The series, which, with the approval of Miguel Bosé, tells the personal and professional journey of the Amante Bandido singer, is now in its third life. A year ago, the Paramount+ platform released it in the countries where it was available. Spain was not one of them. It only arrived in Spain in March 2023, as one of the star titles at the launch of the SkyShowtime platform. And this Monday (10:50 p.m.) Telecinco gives him his third opportunity, now open, supported by a special evening dedicated to the artist and including an interview with him. He also has a new suit for this third life.
Bosé was conceived as a platform series, so those in charge had no problem with the episodes lasting as many minutes as they needed. The series had six episodes, lasting between 54 minutes for the final episode, the longest, and 45 minutes for the fifth, the shortest. “I seem to remember them even telling us that the shorter they were, the better,” recalls Nacho Faerna, script coordinator and executive producer of the series. However, to adapt to Telecinco’s prime time programming, the channel needed 70-minute episodes. Although the script team consisted of Ángeles González-Sinde, Isabel Vázquez, Boris Izaguirre and Faerna himself, it was the latter who took on the challenge of rearranging the script to meet the new requirements.
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“It was a complicated task because we didn’t have much flexibility,” says Faerna in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS. With the footage they had from the six episodes (296 minutes total), they were able to get four 70-minute episodes (exactly 74 when the split is complete). So I couldn’t do without anything and didn’t have any new material to add. Each original chapter told a story with a beginning and an end, and there were the biggest jumps in time between episodes. The task was not only to turn the duration but also the content of the series on its head.
Iván Sánchez plays the adult Miguel Bosé in the series about his life.
With the option to edit every 70 minutes, Faerna got to work. In his first attempt, he tried to make two new chapters out of the first three episodes and two more out of the remaining three. To do this, he broke the scripts into sequences, noted their duration on cards and placed them on a whiteboard to rearrange the chapters according to storylines. “The problem with that is that while I got something that made sense, episodes that made sense, they weren’t the same length. A first episode of 60 minutes and another of 80 minutes were released.
Then he decided to do a more radical assembly. The solution was found in the final chapter of the original version of the series. This episode begins with the death of Luis Miguel Dominguín, Miguel Bosé’s father. The singer is caught filming in France and travels first by plane, then by train and finally by car to Sotogrande (Cádiz) to attend his father’s funeral. During this journey the final flashbacks emerge, showing the relationship between father and son. “Since the story of all the chapters was based very dramatically on Miguel’s relationship with his parents, especially with Dominguín, and how this affected his relationship with his mother and his career, I thought this would be a good structure for the new montage,” continues Faerna. In this way, the open television version begins with the end of the platform version, with the death of Luis Miguel Dominguín, and the four chapters tell the singer’s life through flashbacks that take place during this journey.
Iván Sánchez as Miguel Bosé in front of his father’s corpse in the final chapter of the series in the platform version.
“It was a very interesting scripting, storytelling and editing exercise. And I think it has an added appeal. The fact that it begins with Dominguín’s death and that everything begins at that moment in Miguel’s life gives the story a different look, things have different nuances that were rather blurry before. And the fans who have already seen the series on streaming and want to see it again will not see the same series, but the same story, but told differently,” explains the screenwriter of the resulting new edition.
It is not the first case of a Spanish series with different versions on free-to-air television and platforms. When La casa de papel moved to Netflix, the Antena 3 series, which originally also had episodes longer than 70 minutes, had to adapt to the international duration of around 40-50 minutes. In this case, the solution was to convert the nine episodes of the first season into 13 episodes of the new length, which was also applied in the second series of chapters. Alberto Caballero, co-creator of El Pueblo, explained in 2019 that for the second season of this comedy they had prepared two versions of each episode, one of 50 and one of 70 minutes. Therefore, they had a shorter version for platforms and recorded certain sequences to achieve the duration required by Telecinco.
José Pastor, in the series “Bosé”.
In Bosé, the recomposition has also led to the need to rearrange the songs that accompany certain moments. “We often use Miguel’s songs as a background for things that are happening, and now there are songs that are in a different place and used in a different way,” explains the executive producer and screenwriter. If You Don’t Come Back or Captain Trueno’s Son can now be heard in other places. The chapter titles have also changed. “On the one hand, for practical reasons of registration and identification of the work: they are two versions of the series, they are two different things, and they had to have a different name,” explains Faerna. Additionally, each chapter is titled with a song by Miguel Bosé about a symbolic moment that occurs in the episode. Now they are called “Captain Trueno’s Son”, “Don Diablo”, “Bandido” and “Morena Mia”. Previously the chapters were called “Linda”, “I Will Love You”, “Bravi Ragazzi”, “Salamandra”, “The Boys Don’t Cry” and “If You Don’t Come Back”.
For the remake, Faerna consulted at times with his script colleagues and the series’ directors. The one who doesn’t know the result is Miguel Bosé. “He worked on the script, I met with him for hours and days and he told me memories, showed photos… But when we started writing, he didn’t intervene. Regarding the comeback, he asked me at the press conference the other day, “How did it turn out?” I told him the same thing I’m telling you and he told me he couldn’t wait to see it. We didn’t have to ask for his permission at all, he allowed us to work in complete freedom,” explains Nacho Faerna.
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