Get Swept Away With These Telenovelas on Netflix

Ever feel like the daily minutia of your life is getting a bit, well, dull? If the answer is yes, you may want to consider escaping into a telenovela—a genre rooted in Latin America, known for its colorfully elaborate plots—and Netflix is currently streaming some of the best.

The name is a combination of "tele," meaning "television," and "novela," or "novel." Much like American soap operas, the shows proceed with ever-unfolding melodramatic twists. Unlike a soap opera, though, there's an end in sight: Episodes air five or six nights a week, with an average of 120 episodes total. These Spanish-language shows range in genre: La Reina del Sur, for example, is an intense tale set among Mexico's drug cartels and Silvana Sin Lana is a riches-to-rags love story. Originating in Mexico, Colombia, and beyond, for non-native speakers, they may even help you learn Spanish.

For the purposes of this list, we've included a few series that also borrow from the hallmark of a telenovela, but have a slightly different format. Netflix's The House of Flowers is a modernized telenovela, repackaging the plot points while offering gorgeous production value (and it stars telenovela veteran Verónica Castro in the first season). And even more contemporary telenovelas are on the way, like a reboot of the Mexican series Rebelde coming to Netflix in 2022.