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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Sentient_Flesh on 2025-11-06 09:40:48+00:00.
A/N: All links below lead to sources in Spanish. The translations of the relevant excerpts have been done by yours truly.
If there’s anything that being on the internet for a while can teach a person, is that some people can just get really angry at things. And I don’t mean justified, righteous anger, but more closely just being angry at the shadows on the walls, at the things that you don’t know but someone is telling you that you must be mad at it, that whatever is there that you don’t know is evil and out to get you. With time, this seething anger, as it is fed through monsters like the algorithm, or political-spewing talking heads, grows in pressure and becomes bigger, and nastier and then it boils, and finally…
Finally someone, at one point, points out a lie. And a war breaks out.
It’s been a close to a year since this happened, so ladies, gentlemen, and I’m sure there must be someone non-binary in the audience, if you’d be so kind, accompany me down the rabbit hole into the Best and Worst Feud in modern Spanish Television.
This is the history of the war between El Hormiguero and La Revuelta, and their biggest battle yet.
Status Quo Ante Bellum.
Anyone who would have turned on a television in Spain at night in the late 2000s and the very early 2010s, after the evening news, would have been met with either terrible “reality” shows, films being aired multiple years after their release (and lengthened by half by the sheer amount of advertisements), or the occasional sitcom. None of which was particularly appealing for the then middle-class nuclear family with young kids that had about an hour between dinner and going to sleep, nope, they’d all be watching El Hormiguero (lit: The Ant Hill.), a talk show starring a red-haired late night funnyman, his weird purple sarcastic ant puppets, big name celebrities, a resident stage magician, and “Science” experiments. It was a perfect show for both the kids and the parents.
Key word being, was.
Time hasn’t been kind to El Hormiguero, in the mid-2010s, while keeping the celebrities, the show started becoming more and more political. Hell, I remember one time, as I was once part of its loyal audience of kids and early teenagers, when the entirety of the runtime of one episode was just the host talking politics. And not only that, but it kept going more and more conservative, to an almost ridiculous degree.
And this was, most of the time, the most watched show in Spanish television barring news programs. It had no competition, until it did. But before I go into that and the drama around it, in the buildup to everything, let’s talk a bit about the man behind the ants, because he’s kind of central to the whole nonsense that was going to unravel.
The Puppetmaster.
Pablo Motos is a television host, radio host, DJ, businessman, guitar player and composer. He was born in the town of Requena, in the province of Valencia in the mid-1960s to a working class family and by the age of 19, through sheer business acumen, he was already running the local radio station. Some time later, he moved up, being in several radio shows shows across various channels, running behind-the-scenes stuff in television and theater, and by 2002, he arrived into having his own radio show in a fairly important radio channel, and surrounded by several of what would become his friends. Pretty much all of whom then went with him to make El Hormiguero in the Antena 3 television channel by 2006.1 The rest is history.
Oh, and also, he’s kind of fucking insane:
I was spending my life trying to do something bad, break something. One time I gutted two televisions, two radio sets and a sound system and plucked the speakers out and connected them with wire. I wanted to see what happened if I plugged them all at once, what happened was that they all sounded for some 30-40 seconds before blowing up. Sometime later all of my friends had television in colour so I went to the living room and told my father that we needed a colour TV. “This one works”, he said, pointing to the black and white one, so I threw it on the floor and it broke. They beat me up, but ended up buying a TV and of course, it was in colour. Being beaten up was painful but it lasted little compared with what you would get, so it was worth it. In order to punish me they would lock me up in a storage room that ended up being like my second home. I would spend entire afternoons there, in the dark since there was no [electricity there] and I liked it since I could just make up stories. There was an old bicycle in there and I would pedal backwards for hours, imagining that I was out in the countryside choosing where to build a house (…)
That’s an entire paragraph of an actual interview he conceded, folks, the one out of the two big ones of the time in which he didn’t get mad and sent a formal letter of protest because it painted him as a freak. No, that was this one:
We start with Iberian ham, to which Motos removes the fat with a knife, slice by slice. Once a white mountain is over his plate, the seconds arrive: Two massive lobsters on top of a salad bed. The waiter removes their heads, as the lord doesn’t like them. “Uggh, I couldn’t”. [Motos] says, wrinkling his nose.
But, far from trying to make a character assassination of him, let’s leave it at him being a bit obsessive about some stuff, like his personal image, both in the physical sense (Yes, that’s him), and in the PR one: Motos doesn’t like it when people speak ill of him, to the point that he allegedly frequently has close workers of him send threatening calls to journalists or comedians who dare say something he did was wrong.
And yes, it happens frequently as Motos is kind of a big fountain of drama. He’s been credibly accused of sexism, racism, homophobia while on set.2 So, that’s a lot of threatening calls, and a whole lot of people who, even out of his politics, really, really don’t like him.
People that for years were asking for a David to fight Antena 3’s Goliath. And then they got it.
The Deer King’s Resistance.
If you looked at the barest surface, they’re not that different.
David Broncano is a television host, radio host, stand up comedian and amateur tennist. He was born in Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, to a working class family, and grew up in Andalucía before moving to Madrid to study college. He dropped out, got big in stand up, ended up in the radio, in which he often played a confused reporter that asked bizarre questions to passerbys, then he collaborated in television, in more radio, and was finally found by legendary late night funnyman Andreu Buenafuente, who offered him a show.
Long story short, and I’m simplifying things quite a bit, the result of that offer, following a collaboration in Buenafuente’s own show, was La Resistencia (Lit: The Resistance), a surreal, improvised, late-late-night thing that aired after Buenafuente’s show in the Movistar+ subscription television channel. I described it previously here in a different drama that also involved them as “Imagine if The Eric Andre Show was improvised and had a live audience that may or may not interact with the guest.”, which I still think is a fairly accurate description.
La Resistencia fairly quickly ended up building a cult following thanks to the highlights they uploaded to Youtube that called itself the 1AM club (since that was the time at which the videos were posted) and were stereotyped among themselves as stoned university students with broken schedules that literally had nothing better to do. As it happens, for the sake of a fair disclosure, I was a proud member. And why they got it was fairly understandable, it was underground, it didn’t care about silly things like being polite to the guests, and by the time it was getting to be well-known, the guests it could have in a single week ranged from award-winning scientists, to rappers, graffitti artists or the Polish ambassador. Yes, they did, in fact, have the ambassador of Poland in Spain as a guest, in fact it is generally considered to be one of the best episodes of the show’s entire run.
And, well, while Broncano and Motos’ relationship back then was fairly cordial (Broncano had been a guest in El Hormiguero one time and had come as a surprise accompanying another later), things began to sour up when it turned out that the comedians that worked at La Resistencia liked to make fun of El Hormiguero, usually in a self-deprecating way, but in other times by doing parodies that the Hormiguero folks, in their family-friendly branding, found offensive. Case in point, although as far as I’m aware there were no complaints for this one: Historically El Hormiguero had a section called “Ass or Elbow?”, in which the audience, and sometimes the guest, would have to guess if the closed-up picture shown on-screen was that of a flexed elbow or an ass crack, then La Resistencia parodied it in skits like “Magician or Pedophile?” in which the audience had to guess if… well, you get it. Generally, when asked about it, the staff of La Resistencia would sim…
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