In total, MyNetworkTV planned to air 600 hours of original dramatic programming in HDTV every year.

[3] Parent company News Corporation said MyNetworkTV lost two million dollars per week with the all-telenovela lineup.

Paul Buccieri, Twentieth Television's programming chief, became fascinated by telenovelas in the 1990s, inspired by his Latina mother-in-law's devotion to such shows.

Before it announced MyNetworkTV, Fox offered the telenovelas in syndication under as an anthology titled Desire, which would air one hour each weeknight starting in the fall of 2006.

[9] After receiving lukewarm response from stations not owned by Fox, Twentieth Television decided to pitch the show for June 2006.

It argued that teenagers are out of school and planted in front of their TV sets, while reruns dominate network schedules.

As MyNetworkTV's debut grew closer, Fox dropped the idea of using two umbrella titles for its telenovelas.

Jack Abernethy, chief executive of Fox Television Stations, said before launch that MyNetworkTV's six-day-per-week format was the wave of the future because a traditional schedule costs too much.

[11] Each episode was said to cost about one-tenth the budget of traditional prime-time shows,[12] and even less than the typical daytime soap.

[15] At first, MyNetworkTV called its soap writers "translators" since the projects were adaptations of existing Spanish telenovelas.

Since Segall rented part of the lot to the U.S. government, the telenovelas were shot near a mock Iraqi village used to train military personnel.

[21] Producers built 53 shared living-room sets, which were repurposed by changing colors and camera angles to give them a different look.

[27] So while these serials were said to add campiness, cat-fights and gay sensibility,[28] they were also seen to lack the "cultural depth" and "raw passion" of the Spanish originals.

[29] Camilo Cano, the VP of Caracol Television International, which sold two telenovela formats to MyNetworkTV, said he was satisfied with the English versions.

“The basic elements of the novela were respected,” he said, “which is what concerns us the most.” He said Caracol worked to ensure the adaptations were faithful to the original serials.

CKXT-TV, an independent station in Toronto, Ontario, Canada showed Desire and Fashion House, airing them in the afternoon time slot traditionally held by daytime soap operas.

MyNetwork promoted its telenovelas as trashy melodramas, resembling prime time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty.

[8] While these shows attempted to adhere to the telenovela format and tone, the network's executives and producers developed their own campy interpretation of the genre.

"[8] Robert P. Laurence of the San Diego Union-Tribune complained of "amateurish acting, cheap sets and tedious scripts.

"[33] Robert Bianco of USA Today remarked, "Think of the most incompetent soap opera you've ever seen, imagine something even worse, and there you have MyNetworkTV.

"[36] Also, an executive of another television network told TV Week magazine that the existence of MNTV was "a miracle" because it went from concept to reality in only six months' time.

Then on March 1, 2007, MyNetworkTV announced that it quit developing scripted content altogether, putting an end to its slate of telenovelas.

Under the revised schedule, two hour installments of American Heiress and Saints & Sinners aired on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings through March and April.

Meidel, the new network president, decided that the mixed martial arts IFC Battleground broadcasts on Monday would not deliver an audience to telenovelas the next night.

[47] In addition, the last set of telenovelas were preempted several times for reality specials and other programming before being dropped altogether.