Ever since Succession ended in 2023, HBO has spent the past few years introducing one prestige drama after another, with varying degrees of success. Jesse Armstrong’s Roy family saga won 19 Emmys across four seasons and left behind the kind of gap few shows are built to fill. For a time, Industry looked like a plausible heir to that mantle, though its creators said earlier this year that the finance drama will end with season 5, which put the unofficial title back up for grabs.
The interesting part is where HBO Max seems to have found its next contender, because it isn’t another English-language prestige drama at all. Just a few days after its premiere, it’s already climbing the platform’s charts. The show is Collision (or Colisión in its native Spanish), which debuted on HBO Max on Sept. 7 and currently sits at number four on the platform’s US TV rankings per FlixPatrol.
HBO Max’s ‘Collision’ Is Already Climbing the Charts
Collision’s ranking places it inside the top five alongside heavy hitters like Lanterns and President Curtis, which is arguably a striking result for a Spanish-language melodrama with no franchise attached and barely any marketing footprint in the States. Produced by Telemundo Studios, it’s the first telenovela ever made for HBO Max, and the streamer clearly sees it as more than an experiment given the sheer scale of the order. The season runs 39 episodes, opening with a four-episode drop and then releasing five more every Monday through a finale on Oct. 26.
In the show, Macarena Achaga plays Zoé, who returns to Mexico after her father’s death expecting to step into his role atop the family’s corporate empire, only to find that her mother, Belén — played by Colombian screen veteran Margarita Rosa de Francisco — has already taken control and has no intention of giving it up. The setup invites some obvious Succession comparisons: a parent unwilling to let go, an heir who sees the business as her birthright, and a power struggle that spills from the boardroom into family life. Still, this plays in a different register, with the telenovela format naturally pushing those conflicts toward a much more heightened emotional pitch.
HBO Max’s Telenovela Bet Looks Bigger Than a Single Series
In any case, the source material predates the Roys by decades, as the series is adapted from two novels by prolific Spanish author Corín Tellado, whose catalog Telemundo acquired in 2021. Interestingly, Warner Bros. Discovery has been quietly building a Spanish and Portuguese-language melodrama pipeline for HBO Max, with the Brazilian series Scars of Beauty becoming a genuine phenomenon for the platform in Latin America before Collision arrived. The apparent bet is that this kind of serialized drama, with its near-daily release rhythm and expansive episode counts, gives a streamer something weekly prestige dramas can’t, which is a reason to open the app several times a week for two straight months.
