El Rey Network

» see elreynetwork.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

el rey was a cable channel targeting english-speaking hispanic viewers on us tv. that is not a demographic i belong to and it is not a market that ever had a turkish equivalent. i knew robert rodriguez the director from mariachi and desperado, watched at internet-cafe-shared dvd rip quality around 2003. the channel he put his name to a decade later was fully outside my reach.

el rey network launched on 15 december 2013, financed by factorymade ventures with univision holding a minority stake. rodriguez had been developing the idea since 2010 as a channel that would run action films and cult horror reruns with a small original slate on top, aimed at hispanic viewers whose first language was english. the fcc had reserved the slot back in 2010 as part of comcast's nbcuniversal merger conditions requiring carriage of minority-controlled networks.

the flagship original was lucha underground, a lucha libre plus drama hybrid produced with aaa mexico and mgm. it ran four seasons from 2014 to 2018 with a devoted small audience. rodriguez himself directed spy kids adjacent behind-the-scenes shows and hosted a director's-chair interview show called the director's chair. carriage peaked at about forty million us homes in march 2015 and slid downward from there.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the channel had a specific niche in mind. the us cable bundle in the early twenty tens carried hundreds of channels with almost no space for hispanic viewers whose first language was english. telemundo and univision covered the spanish-language audience. mun2 targeted younger bilingual viewers with a spanish tilt. el rey wanted to sit in the gap between those and the mainstream anglo channels, delivering action programming in english with hispanic culture as a default rather than a marker.

rodriguez used his director connections to pull unusual bookings. one drink with tarantino ran in 2016 as a talk show. from dusk till dawn: the series expanded rodriguez's own 1996 film into a three season tv version. wrestling matches doubled as narrative episodes on lucha underground. reruns filled the day with grindhouse action and eighties cop shows on rotation.

~ the rise and fall ~

the peak came in march 2015 when carriage crossed forty million homes. that was fifteen months after launch, which is fast for a new cable channel. lucha underground drew critical praise and a cult audience through its four-season run. rodriguez raised the brand's visibility through interview shows and behind-the-scenes production content aimed at his own film-fan audience.

then the same forces that were killing every mid-tier cable channel took a bite. dish and directv started stripping unrated channels out of standard tiers to trim carriage fees. lucha underground ended after season four in 2018 when the aaa mexico deal expired without renewal. by 2020 the channel had lost about two thirds of its carriage. univision announced its exit from the joint venture in november 2020. the linear channel shut on 31 december 2020.

~ the long tail ~

rodriguez did not let the brand die entirely. in august 2021 el rey relaunched as a free ad-supported streaming channel through a partnership with cinedigm, running on the roku channel and pluto tv as a fast channel. the streaming version drops most of the original programming and mostly plays through the film-rerun library rodriguez controls. the cable channel with a full original slate, produced from a rodriguez soundstage in austin, ended with the linear shutdown in 2020.

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