Quimi and Valle, from Companions, They repeated the course. The series was going so well, with episodes exceeding five million viewers, that they could not risk losing the romantic couple that Spain was talking about. In the end, even so, they graduated with the rest. His school life had been extended due to audience issues. The scriptwriters had added one more year to high school, which they unofficially called “the limbo year,” recalls Manuel Ríos San Martín, executive producer since the third season. Thanks to this fit, everyone was on an equal footing and the cast remained on the air for an extra season. Even if, as a headache for the script, They had to cover all the books so that you couldn’t see how old they were. It was the move they had left before facing the Rubicon that high school series go through: when the protagonists have to leave their classrooms and break the status quo.
Thousands of kilometers away, and more than 20 years later, a very different series faces a similar challenge. As happened with Eva Santolaria (Valle) and Antonio Hortelano (Quimi), who asked to leave to dedicate themselves to other projects, the actors of Euphoria They have achieved fame beyond television. Their age makes it increasingly unlikely for them to be 16-year-old characters: Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Hunter Schafer are between 25 and 27, and Alexa Demie, the only one not involved in major Hollywood productions, is over 33. If they came back at the institute they would seem more like the protagonists of Feeling of living or even that Empty classrooms, full hearts that Anabel Alonso parodied in 7 lives. AND Euphoria It was a realistic series, so HBO is only clear that in the third season there will be a time jump that takes them out of the classroom.
There are few unprecedented decisions, from the most surreal to the most clichéd choices. Creator Sam Levinson proposed turning Zendaya’s Rue into a private detective, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Even that wouldn’t be new. Veronica Marsafter leaving first high school and then university, he already starred in a season as an FBI agent, and Betty, Riverdale, became a police officer upon graduation. More contemporary, but almost more surprising, is the other option that Zendaya proposed: turning her character into a surrogate mother, taking her to another stage of her self-destruction. None of the ideas pleased the channel, so they have postponed filming and the stars work on other projects while they wait to see if the series survives and premieres in the announced 2025, three years after its last episode.
In Elite nor did they consider that they would succeed enough to continue. Its actors had a contract for three seasons. “Then we planned to follow the lives of the characters at university, in their first jobs or in their gap year. But we thought it would be more interesting to turn Las Encinas into a nexus,” recalls one of its creators, Carlos Montero: “Half of the cast also wanted to start new projects.”
“The good in Companions The thing is that the teachers were the main characters and we were clear that the protagonist was the school and the school plots. Azcona was continuity,” Ríos responds in the same way about the difference with the Antena 3 series, launched by Manuel Valdivia, compared to others such as Feeling of living either Saved by the Bell, who simply decided to move their characters to a fictional University of California. The scenery changed, but nothing moved. In me and the world They even moved in with the teacher, the iconic Mr. Feeny, pushing the limits of plausibility higher.
Even so, it is not easy to recapture the magic twice. Saved by the Bell: The College Years, more focused on romantic plots, only lasted 19 episodes. In addition to the continuation, the comedy also diversified the strategy with a renewed cast of students, but this time in a second spin-off series, Saved by the Bell: The Next Generation, which maintained teachers and the charismatic Screech as an assistant. Today she is not as remembered, although she had 143 chapters, until the year 2000.
The option of Companions was to change the student body. Already in their last season, Hortelano and Santolaria negotiated to have fewer episodes, and the decision was inevitable. “We did a very long casting from scratch, because we didn’t want to repeat the archetypes in the new group. It is true that recapturing the chemistry of the first gang was difficult, they had hit it off,” recalls Ríos. The character of Manuel Feijóo remained as a teaching fellow, another classic of these changes. The new cast lasted two seasons.
In Elite, the process was staggered, and has been repeated on several occasions: “The challenge was for the new ones to enter with force, but not overshadow those who remained. You stay with those who want to stay, although it has also happened to us that we felt that some were not giving more of themselves,” says Montero, who was on the team at the infinite institute of Physics or chemistry. “When you have two seasons ahead of you and they are in their last year, you start to delay months. It works to a certain extent.”
And for something to work twice is almost impossible. “How to maintain the essence in other characters? Do we maintain it or evolve? Will we get the new ones right? “Will it sound repeated or too different?” says Montero about the discussions at the script table. glee even recorded a reality show to choose his new generation, but the charisma was impossible to replicate, and the producers realized it as the season progressed. The institute, which also included some veteran repeaters, gradually disappeared in favor of Lea Michele and Chris Colfer’s trip to Broadway, where they met Shirley MacLaine, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kate Hudson. The musical also had to deal with the death of one of its leading graduates, Cory Monteith. The same thing happens now to Euphoriawhich between seasons has lost actor Angus Cloud.
Companions, in fact, also opted for a time jump, but using a different strategy: a final film. Ríos San Martín directed I will not fail you, which turned its tone towards an action-chase adventure three years after high school. The idea was to make more films with the same two protagonists who, as they matured, would jump into genres such as horror.
Today, even that is invented. In one of the most surprising graduations in television history, Archie, another repeater, dropped out Riverdale with his partners. Then, from one episode to the next, the series made a time jump of seven years, when the most iconic young man in US popular culture returned from the war. A change that transformed the series from being a story about an institute where there were crimes and some satanic twist, to a series with parallel realities, witches, time travel to the fifties and resurrections of the dead. In television, there are few decisions more risky than leaving school.
Any advice for Euphoria? “The good thing is that the creators and scriptwriters of Euphoria The last thing they need is my advice,” jokes Montero, already an expert in adolescent reinventions.
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