.

While Marta López ended up introducing herself on the network's programs as "the cuckold of Spain" and Alexia Rivas ended up suing her bosses at La fabrica de tele for everything that was being said about her, Alfonso Merlos was received in the Ana Rosa program with a “I don't know how the poor can be here”.

We do. Repeating the old and hackneyed story of the young and intriguing woman, the spiteful and betrayed woman and the don Juan helped Telecinco to break audience records in all the programs on the network in which the members of Melrose Place appeared separately: Marta López's confessions on Saturday Deluxe made that program the fifth most watched in its history. Viva la vida, Socialité, the ana Rosa program, It's already noon... all the Melrose Place programs increased their share of the screen. If it worked then, why wouldn't it work now?

While Alfonso Merlos has warned Mediaset via burofax that he will sue whoever mentions his name in Survivors, on the Yotele portal they assure that the original idea was to reunite the three in the Honduran reality show. It could not have been with the journalist, but with the female members of the drama.

And what's a production company to do when their bookish love triangle falls apart? Well, resort to another of the most typical, topical and sexist narratives that exist: that of the catfight. Women are mean to women, women compete with women, women compare themselves to women... In the 21st century, in the midst of the blossoming of sorority, Survivors arrives ready to exploit for the audience one of the most hackneyed myths of sexist rhetoric.

We all have clear in our retina what a catfight is: the Hollywood of the golden years repeated it to us film after film. Two young women, who could be attractive, who fought to entertain the public because they couldn't stand each other, were rivals (especially in love). It seems no coincidence that one of the first catfights ever filmed took place in a movie set on an exotic Pacific island (the movie was called Tabu).

Casually Survivors has brought together two young, beautiful women in Honduras, probably in bikinis and with a pending confrontation, whom they are subjecting to extreme survival conditions and whom they are going to coincide with the appropriate timing (if the health by Alexia Rivas allows it) so that they have that fight that the public is waiting for and that Telecinco needs to ensure its audience and perpetuate the idea that women, if they appear together on screen, either talk about men or compete with each other. Ciao sorority, welcome audiences.