Uh, oh: Peña Nieto’s daughters planning reality TV show

A new comedy show?

The Mexican broadcaster Televisa is reportedly preparing a reality show starring the daughter and step-daughter of Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

The show has yet to be confirmed, but the buzz is that Paulina Peña Pretelini and Sofía Castro are considering the show as an attempt to clean up their image as privileged, uncaring people.

Paulina famously took to Twitter during last year’s election campaign to complain that critics of her father were lower class “proles”. And Sofía Castro notoriously dissed a pair of 15,000 peso (US$1,180) shoes that had been given to her by her father.

Paulina Peña Pretelini  is  Peña Nieto’s  daughter with his former wife Mónica Pretelini Sáenz, who died in 2007. The step-daughter, Sofía Castro, is Angélica Rivera Hurtado’s daughter with her first husband, José Alberto Castro, whom she divorced in 2008. Peña Nieto and Rivera Hurtado were then married in 2010.

Angélica Rivera Hurtado is a well-known telenovela (soap opera) actress. Her various shows were also on the Televisa network, which has been widely criticized for having had overwhelmingly biased pro- Peña Nieto coverage during the 2012 presidential campaign. The father of Peña Nieto’s step-daughter, Sofia Castro, is himself a telenovela producer named José Alberto Castro.

Efforts to present the daughters as “normal young girls” – the stated intention for the show – may result in unintended consequences. It would perhaps not be quit the send-up that A simple life was with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, but it is hard to imagine how to avoid comedic pitfalls.

Insiders say that the show will be “something like the Kardashian show”, but with fewer details of their private lives. You never know – it could be a cross-over hit on Comedy Channel.

(TE Wilson is the author of Mezcalero, a Detective Sánchez novel.)

Twitter: @TimothyEWilson

Email: lapoliticaeslapolitica [at] gmail [dot] com

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