“We took the world’s most popular sport, football, and combined it with this form, the dramatic series, with dramatic effect,” says Marks. The Washington, D.C.-based Search for Common Ground, run by John Marks and Susan Collin, produces The Team in Yemen and versions of the same formula in 16 other countries. Pick almost any social, health or environmental issue, it seems, and there’s a soap opera somewhere that has worked it into a narrative. They’ve supported the search for women kidnapped and trafficked in Argentina, and they are used in the fight against AIDS in the Caribbean. Melodramatic telenovelas have helped bring down the birth rate and stimulated literacy in Mexico and Brazil. Over the last 40 years, such serial dramas have spread far and wide.
As the nongovernmental organization Jones works for likes to say, it is a “soap opera for social change.” The approach is surprising and, in the best possible sense, subversive. “And we do deal with the realities on the ground.” Automatic rifles, wicked-looking hook-bladed daggers, hysterical shouting matches: it’s one confrontation after another on The Team, which is all about conflict resolution, in fact. “There are a lot of guns in the show because Yemen has a lot of guns,” says Jones. It turned out the cameraman also was working as a stand-in and an extra in that scene, so he needed the Kalashnikov for verisimilitude.
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