In an ideal world, hugely successful series serve to finance smaller, riskier and more innovative ones. Fictions in which paths are explored that could later be as popular as they are profitable. This is how the cinematographic machinery works when it works well and this is how television could work if it weren’t a radically different industry from movies. There are no festival series nor are there series festivals in which showrunners visionaries, kamikazes and savages can demonstrate that another TV is possible. These figures do exist, but the very configuration of the medium and the business soon domesticates them, in a creative-commercial tension that, well carried out, can be very beneficial. The Javis are perhaps the best example of how you can operate from the margins of the normal and, by demonstrating that there is a real market for fresh ideas, expand your boundaries. Poison is that. Selftape also. AND People talking.
The creator of the latter, Alvaro Carmona, is behind the very interesting Déjate ver, already broadcast on Atresplayer. “It’s not an easy series” would be the easy way to start describing it. Easy and erroneous, prejudiced and almost classist. Let yourself be seen is enjoyable for anyone who asks a series for more than just rehashed plots and recognizable characters. Those of this kind are, in their own perverse way. In the apathy and passivity of Ana (a Macarena Sanz for whom David Lynch would bid high) lies the essence of the character, a lost woman who literally begins to disappear in a world that we don’t know if it is futuristic, dreamlike or parallel. Or all three things at the same time. And also, hilarious. Every easy joke let yourself be seen includes a later questioning that is disconcerting, each absurd dialogue advances the plot and every geek-character with whom Ana crosses paths in her search for, literally too, existence, helps paint that bitter and very clean picture that is the series in which she lives. Costumbrismo and poetry, contemporary art and rubber, almost nothing is left over in Déjate ver. The only thing missing is a good budgetary injection that would allow virtuosos like Robert C. Carrera (photography), Marta Archiles (art) or Nazareth Colomina (costumes) to shine even more. This is the series that should obsess both fans of the most stylized nineties cinema and the kids who were amazed by Severance. Also those we venerate Sunrise, which is no small thing.
There are so many things in let yourself be seen that could have gone wrong and so few that they don’t work. I would like to think that it is a product of the television system in which I believe, one in which there are enormous series for everyone and others, with less fanfare, for a few. Let yourself be seen is one of the second ones, but since I know that it is a series for me, like me I am one of those few who directly questions, I’m very glad it exists. I hope that “from the creator of Déjate ver” is a phrase with which in a while they will sell us the next series by Álvaro Carmona. I will buy it.