The best series come down to earth

‘The new years’. The second series by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, as different and at the same time as neat as ‘Antidisturbios’, starts from the concrete, two thirty-year-olds who meet, fall in love and begin a relationship with their comings and goings, their potholes, their goodbyes, to turn the normality, the couple’s routine, into something extraordinarily ordinary. Over a decade, from thirty to forty, the protagonists will discover what it means to become adults, they will enjoy, they will smile, they will cry, they will wallow in ‘carpe diem’, to the rhythm of Nacho Vegas for example, and they will toast with wine every New Year’s Eve and every New Year until life prevails and passes them by. Starring Iria del Río and Francesco Carril, two actors who bring out the unspeakable from their guts, the series created by Sorogoyen together with Paula Fabra and Sara Cano is configured as a visceral generational portrait of our time.

‘Want’. After wowing with his first film, ‘Cinco lobitos’, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa writes and directs his first series, ‘Querer’. The fiction, of four episodes, was not born from his mind but from a kind of assignment from Movistar Plus+, but he took control of it in the engine room, writing, together with Eduard Sola and Júlia de Paz, and directing. Also managing to address a deeply political issue from the most intimate and honest point of view, stopping, in this case of a complaint of rape continued during thirty years of marriage, on the looks, on what is not said, which always speaks more than what is not he shuts up There is no physical violence, but violence is everywhere. In the contained tension and fear of a great Nagore Aranburu, in the arrogance of Pedro Casablanc, in the discomfort and denial of the children, played by Iván Pellicer and Miguel Bernardeu, in the fear of dynamiting a social status acquired from the cradle.

‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’. No, the Prime Video series has nothing to do with the forgettable film in which Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt fell in love more than the starting point. In this case, the couple played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are not until they accept the job of becoming assassins and pose as a married couple. From there, the series hybridizes genres and pivots between thriller and romantic drama, action comedy and spies, using Ingmar Berman and the audacity of the humor in his dialogues to turn the ‘remake’ into one, another , unmissable love story. Of course, with many explosions, bullets and blood.

‘Industry’. The ‘Succession’ of banking, the ‘Game of Thrones’ of finance. The British series reaches its maturity in an epic third season in which there are betrayals, stabbings in the back, families broken by vices and addictions and friends that not even the worst villain would like to have. Also, although the world of capitalism seems cold and calculating, passions abound, the low ones above all, but also, although almost never with a good ending, the romantic ones.

‘True Detective: Polar Night’. From the psychedelic to the supernatural. From the sticky humidity of the smelly swamps that swallow corpses whole to the purity of the immaculate snow, which erases and buries everything, footprints, a last and agonizing breath and even a herd of elk. From an unrecognizable Matthew McConaughey after the grandiose and metaphysical talks to a worn-out Jodie Foster who graduates as a detective more than three decades after her master class with Hannibal. From Louisiana to Alaska had never been such a short distance. Exactly three seasons, just what ‘True Detective’ has needed to return to its origins, to its quintessence. To that first installment that crowned the golden age of the series. The imposing boxer Kali Reis and Foster recover the police couple after Mahershala Ali’s failed solo adventure and, as in Pizzolato’s ‘True Detective’, Issa López resurrects the importance of the landscape, a hostile, esoteric, overwhelming environment . The best wrapping for a mystery and the worst nightmare for those who want to follow a trail. The snow of Ennis forgets very quickly, swallows evidence, kills witnesses, protects the executioner… disorienting everyone in the darkness of its infinite night.

‘See you in another life.’ Another from the Spanish label to crown the stupendous homeland harvest of 2024. The series by the Sánchez Cabezudo brothers does not seek the epic of the greatest jihadist attack on European soil in the explosions but in the tatty germ of 11M, with the unlikely alliance between a former miner who saw a business opportunity exchanging dynamite for hashish and a neighborhood kid, underage, wanting easy money.

‘Always the same day’. The series, disguised as a romantic comedy but exuding drama at each change of cycle, visits Emma and Dexter every five years over two decades to see how life hits them and they push and pull, dissemble and give up. until time runs out, strength falters and the only thing left ends up being the memory. It reinvents the story of the film ‘One day’, which starred Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in 2011.

‘My stuffed reindeer’. The big surprise of the season is the story of how a kind gesture can change your life. Inspired by the life of comedian Richard Gadd, creator and protagonist of the Netflix miniseries, who earned an unhealthy obsession and dangerous harassment for buying a drink and giving a smile to a poor woman in a bar. Layer by layer, the comedian’s traumas are revealed, and he ends up confessing that he suffered a brutal sexual assault.

‘The Penguin’. The series set in a superhero universe that Scorsese would like. It is the origin story of the Batman villain, pure ‘One of ours’ and proof that psychopaths are born, not made. And what’s worse, they don’t change.

‘Shogun’. It did not conquer because of its almost static plot, but because of the technical and production waste of a series that travels to the powder keg of feudal Japan with the help of Jesuits and English pirates in an epic story. There is blood, politics and imposing beauty.