‘Gen Playz’ grows and graduates with its audience | Television | The USA Print

Gene Playz, the flagship program of the RTVE digital platform dedicated to hot topics in generation Z (those born in the late 1990s), grows and graduates. After 240 programs that began to be broadcast in 2020, and now that many of the Z have come of age, the set moves to the RTVE sets in Prado del Rey. The comedians Inés Hernand and Darío Eme Hache continue as presenters of this debate space that expands its duration (it will be broadcast two days a week: the debate on Tuesdays and the current affairs and collaborations part on Thursdays at 10:00 p.m.) and expands its content with collaborators such as investigative journalist Carles Tamayo, singer Samantha Hudson, Mariang and Carlos Peguer, from podcast The dick and the quinquiand the comedian Ignatius Farray.

It seems that they have gone with what they are wearing and leave the ping pong table to replace it with four ocher sky sofas. Nacho López, the visual manager of the program, explains that they give a more relaxed air to the Show. “I wanted it to look like a poorly produced, improvised set, so we left the marks on the floor of other sets and added colored vertical panels that reveal the cameras and the unpolished backgrounds of the space”, he justifies.

For Hernand it is a small conquest to be on the sets of traditional television: “It is an opportunity to reconcile classic television with something new. We use the recycled sofas from an old program, in the same way that we are giving a second useful life to spaces that were intimately linked with the stale”. Although, he adds, she would have liked them to sit on the floor “like Rosana when she went to Triumph operation in 2001″.

When the presenters record the promotion for the social networks of Gene Playz, in which several moments of his program tend to go viral, Hernand takes the reins of the speech and his partner ends his presentation with a brief intervention, true to reality: “I speak a little.” As they pose for photos on the sofa, Hernand jokes: “Wow, this is very Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Preysler in 2015.” Both are over 30, so they would be considered millennials (those born between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties), but, for the comedian, this works in her favor: “Being millennials we are quite close to Z and, at the same time, we have quite intergenerational codes. If we get a 50-year-old lady and a 15-year-old boy to see us, then she’s cool”.

In Spain there are five million young people (between 15 and 25 years old), who are the target audience of the programme. To Hernand and the creators of Gene Playz It seems essential to them that there are spaces dedicated to these people, who are not usually represented in the classic formats. “They have grown up in forums, on Messenger, on Tuenti, which are still public digital agoras. They are used to debating, to being contestants. Here we channel the concerns that are being seen in digital environments such as Twitter or TikTok and we expose them from all perspectives: informative, experiential, but also playful”, the presenter develops.

For this reason, they are very proud that the program is a commitment of public television. In fact, Hernand opens the first episode of the season with a humorous “We have thrown the house out of the window with the Spanish taxes”, to emphasize this. Precisely because it is a public program, it has been subjected to several parliamentary consultations due to some issues that have arisen in the broadcasts. “At Vox they asked us the question: ‘What does the word cuca mean?’ Because I say by way of greeting: ‘Hello, my hot cucas’. Sounds like a nice word to me. In Catalonia it is ‘cock’ apparently, and yet in Venezuela it is ‘coño’. It caught their attention and they asked us for clarification, ”he recounts.

Although the political positions of Eme Hache and Hernand, publicly exposed on their social networks, may cause suspicion among some viewers and politicians, Gene Playz It is independent of your personal convictions. “I am a citizen and I define myself as a person who is class conscious, who tries to correct anti-racism, pro LGBT rights, but in the debates the participants have the leading role. We believe in dissent, because the opposite of it, as my friend Nerea Pérez de las Heras says, is a dictatorship”, Hernand clarifies.

As an example, he gives the program they did on bullfighting, one of the most tense of the last season: “We brought a bullfighter, a rancher, a vegan and a philosopher. Of course, there the move is served. At no time do I catch and say to the bullfighter: ‘You are this, you are that’. I have my opinion that I reserve.” The comedian advocates exposing herself to positions “that we don’t like”, since she sees this as a way to enrich herself and form her own opinion.

The nervousness of the first filming of this season —a special program on 8M that was broadcast last Tuesday and which focused on cyber bullying against women— had vanished in the next one —on this occasion, the subject was the influencers and the popularity of this profession. Natalia Canoa, one of the youngest scriptwriters on the show, explained that they try to alternate between denser themes and other more playful ones. While they were preparing the recording of the debate, the collaborator Tamayo wandered here and there recording a video “for 10 years from now”, in which he asked whoever he came across what he thought his life would be like in 2033.

You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.