El cuerpo del Deseo, the telenovela Telemundo sold abroad as Second Chance, ran for a single season of 157 episodes. The record dates its first episode and its last episode to the same day, June 7, 2005. The series was a limited run, and its afterlife turned out to be longer than its original broadcast.
Julio Jiménez created it. Telemundo produced it with Film in Florida. The show aired in 25 countries.
A Dead Man in Someone Else’s Body
The premise is the engine. A man comes back from the dead and discovers dark secrets about his beautiful widow. That is the whole hook, and Second Chance does not waste time dressing it up.
The mechanic is transmigration — the passing of a soul into another body after death. The dead man does not return as himself. He returns inside someone else, which means every scene with the widow is a scene where she does not know who she is talking to.
This is the kind of setup that writes its own conflicts. Grief, suspicion and desire all get scrambled into one body.
Diana Osorio, Mario Cimarro and the Cast List
Diana Osorio plays Valeria Guzmán. Andrés García plays Pedro José Donoso. Lorena Rojas plays Isabel Arroyo, the widow at the center of the secrets. Erick Elías is Antonio Domínguez, Martín Karpan is Andrés Corona, Vanessa Villela is Ángela Donoso.
Roberto Moll plays Walter Franco. Anna Silvetti is Abigail Domínguez. Jeannette Lehr is Gaetana Charry. The record lists Mario Cimarro with a question mark in place of a role name.
The ensemble is large because the genre demands it. A telenovela at 157 episodes needs bodies to fill the hours, and Second Chance has them.
What the 157-Episode Run Actually Looks Like
Here is the shape of the thing, laid out plainly. One season, one premiere date, one finale date, and a lot of ground in between.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title | Second Chance (El cuerpo del Deseo) |
| Creator | Julio Jiménez |
| Network | Telemundo |
| Producer | Telemundo and Film in Florida |
| First aired | June 7, 2005 |
| Last aired | June 7, 2005 |
| Seasons | 1 |
| Episodes | 157 |
| Genres | Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy |
| Reach | Aired in 25 countries |
| Score | 7.6 of 10 (TMDB audience score, 525 votes) |
That genre list is doing a lot of work. Comedy, drama, mystery, sci-fi and fantasy all in one column. The fantasy is the transmigration. The mystery is whatever the widow is hiding. The comedy is harder to find in the premise, but it is listed.
The 1992 Original Nobody Remembers
Second Chance is not the first version. En Cuerpo Ajeno, produced by RTI Colombia in 1992, came first. The source calls that series the first version of El cuerpo del Deseo.
That matters for how we read the show. The idea was already on television more than a decade before Telemundo’s run, and the 2005 series is the one that traveled.
It aired in 25 countries. The Telemundo version is the one that got a second life in another language and another country.
The Ugandan Remake That Outlived It
The clearest proof of Second Chance’s reach is what happened eleven years later. NTV Uganda produced a Ugandan version, also called Second Chance, and it premiered on October 31, 2016, with a premiere event at the Serena Hotel in Kampala.
The Ugandan Second Chance is a remake of El Cuerpo del Deseo. NTV Uganda had aired the original Spanish-language version in 2009, where it drew a large audience, and later acquired the rights to make its own.
The Ugandan cast includes former UNEB Chairman Fagil Mandy as Peter Byekwaso, former Miss Uganda Stellah Nantumbwe as Isabel Byekwaso, media personality Laura Kahunde as Angela, Roger Mugisha as Saava Ssebina, and Housen Mushema as Andrew Masa.
Casting began in early 2015. Mandy and Nantumbwe were the first cast, in the lead roles. More than three thousand Ugandan actors applied through advertised casting calls, though most roles went to well-known performers for easier promotion.
Anita Fabiola played Angela in the first half of the Ugandan show. Laura Kahunde took over the role. The Ugandan plot: Peter Byekwaso, a wealthy old man in a big mansion with his daughter Angela and his servants, marries the younger Isabel. He dies suddenly. Isabel marries employee Andrew. Peter returns through transmigration, inhabiting the body of Saava, a handsome but poor family man.
Why the Widow Is the Whole Show
The widow is the mechanism. In the 2005 version she is Isabel Arroyo, played by Lorena Rojas. In the Ugandan version she is Isabel Byekwaso, played by Stellah Nantumbwe, described as the notorious but sexy young wife of Peter.
The show’s title, Second Chance, points at the dead man. The show’s actual energy points at the woman he married. She is the one with something to hide, and she is the one who has to keep talking to a stranger who knows too much.
That is where the mystery genre earns its place on the list. The fantasy gets the man back on Earth. The mystery is what he finds when he gets there.
A 7.6 and What It Means
The published score is 7.6 out of 10, drawn from a TMDB audience score across 525 votes. That is a solid number for a limited-run telenovela with a single season.
The score is not a rave. It is the number you give a show that does its job. Second Chance is not trying to be difficult. It is trying to hold an audience across 157 episodes, and the audience score suggests it mostly did.
The 2005 version’s real achievement is durability. It aired in 25 countries. It got a Ugandan remake eleven years later. Very few telenovelas get a second life, let alone a third.
What is worth watching here is not the supernatural hook. Transmigration is a device, and the show treats it as one. What is worth watching is the structure the device creates: a man who cannot prove who he is, a widow who cannot afford to believe him, and a house full of people with reasons to keep both of them quiet.
The weak spot is the same as the strength. At 157 episodes, the premise has to stretch, and the genre list — comedy, drama, mystery, sci-fi and fantasy — reads like a show hedging its bets rather than committing to one register. A tighter run might have hit harder.
But the bet paid off. Second Chance is the version that traveled, the version that got remade, and the version that a Ugandan network bought the rights to redo with its own stars. For a limited-run series, that is a long shadow.
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