Paramount: With Dime con Quién Andas, we raised the quality bar to be considered by OTTs

After four years, Chilevisión —a Chilean national channel owned by Paramount—, returns to fiction with the production Dime con Quién Andas, which will soon premiere both on the local screen and on Paramount+, becoming the first series from that country to reach the platform.

“For us, it is a great challenge to make local national fiction in Chile again. The last one was Gemelas in 2019. During this time, between the pandemic and obviously the acquisition of Paramount, the industry changed a lot and so we asked ourselves how we can return with a fiction focused on the Chilean audience, but also an international and universal appeal. It was a daily effort of the team led in Chile by Juan Iñaki Vicente, together with Guillermo Pendino of Programming and Contents, the executive producers Javier Goldschmied and Pablo Díaz, the directors and producers,” explained Darío Turovelzky, Senior VP Broadcast and Studios, Original Spanish And Portuguese Content, from Paramount, during the studio’s screening in Los Angeles on May 20.

It is the story of Kari (María Swett), a successful fashion designer who is accused by the media of being a scammer, but the real ‘chanta’ —how they call this type of person in Chile and Argentina— is Paulo (Cristián Riquelme), her husband, whom she will try to unmask, while a new man pops into her life, Ramón (Cristián Arriagada).

Turovelzky points out that after having the experience of the Argentine series El Primero de Nosotros, which premiered on Telefe and simultaneously on Paramount+, they decided to use the same strategy for Dime con Quién Andas, but in this case, the production values were higher: “We had to raise the quality bar and offer it to the platforms. There are three elements that were indispensable: the technical quality, it’s a TV series that matches up to any platform in terms of quality; an incredible cast, such as María Elena Swett, Christian Arriagada, and Cristian Riquelme, all with great empathy and ability to relate with the Chilean people and are recognized in Latin America; and the third, the content, it’s a universal story which portrays ‘chantas’ husbands that prey on their wives or girlfriends leading to a love triangle.”

Technically they changed the optics of the cameras in order to match the platforms’ premium series, which due to the number of episodes – 90- increases the difficulty. Also, regarding the narrative they adopted a quality able to work in two different windows in order to have cliffhangers at the end of the chapters so that the platform viewer is encouraged to see the next and also small cliffhangers so that on linear television they do not change the channel during commercial breaks.

“The challenge is to get the two audiences on board. We are right here at the Paramount screening and as we say in the company ‘we know how to make popular and massive content’. So when we decide to make content, be it entertainment, fiction or non-fiction, it has to be massive. It cannot be limited to a small audience or niche or to a territory. That is what matters the most, to make something that can be distributed through different contact points and that reaches the whole world,” he concluded.