When Univision announced that “Sabado Gigante,” a weekend family variety show, would soon go dark after 53 years on the air, viewers were both puzzled and devastated.

After all, “Sabado Gigante” reaches more than 2 million U.S. viewers a week and many more overseas. It also lords over its time slot on Spanish-language television and, thanks partly to extensive product placement, has been a reliable cash cow Univision.

Cue the applause for Don Francisco, nom de scene Mario Kreutzberger, the Chilean-born emcee who for the last half-century has dominated the Latino living room with his iconic lineup of budding talent, musical and dance sketches, slapstick and interviews with presidents and prom queens.

Univision didn’t say why it’s pulling the plug. Kreutzberger, now 74, only added to the mystery last Saturday when he allowed that “Times have changed, we know that, and because of that we need to look for new challenges.” By Tuesday, his on-air goodbye had replayed more than 530,000 times on Facebook.

The unstated challenge is the demographic earthquake that has hit the Latino community in the U.S., shaking legacy media and tugging at the loyalties and tastes of some of its core customers.

That problem extends across the Latin broadcast spectrum, where younger spectators are deserting legacy shows. Of “Sabado Gigante’s” 2 million regular U.S. viewers, only 307,000 were young adults in the year ending March 31 — a 43 percent decline from the year ending in March 2011.

Across the board, “Giant Saturday” has seen its once-captive audience shrink from around 3.2 million total average viewers in 2008 to around 1.9 million in the U.S. for the week ending March 29. Now the media chatter is over whether Univision needs to change before it, too, declines.

For years, Spanish-language programming seemed to flourish in a cultural bubble, nurtured by its audience’s tightly-knit bond and a storied loyalty to the brands that filled every station break. “Hispanics used to embrace brands as an expression of who they were and to show they were coming up in the world,” said cultural consultant Giovanni Rodriguez, who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, and now advises businesses and government on how to pitch to Hispanic communities. “My dad only believed in Buicks. When we got a new TV, my mom wanted a Zenith,” he told me.

That loyalty may be history. A recent survey showed that most Latinos are no more committed to brands than non-Latino U.S. consumers. The big exceptions are less acculturated Latinos who are still more likely to go out of their way to find their favorite toothpaste or beverage.

Behind that shift, another more fundamental one is reshaping the Latino household, as the children and grandchildren of Hispanics gain on their immigrant relatives. In 2013, for the first time, U.S.-born Hispanics outnumbered those born outside the U.S. in the workplace, according to Pew Research Center.

For these native Hispanics, English is the new Buick. Pew Research Center found that by 2012, some 82 percent of Latinos got at least some of their news in English while nearly a third of them did so exclusively.

Contrast that with 2006, when 78 percent of Hispanics occasionally turned to news in English but only 22 percent relied on English-only media. “English is the lingua franca, and Hispanics want to be part of that global trend,” said Rodriguez.

In its glory, “Sabado Gigante” was not just a fun show but a ritual in Latin households, with whole families and friends gathered for the evening around the television. Now younger, more restless bilingual consumers with their smartphones and video on demand have little patience for Spanish-only variety shows, never mind one that keeps you on the couch with your grandmother for three hours.

In fact, last November Univision announced that it would adapt another iconic format — telenovelas — for the smartphone set, creating Novelas Xpress to carry abridged versions of some of its more popular shows. According to their market research, Hispanics spend 13 percent more time browsing and 39 percent more time watching video on a smartphone than the overall population every month.

In short, one of the U.S.’s fastest-growing consumer demographics — with a projected $1.7 trillion to burn by 2019 — has become a moving target in more ways than one. That point has not been lost on Univision, which in 2013 teamed up with ABC to launch Fusion, an English-language entertainment channel on Hispanic culture aimed for what ratings company Nielsen calls ambicultural consumers. Network neologists use an equally unfortunate term: the rising psychographic.

They might take a cue from Don Francisco, who captured the Latino golden goose decades ago, and now has discovered that having it and holding it are two very different scripts.

Saturday nights for Latinos are usually family nights, and the variety show Sábado Gigante – the Miami-based Spanish-language hybrid of Benny Hill, Saturday Night Live and The Price is Right, which aired across the Americas for 53 years – has long been a big part of that. I didn’t watch the show of my own volition too much after immigrating to the US as a child (I was a nerd who preferred to read books), but it was often on at home following the family meal on Saturday evenings; if we had friends and family over at our apartment on Saturday night, spending time with them meant watching the show. If I happened to be at a friend’s house on a Saturday night, watching the show was a big part of our entertainment.

Sábado Gigante always gave America’s diverse Latinos a shared pop culture vernacular; for immigrant families, it gave us something to connect to with family back home. As long as they had televisions and understood Spanish, a grandmother living in El Salvador, a cousin living in the Dominican Republic, and an uncle living in Paraguay could all share a common reference point with family members living in the US and Canada – much like strangers use Twitter now to talk about Scandal or Game of Thrones.

And, for second generation Latinos who discreetly agonize over our Spanish language attrition. Spanish might be the first language we learned growing up in Latin America, or the first language we learned being born in the US, but many Latinos do most of our formal learning in English – and it influences our understanding of the grammar and vocabulary of our mother tongue. Sábado Gigante’s skits and segments are so over-the-top that it doesn’t matter whether we’ve lost our ability to conjugate verbs into the subjunctive mood, for instance – we will still get the basics and other family members can fill us in on any nuances we missed.

With an audience of about two million people, the 3-hour Univision show (which will come to an end this fall) has remarkably soothed generational, geographical and linguistic divides. Latino families in the US and throughout the Americas still gather around the television screen to watch it, as generations did before us, and many are mourning its end. When Latinos in the US say they’ll miss Sábado Gigante, they sometimes mean they’ll miss the way that it allowed them to connect with other Latinos, and the anxiety over losing the bond that only Sábado Gigante makes possible – and made possible for so long – is predictable.

But coupled with a certain willing silence over the show’s problematic themes, sketches and host, that melancholy illustrates how Latino misogyny and racism is perpetuated in the US. Sábado Gigante and its host are representative of some of the worst supposed Latino culture, and both should have been rejected ages ago.

Sábado Gigante’s host, Mario Kreutzberger – better known as Don Francisco – has become synonymous with Sábado Gigante for more than half a century. Those of us who grew up watching Don Francisco also grew up having to accept his persistent objectification of women to enjoy (or endure) his show. Although I didn’t have the words to articulate it as a child, seeing the way Don Francisco treats women made me cringe – and still does. One of the Sábado Gigante’s best-known segments, for instance, is Miss Colita (roughly translated, it means Miss Ass); a pageant in which women parade around the stage in thongs while Don Francisco comments and audience members vote for their favorite buttocks. Miss Colita contestants willingly sign up for the segment – but also have to cope with Don Francisco’s constant ogling and groping.

But it’s not just Miss Colita contestants who are objectified by Don Francisco on Sábado Gigante: the host also picks women out from the audience – grabbing women of all ages and body types by the hand, wrist, elbow or waist – and comments on their bodies. I don’t know that any woman ever directly rejected Don Francisco’s physical prodding on an aired episode of Sábado Gigante – but he was sued for sexual harassment by a cast member (it was settled out of court).

And, when he’s not busy groping women the show regularly uses little people as caricatures, employs exaggerated gay characters for laughter and regularly fat-shames people – including children.

When it comes to blatantly racist portrayals, the show’s mockery of indigenous peoples in the Americas is profoundly demeaning. Sábado Gigante’s interracial sketches illustrate the stubborn inequity among Latinos in the Americas: although we share a geographic region, Latinos are not one race of people. There are black, indigenous, white, Asian and mixed Latinos who are all subjected to a racial hierarchy – an order that Sábado Gigante doesn’t challenge. As a Latina who’s also indigenous, I connect with the show’s use of the Spanish language yet strongly reject the way that indigenous peoples are portrayed.

The show’s racism doesn’t end with its mockery of indigenous peoples: one of the Sábado Gigante’s best-known recurring characters is La Cuatro, which is short for La Cuatro Dientes (“Four Teeth”), a reference to the character’s social status – poor people, it’s assumed, can’t afford to fix their teeth. Although the actress who portrays her is light skinned and blonde, La Cuatro is often referred to as being savage and wild. In one episode from the show’s later years, viewers learned that La Cuatro is expecting an inheritance from an uncle in Africa, which is eventually delivered by an “African” character sporting a cheetah-print cloth and disheveled hair held together by a large bone.

As English language television struggles to figure out how to portray and serve a Latino audience – from Cristela to George Lopez to Jane the Virgin to Modern Family and beyond – I can’t imagine Sábado Gigante-type antics would ever hit mainstream screens. The stereotypes it employs don’t represent us – but we would also never want non-Latinos to know that those offensive stereotypes are humor in which any of us should continue to traffic. Sábado Gigante symbolizes an outdated thinking about Latinos and comedy that hinges on fetishizing and ridiculing people for ratings; it is ostensibly Latino, but it’s not an indication of who we are or who we’ve striving to become.

Sábado Gigante brought Latinos together across continents and generations, it’s true, but its misogyny and racism became its hallmarks even as the Latinos watching outgrew them. It’s probably too much to hope that the hatred for women, people of color and other marginalized people it perpetuated and institutionalized will die when Univision pulls the show’s plug on 19 September 2015 – but I can dream.

Vme TV, the national Spanish-language television network affiliated with public television stations, has inked a deal with Off the Fence to broadcast a total of 75 hours of nature-focused, educational programming, beginning May 2015.

The array of factual content to air on Vme TV aims to provide a fresh perspective across a range of topics including environment, wildlife, climate and cultures. Off the Fence has been praised with more than 80 recognitions including those awarded by Royal Television Society, Emmy, Golden Panda and Grand Teton.

“Vme TV is pleased to expose our viewers to programming that is rich with knowledge and cultural learning,” said Doris Vogelmann, Vme TV’s vice-president of programming. “We hope to engage families and build on their understanding of their surroundings with content that will offer them a fascinating learning experience.”

This agreement with Off the Fence complements Vme TV’s mission: to provide enriching, quality programming for Hispanic Americans in the United States. By airing these programs, the network offers viewers a superior viewing experience that is entertaining for the entire family while simultaneously peaking interest in learning.

“Vme TV’s platform is a natural fit for Off the Fence,” said Ludo Dufour, sales manager at Off the Fence. “Our content seeks to inspire viewers and shape an understanding of the world around them. Vme TV’s efforts to educate its audiences are without a doubt in tune with what our programming strives to accomplish.”

Available in 43 markets and reaching more than 70 million households in the United States, Vme TV is available through Comcast, DIRECTV, DISH Network and AT&T U-verse.

The 24-hour digital broadcast service is dedicated to entertain, educate and inspire families in Spanish with a contemporary mix of original productions, exclusive premieres, acquisitions, and popular public television programs specially adapted for Hispanics.

You may have to wait an hour, but the concept, camaraderie and the natural chemistry of these barbers is so good that Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey Network wanted in on the fun.

“Lancaster is a really interesting snapshot of what America now looks like,” Morales told Latin Post in an exclusive interview.

“When I went into the little town I saw a buggy, and I heard a group of Mennonites singing in the town square. Then I went a few miles down the road, and I saw a graffiti mural and a barber shop. Thirty percent of the population is Latino. It is just this giant stew of cultures and people, and everyone gets along.”

Led by award-winning barber Amit Corso, the dynamic team of stylishly daring barbers of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian and Ghanaian descent, who are “celebrities” in their own right, are made up of Dré Gonzalez, Alex “Controversy,” Gabriel “Gaby” Rivera, Bryan Sanchez and leading ladies Destiny “Dessi” Bell and Caroline Winkler.

“Although there is serious dedication to the craft, barbering isn’t the only thing going on at the shop — in between the fades and shaves, this band of barbers finds time to bicker, debate, joke around and cook up challenges that range from testing feats of strength to more juvenile endeavors and hijinks,” according to El Rey. “But in the end, it’s the camaraderie in this diverse group that is at the heart of ‘Cutting Crew.’”

“The barber is another version of a DJ or a hip-hop artist,” Morales explained. “The teenagers on the show idolize these guys. They are the coolest guys in the neighborhood. “

Never having to fake anything or recreate scenes, Morales said they were lucky to come across a reality TV show that’s more organic.

“I think that is like with El Rey, it’s just a snapshot of potentially what this audience is looking like,” he said. “It’s a reflection of a really interesting subculture that’s very American. The barber shop is an American institution.”

In light of what’s going on in the world with racial discrimination on the news every day, Morales adds, “What is so endearing is that the clientele is as diverse as America is.”

This Latino brotherhood-type environment is welcoming to all.

“To me, what was interesting was the fact that a lot of the guys had an African-America clientele, and for an African-American guy to have a non-African-American guy cutting his hair is a big deal. It’s a welcoming environment. These are top-notch guys who take their jobs seriously and they want to look good and it comes through in the show. They are the real deal.

“For me it was a thrill,” Morales said of working with Rodriguez. A huge fan of “El Mariachi,” he pointed out that he helped with the opening graphics of the show. “It was such a treat to have him get that involved with the show, but give us the space to do what we do.”

While Morales has yet to sit in the “Cutting Crew” chair and live a little on the edge, he said that if the show gets picked up for a second season that he will commit to getting an El Rey fade on the back of his head! Stay tuned!

El Rey Network’s unscripted series’ “Cutting Crew,” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. beginning April 15, following the 8 p.m. ET/PT airing of “Lucha Underground,” “the addictive, action-packed freestyle wrestling franchise from Emmy Award-winning producer Mark Burnett.”