‘Cardo’, ‘Todo lo otro’ or the second season of ‘Vida Perfecta’ were born with the intention of presenting little-explored realities in our audiovisual
Among many other functions, the series help us to better understand ourselves. Many fictions explain us, open our eyes, offer us the opportunity to feel reflected in them. This ability to become a mirror so that the viewer can look through them is sometimes comforting and other times shocking. The important thing – if it is well done – is that it does not leave you indifferent. For this to happen, there must be a will to realism, to try to show people and situations with their virtues but also with their miseries, with successes and failures, with graceful faces and with others that do not hide their less flattering parts.
Does that happen with the Spanish series? Increasingly. And the premiere, almost at the same time, of titles such as ‘Cardo’, ‘Todo lo otro’, ‘El tiempo que te give’ and the second season of ‘Vida Perfect’ has contributed to opening the range of stories and roles. The reflection of a diverse society is undoubtedly one of the most relevant challenges currently facing Spanish audiovisuals, which has been accused on occasions of imitating American models rather than transferring our realities to the screen. Diversity concerns ethnic, sexual and gender issues, but also other aspects, which have to do with the settings where the plots take place and with the aspect of the interpreters. Why is it so rare that the protagonist of a series lives in a 50 square meter apartment? Why are love conflicts rarely raised in adult couples? Why aren’t there more fat or ugly people in the cast?
The tyranny of the audiences – when there were only channels with linear programming – has been the excuse many times used to throw back scripts in which portraits appeared with which, presumably, a large part of the public was not going to feel identified. The arrival of new platforms and the change in consumer habits have made it possible to break down some barriers and the series are now more diverse. “Television has given priority to looking a little more like the country that watches them,” said in a recent article the head of television information for ‘The New York Times’. And he put forward various reasons why this was happening: “money, infinite channels and because it is the right thing to do.”
In our country, some data for the moment are not overly encouraging. The first report of the Observatory of Diversity in Audiovisual Media, published in January this year based on films and series released in 2019, indicated that only 80 of the 1301 characters analyzed were LGBTI, that women were underrepresented and that there were hardly any stories with racialized protagonists. In 2020 the figure does not improve much, it goes from a percentage of 6.15% to 7.1%. Another recent study on this subject, promoted by the DAMA entity and by Netflix, directed the gaze towards the directing and script teams, where the number of female professionals is considerably less.
The landing of women – April Zamora, Leticia Dolera, Nadia de Santiago, Ana Rujas and Claudia Costafreda – leading projects has helped the statistics improve. But not only that, also so that stories condemned until now to marginality and stereotype are told. And they have also infused a dose of realism into our fiction, possibly due to the need of their own authors to narrate their experiences rarely represented as they would like. Rujas, creator of ‘Cardo’, has commented that some of the sequences are based on her own experiences, such as that so crude in which a teenager is rejected in a casting because her nose is imperfect. Dolera explained when ‘Perfect Life’ was released that she shared some doubts and reflections with the protagonists of her project. And Zamora has confessed that, finally, ‘Todo lo otro’ is more autobiographical than she herself had originally planned.
A still from ‘Thistle’.
The result of all of them is uneven. ‘Thistle’ reveals truth on all four sides. And much of the ‘guilt’ has to do with their determination not to hide the imperfections of their own reality, the ugliness that surrounds us and that the cameras often ignore. Here the floors are claustrophobic, because if you are 30 years old, your job is precarious and your income is irregular, it is quite likely that you will not be able to reside in a designer attic. Here is a Madrid that extends beyond Malasaña. Neighborhoods like Carabanchel exist. And here, in ‘Cardo’ I mean, you walk through streets full of cars and bars that look like fried food. All this helps the viewer to enter the story more easily and feel closer to the drama posed by the new Atresplayer proposal with the Javis as producers.
The opposite happens in ‘Everything else’, on HBO Max, in which almost nothing is credible. Not the house they share, even if it is old rent as they clarify; nor the bars in the heart of Madrid where there are hardly any people; nor the way in which the protagonists behave, more typical of adolescents than of people in their late 40s.
The two series mentioned are based on particular conflicts but can be read in the key of a generational portrait. The first one achieves it with that heartbreaking tone, which summarizes the discouragement with which many millennials live – and try to survive, drowned by the lack of opportunities and by the false expectations generated around them. The second, however, is shipwrecked because everything that happens seems to have been imposed, from the anecdotes they tell, to an over-illumination that dazzles (for the worse) anyone.
Abril Zamora has introduced a trans character into the plots, but has prevented that from being her main conflict. And that is a step forward. This is precisely one of the claims made by the Diversity Observatory, which asked that papers be written with an identity beyond their sexual orientation or gender, “with drama in their professional careers or in their relationships”, to prevent them from look one-dimensional and skewed.
Other relationships are possible
In this sense, in the second season of ‘Vida Perfecta’ (it premieres on Friday 19 in Movistar) the character of Esther -sister of María (Leticia Dolera) – who faces the anxiety produced by commitment to a relationship and complexity of having a partner with a noticeable age difference. Esther’s new girlfriend allows the series to peek into less cosmopolitan and urban universes, something that it sinned in its first season. Also convincing is the journey he crosses with Gari, the gardener with functional diversity who faces a fatherhood that overwhelms him. His remains an exception, given the scarce presence of protagonists with a disability (2.6% in films and 5.3% in series according to the DAMA report).
Gari, in ‘Perfect Life’.
The new Spanish fictions continue to ignore rural reality, since most are located in the center of towns such as Madrid or Barcelona. ‘The time I give you’ is filmed on the coast of Granada, but the location is not very relevant this time. And that is a pending debt of our audiovisual, more concerned about what happens in overpopulated cities than in emptied Spain, which the homeland literature has approached with novels such as’ Los asquerosos’, ‘Intemperie’ or ‘Un love’.
Although it is not necessary for all series to be realistic, the arrival in the industry of more diverse professionals (the case of Bob Pop and his ‘Lost Maricón’ is another of the most important of the Spanish batch this year) opens the door to narratives with which until now was more difficult to find in our industry.
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