I’m not going to finish watching Romance whole because if with half the season still seen I’m not really sure what it’s about, his next half doesn’t interest me in the least. It’s not that I don’t understand what happens in this Spanish Prime Video series, it’s that I don’t detect what its creators want to tell us. Romance it’s a showy hodgepodge of things that are “very cool” (ironic quotes) and colorful lights. Also a collection of commonplaces, misinterpretations and funny references to movies, series and comics that, ahem, are very cool. Preceded by a discreet and not very effective promotional campaign (it was as indefinite as the series itself), Romance It is the perfect example of a false good series.
You have to give him the credit, yes, of not having sold beyond their means. Prime Video has not built a marketing strategy around it that, as has happened to HBO with 30 coins, rather than highlighting its successes, it highlights its shortcomings. I guess the idea was wait to see the first reactions of the public and, if they were enthusiastic, add gasoline to the bonfire of the hype of the series. But that has not happened and Romance It joins the long, and in some cases humiliating, list of series that even their own owners despise.
The mix of customs and genderof chorizo sandwiches with monsters, of neons with open fields, does not work in Romance. His surprisingly short episodes pile up dangerously without ever building anything really worthwhile. It doesn’t end up being a high concept, well we cannot explain it in a single sentence, but it also fails to be a choral portrait of characters who do not hide that they are clichés. Lackluster and autopilot interpretations (like Willy Toledo’s) coexist with attempts to exploit the charisma of actresses like Belén Cuesta or Alba Flores, greatly wasted by scripts that give them nothing. And then we have Ricardo Gómez, who seems to continue insisting that he is no longer the Carlitos of Tell me how it happenedas if it had not already been made very clear to us with the splendid The route. There is also in Romance vampires, witches and more things that, since I suppose they appear more in episodes that I have not seen, I imagine that they will be very cool and will be photographed with good light and color contrasts. Mixing cañí Spain with the supernatural is a complicated bet. From there they can come out The Day of the Beast o sacred spiritbut also 30 coins o Romance.
The Prime Video series seems to have a generous budget. It also seems that They have gone into various nonsense and freaks outinstead of script rewrites and meetings in which we ask ourselves what we want our series to be about, what we want it to tell and what all this is for. Romance It’s an expensive toy that I don’t want to play with.. The best way to like it is not to see it. As an idea it’s much cooler than as a series. In her head it sounded spectacular.