Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty, HBO Max and Discovery
When the team behind The Gordita Chronicles first found out that their show’s corporate overlord was headed for a merger, all hands were on deck. Eva Longoria—an executive producer on the series alongside Zoe Saldaña—allegedly went straight to the top and called HBO exec Casey Bloys.
“She really hunted him down,” showrunner Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz recalled with a laugh during a recent interview with The Daily Beast. The chief content officer seemed reluctant to give a straight answer, the showrunner said, but Longoria wasn’t having it. “He hemmed and hawed a little bit, and then he said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to make it work.’” The reason? HBO Max would no longer be producing “family content.”
That explanation never made much sense to Muñoz-Liebowitz, who noted during our interview that the Gordita creators always saw the series as a straight sitcom. And besides, the showrunner said, Gordita Chronicles was never discoverable under the streamer’s “Family” or “Comedy” categories; it only appeared under “Latino.”