The woman who works at the counter at Barajas airport has rehearsed the phrase and looks as if what happens in her everyday life is something normal. And the normal thing is that Teresa Lourdes Borrego Campos, Terelu for all of Spain and now for Miami as a whole, invoices the two-by-two portrait that they make of Mediaset’s star presenters and sends it along with to the United States would like to send her suitcase. Because without seeing her shining face (and without her ColaCao), she doesn’t know how to live.
Meanwhile, the rest of his companions (the Kikos, Matamoros and Hernández, María Patiño, Lydia Lozano, Belén Esteban, Víctor Sandoval and Chelo García Cortés) for their part try to settle the pulillo – a kind of huge lectern with stairs – that served around to offer the best exclusives and the best laughs from the late Sálvame. The woman who serves them at the counter at Barajas airport smiles a little at such nonsense. And so, ladies and gentlemen, begins “Every Man for Himself!”, which was just released on Netflix.
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The first three episodes are a near-perfect example of what to include in a Florida reality show. All possible colors combined in one dress, huge sunglasses and always worn indoors. Extensions, false eyelashes, anti-sagging facial fillers, hair transplants, botulinum toxin and hyaluronic acid in industrial quantities. Clearly visible logos, tattoos, lots of tattoos. Gym and operating room. Great buildings, huge and polluting cars. Where should the Sálvame collaborators land if not in Miami Beach? It is your ecosystem, your sacred headquarters, your amniotic fluid. Fantasy, yes, for those who love coffee.
Kiko Matamoros, Kiko Hernández, Terelu Campos and Belén Esteban, in a moment of the first episode of “Every Man for Himself!”.FELIPE HERNÁNDEZ/NETFLIX
Television staff do what they can with the scripts. Perhaps the creators, like every viewer, are aware that such creatures cannot be allowed to run amok without rhyme or reason. But just when you let them loose, oil leaks out. When you’ve just landed at the Miami airport and are on your way to the hotel by bus, something magical happens. When María Patiño stares out the window and says, “Miami reminds me of Australia. It’s very close to the beach.” And Belén, Belén from Spain and wherever she wants, replies: “But you haven’t been to Australia yet! Well, Miami reminds me of Paracuellos.” Detail: Paracuellos del Jarama is the city where the princess and queen of our hearts lives.
From the very beginning it becomes clear that in the city where Enrique Iglesias grew up, there are a thousand and one differences between their culture and ours, no matter how much Spanish they speak. First of all in the language, because the characters in Sálvame are “discussion participants” and not employees. Because, under the pretext that serves as the lynchpin of the reality show, they exhort you to get a job instead of asking for an appointment at a SEPE office, and be careful about what is said, because Here the complaints and the lawyers are serious and rumors are not accepted, but certainties. And to be successful, you need a lot more than the recipe that has worked for Kiko Hernández since he left the second edition of Big Brother: “Dialectics and bad shit.”
Great characters
The backbone of the program is María Belén Esteban Menéndez, who for centuries has escaped the shyness of the first interview that María Teresa Campos did with her on television, when it seemed that she would be the first bullfighter’s wife for whom her husband did business had opened. of bags to pass the time. She now has a different face, a different body and a husband who is an ambulance driver, a daughter who doesn’t want to be famous and a million new friends. Like many Spaniards, he loves taking photos with other celebrities and is insatiable at the opportunity to later show off to colleagues and, above all, enemies. Although Belén defines it as “taking photos” or “throwing them”. It is frighteningly pure and can be the most common of all and also the most sensitive. For example, when he comforts María Patiño while she cries because she thinks of her parents, or when he scolds Víctor Sandoval for the resentment he harbors after his failed marriage to Nacho Polo. Another detail: After the divorce, he dedicated a song to him that essentially consisted of the rapid repetition of two words: “Nacho Polo.” And so forth.
Lydia Lozano, in the first episode of “Every Man for Himself!” FELIPE HERNANDEZ/NETFLIX
Sandoval, by the way, is a person who would end Job’s patience, but he is a great television character who cries, who exaggerates and who says that the house in Miami where he lived for eight years is cursed because of the previous owner I buried children in the garden. And so there’s this whole series of misfortunes that keep happening to him, including the time he was bitten by a spider and almost made him log off. “But how do you know about the previous owner?” they ask him. “Cristina Tárrega told me,” he replies very seriously. This Spain should be granted amnesty.
Storylines on local television programs prove erratic, no matter how good the intentions. Only Belén knows who Jenni Rivera is (not only she knows, everything is known about her and her family), Anuel (“the one who was Karol G’s boyfriend”) and brags about her friendship with Rosalía. The rest of his teammates have more of an attitude of being on vacation, which is understandable in this brutal Benidorm called Miami. And the panelists there have little experience in television like the Spanish one, although we met some of them in the also late Chinese Tales by Jorge Javier Vázquez.
You will enjoy the program, laugh and cry if you are one of those people who have seen its protagonists much more often than some of their family members. For example, if you know about Lydia Lozano’s ability to cry, that the two Kikos united will never be defeated, that Chelo García Cortés is accused of passivity in an issue of Survivors and that he is called Chelordomo for his submissive attitude towards Isabel Pantoja. If you know that Terelu has a reputation for being haughty, that Patiño went to Miami as the owner of two chinchillas and one just died. When he cries with laughter when Belén says to María in the middle of a party on board a yacht: “His name is José Luis, right? “I don’t want to call him El Puma.”
As wonderful as it is indescribable. It’s very beachy.
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