A telenovela (also spelled telenovella) is a limited-run television serial melodrama popular in the Americas, comprising a great part of its production budget. The word combines tele, short for television, and novela, a word that Latin literary studies associate with medium-span romances. Telenovelas are essentially soap operas in miniseries format. The telenovela combines ancient melodrama with the 19th century feuilleton and the Latin American radionovela. The telenovela is the most-watched genre of television program in the world, with at least two billion viewers worldwide.
The medium has been used repeatedly to transmit sociocultural messages by incorporating them into storylines.>


Patricio Wills, head of development at Telemundo, jokingly described the basic format of telenovelas thus: