José Pablo López chooses Sergio Calderón, one of the creators of the new ‘Sálvame’, as director of TVE

José Pablo López, the current president of RTVE, had been working for several weeks on the approach to the new directorates of both TVE and RNE, separately, which José Manuel Pérez Tornero eliminated when he assumed the presidency three and a half years ago. As Emilio Escudero reported on ABC, the search for the right profiles was key these weeks. The president was clear that RNE will be directed by someone who is inside the corporation right now and is considering different names from outside to assume the direction of TVE, although it is something that has not yet been defined. And it seems that he has already found it. Sergio Calderón, one of the fathers of the new ‘Sálvame’, will be the new general director of public television, as ABC has been able to confirm. Calderón will be in charge of all public television programming with the exception of news programs, which have their own management.

This signing has been in the works for weeks and it was already known that the new director of public television was going to be from outside the Corporation. Sergio Calderón had a long career at Mediaset. He was a member of the founding team of Cuatro as Head of Audience and Content Research and was part of the PRISA Group before Telecinco acquired Cuatro, remaining as head of programming for the current second Mediaset channel. With the management changes at Mediaset and the departure of Paolo Vasile, Calderón was fired and joined the Fabricantes Studio team as director of content, innovation, marketing and communication.

The signing of Calderón gives clues about the new public television that José Pablo López has in his mind. The president’s idea has always been to reform the chain and renew it through faces that can attract the youngest, like Inés Hernand or bring Broncano and ‘La Revuelta’ to compete with Motos. One of the strategies he used when he was Content Director of RTVE in the previous Board of Directors was to sign well-known and exiled faces from Mediaset after the closure of ‘Sálvame’. The journalist was in charge of bringing Lydia Lozano, Terelu Campos or Chelo García-Cortés to new formats such as ‘Mañaneros’ or Jordi González to present two programs upon his arrival to the network: ‘La plaza’, which stopped airing after its failure , and ‘Blood Ties’.

López’s firm decision to attract this type of profile to the network cost him more than one fight with Elena Sánchez, former interim president of RTVE who would later dismiss him. One of the most popular was when López decided to bring the former collaborator of ‘Sálvame’ Belén Esteban to the premiere of ‘Baila as you can’. Sánchez’s refusal did not sit well with the presenter and generated conflict between the two. Finally, the network chose to follow the line of the then advisor but changing Belén Esteban for Lydia Lozano, another collaborator of the former ‘Sálvame’ and who is currently part of ‘Ni que fuerámos shhh’.

When Belén Esteban and María Patiño visited ‘La Revuelta’, the president of RTVE celebrated their success. «How glad I am to see you there! Humor and pure surrealism,” he expressed on his social networks. Also when Esteban visited Marc Giró in ‘Late Xou’: “Only the superiority complex, intellectual arrogance and incompetence would allow his presence in a program to be vetoed.”