A/N: All links below lead to sources in Spanish. The translations of the relevant excerpts have been done by yours truly.

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If there’s anything that being on the internet for a while can teach a person, is that some people can just get really angry at things. And I don’t mean justified, righteous anger, but more closely just being angry at the shadows on the walls, at the things that you don’t know but someone is telling you that you must be mad at it, that whatever is there that you don’t know is evil and out to get you. With time, this seething anger, as it is fed through monsters like the algorithm, or political-spewing talking heads, grows in pressure and becomes bigger, and nastier and then it boils, and finally…

Finally someone, at one point, points out a lie. And a war breaks out.

It’s been a close to a year since this happened, so ladies, gentlemen, and I’m sure there must be someone non-binary in the audience, if you’d be so kind, accompany me down the rabbit hole into the Best and Worst Feud in modern Spanish Television.

This is the history of the war between El Hormiguero and La Revuelta, and their biggest battle yet.

Status Quo Ante Bellum.

Anyone who would have turned on a television in Spain at night in the late 2000s and the very early 2010s, after the evening news, would have been met with either terrible “reality” shows, films being aired multiple years after their release (and lengthened by half by the sheer amount of advertisements), or the occasional sitcom. None of which was particularly appealing for the then middle-class nuclear family with young kids that had about an hour between dinner and going to sleep, nope, they’d all be watching El Hormiguero (lit: The Ant Hill.), a talk show starring a red-haired late night funnyman, his weird purple sarcastic ant puppets, big name celebrities, a resident stage magician, and “Science” experiments. It was a perfect show for both the kids and the parents.

Key word being, was.

Time hasn’t been kind to El Hormiguero, in the mid-2010s, while keeping the celebrities, the show started becoming more and more political. Hell, I remember one time, as I was once part of its loyal audience of kids and early teenagers, when the entirety of the runtime of one episode was just the host talking politics. And not only that, but it kept going more and more conservative, to an almost ridiculous degree.

And this was, most of the time, the most watched show in Spanish television barring news programs. It had no competition, until it did. But before I go into that and the drama around it, in the buildup to everything, let’s talk a bit about the man behind the ants, because he’s kind of central to the whole nonsense that was going to unravel.

The Puppetmaster.

Pablo Motos is a television host, radio host, DJ, businessman, guitar player and composer. He was born in the town of Requena, in the province of Valencia in the mid-1960s to a working class family and by the age of 19, through sheer business acumen, he was already running the local radio station. Some time later, he moved up, being in several radio shows shows across various channels, running behind-the-scenes stuff in television and theater, and by 2002, he arrived into having his own radio show in a fairly important radio channel, and surrounded by several of what would become his friends. Pretty much all of whom then went with him to make El Hormiguero in the Antena 3 television channel by 2006.¹ The rest is history.

Oh, and also, he’s kind of fucking insane:

I was spending my life trying to do something bad, break something. One time I gutted two televisions, two radio sets and a sound system and plucked the speakers out and connected them with wire. I wanted to see what happened if I plugged them all at once, what happened was that they all sounded for some 30-40 seconds before blowing up. Sometime later all of my friends had television in colour so I went to the living room and told my father that we needed a colour TV. “This one works”, he said, pointing to the black and white one, so I threw it on the floor and it broke. They beat me up, but ended up buying a TV and of course, it was in colour. Being beaten up was painful but it lasted little compared with what you would get, so it was worth it. In order to punish me they would lock me up in a storage room that ended up being like my second home. I would spend entire afternoons there, in the dark since there was no [electricity there] and I liked it since I could just make up stories. There was an old bicycle in there and I would pedal backwards for hours, imagining that I was out in the countryside choosing where to build a house (…)

That’s an entire paragraph of an actual interview he conceded, folks, the one out of the two big ones of the time in which he didn’t get mad and sent a formal letter of protest because it painted him as a freak. No, that was this one:

We start with Iberian ham, to which Motos removes the fat with a knife, slice by slice. Once a white mountain is over his plate, the seconds arrive: Two massive lobsters on top of a salad bed. The waiter removes their heads, as the lord doesn’t like them. “Uggh, I couldn’t”. [Motos] says, wrinkling his nose.

But, far from trying to make a character assassination of him, let’s leave it at him being a bit obsessive about some stuff, like his personal image, both in the physical sense (Yes, that’s him), and in the PR one: Motos doesn’t like it when people speak ill of him, to the point that he allegedly frequently has close workers of him send threatening calls to journalists or comedians who dare say something he did was wrong.

And yes, it happens frequently as Motos is kind of a big fountain of drama. He’s been credibly accused of sexism, racism, homophobia while on set.² So, that’s a lot of threatening calls, and a whole lot of people who, even out of his politics, really, really don’t like him.

People that for years were asking for a David to fight Antena 3’s Goliath. And then they got it.

The Deer King’s Resistance.

If you looked at the barest surface, they’re not that different.

David Broncano is a television host, radio host, stand up comedian and amateur tennist. He was born in Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, to a working class family, and grew up in Andalucía before moving to Madrid to study college. He dropped out, got big in stand up, ended up in the radio, in which he often played a confused reporter that asked bizarre questions to passerbys, then he collaborated in television, in more radio, and was finally found by legendary late night funnyman Andreu Buenafuente, who offered him a show.

Long story short, and I’m simplifying things quite a bit, the result of that offer, following a collaboration in Buenafuente’s own show, was La Resistencia (Lit: The Resistance), a surreal, improvised, late-late-night thing that aired after Buenafuente’s show in the Movistar+ subscription television channel. I described it previously here in a different drama that also involved them as “Imagine if The Eric Andre Show was improvised and had a live audience that may or may not interact with the guest.”, which I still think is a fairly accurate description.

La Resistencia fairly quickly ended up building a cult following thanks to the highlights they uploaded to Youtube that called itself the 1AM club (since that was the time at which the videos were posted) and were stereotyped among themselves as stoned university students with broken schedules that literally had nothing better to do. As it happens, for the sake of a fair disclosure, I was a proud member. And why they got it was fairly understandable, it was underground, it didn’t care about silly things like being polite to the guests, and by the time it was getting to be well-known, the guests it could have in a single week ranged from award-winning scientists, to rappers, graffitti artists or the Polish ambassador. Yes, they did, in fact, have the ambassador of Poland in Spain as a guest, in fact it is generally considered to be one of the best episodes of the show’s entire run.

And, well, while Broncano and Motos’ relationship back then was fairly cordial (Broncano had been a guest in El Hormiguero one time and had come as a surprise accompanying another later), things began to sour up when it turned out that the comedians that worked at La Resistencia liked to make fun of El Hormiguero, usually in a self-deprecating way, but in other times by doing parodies that the Hormiguero folks, in their family-friendly branding, found offensive. Case in point, although as far as I’m aware there were no complaints for this one: Historically El Hormiguero had a section called “Ass or Elbow?”, in which the audience, and sometimes the guest, would have to guess if the closed-up picture shown on-screen was that of a flexed elbow or an ass crack, then La Resistencia parodied it in skits like “Magician or Pedophile?” in which the audience had to guess if… well, you get it. Generally, when asked about it, the staff of La Resistencia would simply state that they admired El Hormiguero and that with jokes like that, they were punching up at their expense for a light laugh.

Anyway, La Resistencia had a great run since its start in 2018 until COVID19 arrived, that first part is generally considered to be its golden age. Once the lockdown started, as a joke about how the only things that should remain running during it were the ones that truly matters, they renamed themselves as What Truly Matters, and had an entire arc that consisted entirely of the core cast of the show, without a live audience, just hanging out and talking about whatever while on the set. This part had its fans, but once the restrictions were lessened and they began to have an actual show, the general consensus is that it became overly commercial, not just in bringing in fairly mainstream guests, mainly singers and actors, but Movistar’s policy’s towards how the show was seen became a lot more restrictive, instead of having mostly unedited 20 minute long interviews plus some skits uploaded to Youtube, things shifted into 10 minute, heavily edited interviews and less skits uploaded. Broadly speaking, the final two years of the show were a general decline that was only momentarily halted whenever they managed to go beyond the company’s mandates. Until it ended.

From “Punching up” to “Moving up.”

Back in 2021, there were rumours that La Resistencia might move to another channel, to Telecinco, but there were no confirmations and the brief discourse on the topic was that it would be a really strange decision, as it would have clashed immensely with Telecinco’s drama-based ecosystem, ³ however, by 2023 Movistar+ began to get rid of its current pool of shows in a downright quixotesque attempt to compete with Netflix, being a paid subscription service and all that. La Resistencia did one more season and then, well, then is when the drama that would precede the all-out massacre started.

Now, the entire hiring of Broncano (and with him the show) would do for an entire writeup on its own given the sheer amount of internal politics (and actual politics) nonsense that the whole thing entailed, so, in order to keep this from being multiple-parts long, here’s the short version:

RTVE, the publicly-owned broadcaster, desperately needs a way to bring in a younger audience, and given that Broncano wants out of Movistar, they go for it. Until they suddenly don’t. The thing is, the then-current interim chairwoman of the corporation is in a power-play with the other members of the corporate board, all of whom, including her, are put there by the then major political parties in a pact to keep the broadcaster neutral. While the chairwoman was put in by the currently governing left-wing PSOE, many of her votes have been along those of the right-wing members of the board, which has caused that the government no longer sees her as suitable for the role. So she needs a way to keep herself there, and the only one she finds is blocking everything and keeping it indefinitely until she can see some way out that would ensure her power. This ends up resulting in the Director of General Contents, José Pablo López, who was quite vocal about bringing in Broncano to get a younger audience, being fired. And then, the board fired her. López was then not only re-instated but given her role.

Got all of that? Great! That was three goddamn months of drama. Here are three articles that go through the facts in more detail, in case anyone wants to lose more brain cells reading that.

Now, while that was the hiring process itself, the arrival of Broncano to RTVE in what by all signs was a way to compete with El Hormiguero wasn’t being taken in the nicest ways by the privately owned competitors, not just Antena 3, but also the aforementioned Telecinco. Here’s the thing, as I have mentioned, Motos is very much conservative and speaks quite a bit about his political takes in the show, in fact, since 2021, an entire section of the show is him sitting with several pundits, chiefly Juan del Val (who was recently the star of another drama, and specifically del Val made his feelings about Broncano’s hiring known:

If I were you [Motos, that is], I would give it a thought to the idea that they’re overfixated against you. Because they say, and I don’t believe it, mind you, that [the government] has called TVE to make a show or something (…) the problem isn’t Broncano, it’s that [the government] wants to end Pablo Motos (…) this should really make us think about how much of a democracy we are (…) it’s a scheme made with a contract, that has never-seen-before conditions, simply made in order to hurt this show.

Motos, on his part, at that moment simply stated that he was uncomfortable with the topic and asked to move on about it. But before actually moving on, let’s talk for a moment about the “never-seen-before” conditions that del Val was talking about, as they were a major point of contention.

The problems that were alleged were three: It would cost 28 million euros, which was seen as ridiculously high, there were no attached conditions, such as not needing any minimum audience in order to not be canceled, and that for the first of the two seasons the show would be in before a presumed renovation, it could not be cancelled in any way during the first.

Let’s go one by one:

• Regarding the first, that would be, in fact, a seasonal budget of 14 million for 155 episodes per season. Which is about 90.000€ per episode. For the record, that’s significantly less than the 400.000€ per episode of the controversial Masterchef Spain. Funny thing about having written a few dramas about Spanish television already, I can link myself to point to other (midly-relevant) dramas.

Anyway, part of that point was also that somehow, the prevalent idea among detractors was that the 28 million were going to be paid to Broncano, instead of being the budget itself. To the point that during the first episode in TVE, Broncano had to explain that one personally.

• There were, in fact, attached audience requirements, specifically, the new show could never deep under the audience rates of the one it would be replacing, that is, never under an 8% of the share.

• The one about not being cancelled, for the first season, is true.

Meanwhile, finally moving on, in Telecinco things were also not great, as exemplified by one of their major conservative outlets, Ana Rosa Quintana, who speaking about Broncano’s hiring claimed:

He’s not at fault for everything that happened. He has every right to move to TVE, make his show, and compete like the rest, but when politicians put their dirty hands over something, they spoil everything.

Meaning, that Broncano’s hiring was a political move from the government, in the same line as del Val, which she said in clearer words once Broncano’s new show started:

I’d like to take some time to clarify something, and that is that a colleague told me that after I said Broncano was shameful, [Broncano] was mortified. I watched him in La Resistencia and I think it’s fantastic that there’s competition and new people who are attracting a different audience. What I said, which is true, even if he says it isn’t, other people are telling me that it is, is that his contract was made [by the government], and that’s what I think is shameful.

That said, things in Telecinco, barring her and her cohorts, were a bit more divided, with long-time host Jorge Javier Vazquez having written a column in a magazine in which he took a more moderate outsider opinion, while at the same time going against El Hormiguero.

Another topic is the whole El Hormiguero affair, in which they have taken Broncano’s hiring as a personal offense. They say that [the government] is overfixated on them, that they want him there to destroy them. I don’t know, I guess that as any conspiracy theory it probably has a lot of believers (…) But for me, it falls a bit short. It has little meat. No matter how much del Val wants to go on alarm and claim that Pedro [TN: That is, prime minister Pedro Sánchez] wants to kill Pablo, I think not even Juan believes such a load of bull, but audience wise, I have no doubts it is profitable. The State, with the capital letter, going all out against a television host. (…) I think that instead of going into these dramas you should wish him luck.

Juan del Val, however, of course, took this as, well, as well as anything really, dedicating him a letter in a conservative newspaper simply titled, “Friend Jorge”:

Not only I think there are moves from [the government] to hurt El Hormiguero, I have proof, as do all the press that have published about it and which are in public domain. You say that you don’t believe them, that it is unbelievable that [the government] would pick up the phone and order the public broadcaster to buy a show in order to remove audience from El Hormiguero. You claim that it’s just some drama from Pablo Motos. (…) I think that servilism towards the power (yes, keep in mind who is the powerful one) from someone with so much talent as you is pitiful.

Motos, in what amounts to him, early in the drama simply stated:

We’ve been doing this show for 18 years and there’s always someone at the competition. May the competition be welcome! May it be Broncano or whoever else! Everyone gets to choose whatever they want.

Which is significantly more cordial. But things would take a sharp turn later, meanwhile, Broncano’s new show, which was just La Resistencia under a different name, and they stressed this significantly during the first few episodes, now called La Revuelta (Lit: The Revolt), started as scheduled with only some minor dramas regarding jokes that some of the audience found to be a bit distasteful, but that was it.

Well, at least that was it for normal people, politically minded Twitter weirdos were going on about it for months, dividing shows in their heads as left wing and right wing, and putting aligning themselves which whoever they see fit to their beliefs .Yes, there were people that thought that watching a show, even if they don’t count towards the audience rates, was doing political activism. Headlines were made, people debated making lofty predictions such as claiming that Broncano’s initial massive success was a massive nail in the coffin of the old television whenever La Revuelta did better numbers, and when El Hormiguero did, others would come out to say that Broncano was just a fad and that the real audiences were in with Pablo. There were even conspiracy theories about how either the government or the big corporations were manipulating the ratings in order to favor one or the other.

There was a scuffle every morning. But this drama, despite being already quite long, has only hit the midpoint, dear reader, everything you’ve read until this point was merely the prologue to the night of the angry tweets, to the moment El Hormiguero crossed a line and reaped the storm.

Cassus Belli

Before we begin however, there are two more things to be aware about La Revuelta: Firstly, it has a running gag about how Broncano is a hack whose only talent is imitating the mating call of deer (and then showing that to the guest), and second, unlike El Hormiguero, La Revuelta does not announce its guests beforehand.⁴

Of course, the largest surprise came in the night of the 21st of November of 2024.

After a normal start to the show and a couple of the usual skits, Broncano showed up on the stage, looking grave, and announced that the guest they had for the night, Jorge Martín, recently the winner of the MotoGP World Cup, despite being already in the green room waiting, would not be interviewed. To quote:

Half an hour before starting the taping, we’ve been told that El Hormiguero has found out that he was coming here, and given that he’s set to be there with them next week, and they don’t want anyone coming here before going there (…) They’ve done some calls (…) I’m not going to go into detail of how they do these things, but thus Jorge has told us that he can’t be interviewed here today because they’ve… I’m not going to get into detail (…) He’s told us that he’s very sorry, but if he comes here today, things would happen. (…) It’s not the first time this happens so we’ve decided to speak directly about it because they’ve torn apart the episode. We’ve implied it before, some guests have mentioned it, it’s something that has been happening for years now, even when we were La Resistencia, not even competition to them, but you’ve all seen how no one comes here before they go there, and sometimes if they can do it so they don’t come here period, they do, but at least they make it so they go there first. And today, this morning, Jorge posted in Instagram that he’s coming to La Revuelta (…) I don’t have any personal problem with them, I don’t know if they have it with me but they’ve been doing this for a long time. I know we do a lot of jokes about them, and about other shows and about ourselves, but they’ve always been elegant in that sense (…) I mean, some people are always complaining about us making fun of them, but I’ve always said that I hoped they responded with more jokes, instead of underhanded stuff.

Then, they cut to an angered production assistant, who complained that all the work they’ve done for the day is worthless, they did a couple of jokes on the situation, Broncano explained a bit more that the reason they were coming out with it was because the guest was already there so they had no time to look for any other, and that it’s happened to many times that they’re tired of it. He apologized to the live audience, promising them to return for free at a later date so they can be for a full taping. Video of the above here

Then they cut to archival footage of wildlife. For the rest of the runtime.

The Great Funnyman War.

Saying that viewers with the disgrace of having a Twitter account, and due to the demographics of the show, not fond of Motos, were furious would be a major understatement. And not only them, that very night, both former staff of El Hormiguero, along with hosts of other shows came out to not only publicly position themselves in Broncano’s side, but to state that yes, it has happened before. In fact, basing themselves in the lyrics of some of the songs that played along with the archival footage, some saw it as a war cry, this was it, this was the night Pablo Motos died, either by their hands or by being finally, after so long, cancelled.

Regular El Hormiguero viewers, however, thought it was false and likely a way to chase clout given that the ratings were going down for a while.

Then, the very next day, Motos came out to explain what happened at his own show, I quote:

I don’t like to get into dramas, but I have to do it because there has been an attack against me and my staff (…) There has been talk already about this, maybe too much, but there are interests and smokescreens that one can’t control. (…) I suppose that being a highly watched show for so long brings enough exposition to have good and bad things, things like this. I’ve always owned to that and always tried to stay out of drama, even when from the competition there are continued jokes in bad taste against me, disguised as mere comedy when they’re actually attacks. I own to that, but I cannot tolerate that the work of my staff is put into doubt by implying things that are not true. (…) So, what happened to the interview with Jorge Martín? (…) We had an interview with Jorge for November 27 since October 29, we had a deal with his managing team that we’d be the first to interview him, winner or not, because we care about offering you the best possible show. However, back in Thursday, the 21st , we were surprised to find a video of Jorge saying that he was going to La Revuelta. We, as any professionals would, called his team and asked what happened. They told us that there had been a mistake setting his schedule and it’s decided that Jorge would take the interview and it would not be broadcast until after we do ours. Jorge was interviewed the past Thursday and that was hidden from the audience. This was only known this morning because independent media dismantled the initial version and from viewers and independent journalists that were present in the taping.

Then Motos would go in to spin a rather complicated story, too much to directly quote so I’m summarizing, about how the whole thing may have actually been a distraction attempt to shield the government from a semi-major development in the investigation of a corruption scheme related to them.

Which, by the way, was bullshit and called out as such pretty much immediately, for two reasons: First, because La Revuelta was taped before the whole thing happened, and the second because the base of it being a distraction attempt is an article from the major conservative publication El Mundo that claimed that what happened the previous night was the opener for the news of the morning, instead of the ‘Koldo’ case. That wasn’t true and in fact through the day the article ended up being recalled.

This was followed, in the same day, by Martín’s agency, who stated:

Due to the events that took place in La Revuelta last night, we, Playmaker Agency, wish to apologize for not communicating from the start to El Hormiguero our wish to visit La Revuelta before them.

They also claimed that Martín had no idea about any priority deals and that it was their mistake, generally in the same line as Motos’ statement. Which, you know, doesn’t contradict the whole thing about having El Hormiguero having done the same bullshit before to both the La Revuelta team and others. But of course, this is the story EH’s supporters went by, that it was clout chasing, the part about the political distraction and that, of course, having a priority deal is perfectly normal in the industry so EH’s staff did nothing wrong. It should be noted, however, that the statement doesn’t say anything about a priority deal, however, but that was generally brushed aside.

The next monday, La Revuelta would begin with a statement on the whole thing:

So, we didn’t do that chasing clout, in fact we were higher than them and then it went down with the deer (…) However, there’s a couple of things they’ve said that I find funny. First is that they came out saying that the interview to Martín was done. That’s true, we haven’t hidden that, we just couldn’t broadcast it. And he also said that pressuring the the guests is something that has always been done, and that’s one of the most infuriating sentences that I can ever hear.

So, yeah, that was the one thing in which Motos did say the truth, and there was in fact some existing footage from a hidden camera in the audience. They also joked about how their audience rating ended up being just slightly higher than El Hormiguero despite them having had Hugh Grant as a guest on Thursday night, which, being a foreign celebrity would have otherwise made them win the round.

And, that’s kind of where everything ended.

Status Quo Post Bellum.

There were several jokes done in La Revuelta about the whole situation in the next few days with the guests, the media talked a bunch, and in a matter of around a week, everything went down because Internet anger cycles, unless sustained, always end up being quite short.

The interview to Jorge Martín in La Revuelta was broadcast the very next day after El Hormiguero’s interview. There were some calls, once it was known that the it had been indeed taped to show it the same day as EH, but nothing came of it.

The feud between El Hormiguero and La Revuelta still continues to this day, although mostly relegated to articles about audience ratings in newspapers and audience ratings nerds, who as I’ve talked about before, are a thing.

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Footnotes below:

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1 El Hormiguero originally aired in Cuatro, but it moved to Antena 3 in 2011 following its purchase by the Mediaset company.

2 To my fellow Spaniards of Hobbydrama questioning why the linked case of racism isn’t the memetically infamous “¡Que entre… La china!”, that’s because it would take a whole lot of context to explain it.

3 There is a whole writeup about the history of T5 and how it is downright made of drama, but that’s down the pipeline because, to be honest, it’s a lot.

4 In fact, this little quirk was praised by critics as a major likely reason for the show’s initial success, as anything that happened was going to be a surprise. However, due to the decline in viewership during the first half of 2025, now they do announce the guests.