Cuéntame is the series that made nostalgia commonplace, so durable and stable that it transformed the past into the present. After more than two decades and more than 400 episodes on the air, the board of RTVE this Thursday approved the production of the last season of the series, which will be carried out in collaboration with Ganga Producciones. As confirmed by the public body to this newspaper, a final series of only seven chapters will be broadcast this year, which will conclude the experiences of the Alcántara family in almost 60 years of Spanish history.
The episodes of the 23rd season will tell nothing less than the leap into the new millennium and will cover the period between 1994 and 2001, the public broadcaster has stated. Each of the seven parts will be dedicated to one of the main characters of the series. The couple Alcántara (Mercedes and Antonio), their four children (Inés, Toni, Carlos and María) and the grandmother of the family, Herminia. In the episodes of the Spanish series still airing, events such as the departure of Felipe González from Moncloa and the arrival of José María Aznar, the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco, the weddings of Infantas Elena and Cristina, the deaths of Lola and Antonio Flores, the dreaded Y2K effect that threatened to paralyze the planet, and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
The series began with the memory of 1968, and being so long-lived, it had time to extend its plots to the early 1990s, going through the Franco regime, Franco’s death, the Spanish transition, and the movida. In the final chapters of the past season, he even jumped in time to transition his characters into the coronavirus crisis. Its protagonist, Antonio Alcántara, died in 2021 in one of these chapters set today, as a tribute to all the Spaniards who died every day from the pandemic. “It even seemed disrespectful to us that he survived the Covid after so many people died,” said Joaquín Oristrell, the series’ script coordinator at the time.
Imanol Arias, in Tell Me How It Happened.
No matter what has happened in the country over the years, Álcantara remains a constant in the lives of many Spaniards. Some of them have come of age without having watched television before Cuéntame.
The project sat in the drawers of public and private broadcasters for years without anyone deciding to try it. When it finally hit the La 1 screen on September 13, 2001, a few weeks before the arrival of Operación Triunfo, it almost immediately became a social phenomenon as powerful as the musical competition. At least that’s how it was in the first few seasons. The most viewed chapter, July 3, 2003, averaged more than seven million viewers with a 51% viewership share. Half of the Spanish spectators chose this day to spend the night with the Alcántaras. The phenomenon has spread to other countries, with adaptations in Portugal, Chile, Argentina and Italy not surviving the original series.
Great actors and singers
Some of the great actors of the Spanish industry have passed through it, from its protagonists Imanol Arias and Ana Duato to supporting actors such as María Galiana, Juan Echanove, Terele Pávez and Pere Ponce. Carlos Hipólito has voiced the narrator of the series, one of the sons of the family, Carlos Alcántara, who played Ricardo Gómez on screen in his childhood and adolescence. Irene Visedo, Pablo Rivero, Pilar Punzano and Paula Gallego have also appeared as the leading couple’s other children.
Even its tune was a parade of musical icons of the country: Ana Belén, Rosario Flores, Miguel Bosé, Miguel Ríos, Ana Torroja and Raphael, among others, have covered the Formula Vee classic that gives its name to the series in one of their seasons. Officially, the series is titled Cuéntame cómo paso to avoid conflicts in registering the original name.
Although controversy has also shaped fiction. Almost all focused on their protagonist, Imanol Arias. The most notorious was the conflict with the Treasury that both he and Ana Duato had, to which is added the controversial criticism that Arias has devoted to TVE from time to time and the public dispute he had with Pilar Punzano, an actress who played had one of his daughters for five seasons.
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