You have 'House of Cards?' I'll take a telenovela

Recently, I was forced by a cold to cancel a much-anticipated visit to the country. On the upside, I did not have to miss the satisfying finale of Tierra de Reyes (Land of Kings), a Spanish-language telenovela set in Texas ranch country that I had watched faithfully for 159 episodes.

I also was present the next night for the beginning of Bajo El Mismo Cielo (Under the Same Sky). Miss the first episode of one of these complicated plots and you can be lost forever. In this case, I would not have known that Carlos, an undocumented Mexican, needed Adela's help to recover the truck she had stolen and then sold because he needed it to make it big as a landscaper in America. Also, he's going to marry Adela in the end. You heard it here first.

While my friends are tuned to the latest season of Game of Thrones or House of Cards, I am tethered each night to Telemundo for an hour of high-volume histrionics. This is ostensibly to maintain my grasp of Spanish. The truth is I am addicted. I have watched so many telenovelas over 17 years, I have lost count.

Unlike American soaps, telenovelas are finite, lasting five or six months. Stocked with big-breasted babes and men with bulging muscles, they feature sex scenes that border on soft porn, with plenty of tongue action in enthusiastic and protracted besos. Channel-flipping males of my acquaintance confess that they sometimes pause on Univision or Telemundo for an eyeful.

For me, after so many iterations, they hold few surprises. Among the tropes are clouded familial relationships. A weeping unwed mother deposits her newborn daughter on the steps of an orphanage in a rainstorm. The action jumps 20 years, by which time the offspring has become a beautiful model, who falls in love with a handsome older man, who turns out to be her father. Uh-oh.

Sometimes, a loving couple will discover they are half-siblings. Fortunately, the discovery always comes just before there is incestuous sex.

Catholicism is a strong component. Many are the tearful prayers offered to the Virgencita. If a woman becomes pregnant, she may consider having an abortion, but instead she will either fall or be pushed down the steps and miscarry, or have the baby.

Inevitably, at least one and usually more of the characters winds up hospitalized beside a beeping monitor. Beep-beep. More than once, I have seen someone sneak in and suffocate a patient with a pillow. Confining someone in a mental institution is another way of sidelining a character.

Good or bad, I watch each telenovela to the end. The outcome may be obvious, but there are often inventive twists and turns. Case in point: Aurora several years back. Not good but compelling in its originality.

At the age of 20, the unmarried Aurora becomes pregnant with Lorenzo's child. She dies after giving birth to a daughter, Blanca. Aurora's father, a physician with a cryogenics lab, freezes her body. After 20 years, Aurora wakes to find that the baby's father, Lorenzo, is now married to her old best friend, Vanessa. Lorenzo is still in love with Aurora, but so is his son Martin. And, OMG, Aurora begins to wrinkle and her hair to gray, aging as she would have if she hadn't been frozen.

And don't get me started on El Clon, in which a renegade scientist duplicates a baby who grows up to confuse all his relatives. This telenovela, whose heroine, Jade, is trapped in a Muslim marriage, offered a scintillating display of salsa and Middle Eastern dancing and a little lesson in Islamic divorce law.

The first telenovela I watched was Soñadoras in 1998, when the Spanish word for "dreamers" had nothing to do with immigration. The most memorable character was El Feo, who was nerdy, acne-ridden, and had bad teeth. In the end, he gets a makeover and becomes a heartthrob. This, too, is a telenovela trope. In one of the most famous telenovelas, Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, or Ugly Betty, as it was known in America, the protagonist sheds her glasses. What do you know? Cinderella!

Always there is a villain. Women are the snarkiest, but men are the most violent. The just-concluded Tierra de Reyes had one of each, and in the final scene, both end up in a swamp, on the run with two hostages. The male, Leonardo, stumbles into a pit of quicksand. He slowly sinks, laughing maniacally. His accomplice, Isadora, is also dying after being bitten by a snake, as we can tell from her spasmodic twitches.

In a final gesture, she aims her gun at one of the hostages, Arturo, whom she always loved, but then turns it on herself.

Before disappearing forever, Leonardo manages to shoot Arturo, who nevertheless extends a helping hand. It's futile. You can't fight quicksand.

As a telenovela approaches its finale, the words ultimas semanas will appear on the screen. "Final weeks." By then, we have grown weary of the repeated fights, misunderstandings, and couplings. We are ready to begin anew.