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Just because a series is over doesn’t mean it’s forgotten. Coming back to re-examining his stories with today’s eyes is an exercise as interesting as it is nostalgic. The peak of television production coincides with the audio explosion. Some proposals combine both worlds in non-professional podcasts in Spanish about already completed series.
Journalist Javier P. Martín wanted to restore Lost from the first chapter. A podcast that has commented on the series since its inception, Lost (on ivoox, Spotify, Apple), was the perfect excuse. “I wanted it to be a conversation about the show, not just an analysis on my part. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I understand the current fashion: it’s a medium that keeps us a lot of company and has a good mix of learning, humor and personality,” he explains. Martín describes Lost as a strange case within the series that marked an era: “Unlike others like Friends, The Simpsons or No one lives here, which are revisited all the time, 2022 doesn’t seem like anyone gets hooked on Lost for the first time. Those who saw it then, we live it as a unique experience, and we know it changed television fiction, but it didn’t leave a legacy as tangible as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. Each episode has one or more guests commenting on two episodes of a production being taped at the host’s home. “The good thing about the Internet is that you can do anything with little and that people hear, read or see it.”
While Perdidas has just been on the air for a year, the Sex in New York podcast (on iVoox, Spotify) launched in March of this year. In it, two friends, journalist Raquel Piñeiro and teacher Patricia Blanco, comment on Sarah Jessica Parker’s series as they reflect on their lives, with a special role for Pontevedra, the city that binds them. The episodes are recorded while chatting remotely via Skype. For Piñeiro, the HBO comedy is a series that, despite its importance in popular culture, “has been reviled and criticized for being ‘for girls’, frivolous, consumerist, etc., despite being one of the most agile shows and best written of the last.” decades”. The two agree that the hardest part about running the podcast is finding space to record. Still, they’re worth it. “It’s almost therapy. Having a little time each week to sit down and talk to a friend is wonderful. I would pay for it,” says Blanco. “Listeners write to us and tell us that listening is like having coffee with some friends who you have a laugh with, and that’s the best they can tell you,” adds Piñeiro.
Not only foreign series deserve a review accompanied by a podcast, some Spanish titles that marked an era are also the subject of this current review. Humor is the protagonist of The Nacho Martín Project (on iVoox, Spotify, Apple) in which journalist Noel Ceballos and Twitter star El Hematocritico (teacher and writer Miguel López) describe Family Doctor. They’re taking it easy because the project started in 2014 and they’re still in the third season of the legendary Telecinco fiction. Why the Emilio Aragón series? “Spanish fiction started with Family Doctor,” summarizes Ceballos. “He brought a lot of recipes from American television. Also, it seemed to us that everyone has a hazy memory of their characters, their sets, and plots, but re-exploring them from the perspective of the present is a very different experience: what passed for entertainment white family in the mid-1990s and is politically correct today pure punk subversion that could never be broadcast on free television”.
In 2017, Radio Azcona (on iVoox, Spotify) launched the podcast where Nacho Toribio, Alba Cordero and Lalachus (Laura Yustres) invoke nostalgia to comment on compañeros. Although they recognize that the hardest thing “in adult life” is finding time to spend an afternoon watching and commenting on the series, they make the effort worthwhile by meeting up for a snack and hanging out with friends over the series or others speak different topic, let it arise “When you see other people accompanying you, listening to you and even looking at compañeros, it’s really satisfying,” say Toribio and Cordero. In his case, the recording process is even more rudimentary: a recorder in the middle of the table. “Don’t miss the fun component,” the authors add. Although they haven’t recorded any new episodes since April (they stayed in Chapter 11 of Season 3 of the 9 that the show had), they hope to meet again to share the adventures of Valle, Quimi and Co. “with a tub full ” to comment on hummus and chocolate donuts”.
How have these titles aged? “Lost was a pivotal series that stuck to the traditional rules of free-to-air television in the United States in the 1990s, but broke them and did things that were very innovative and revolutionary at the time,” says Javier P. Martin. With this review, he changed his mind about some characters, such as Jack, who “has revealed himself as a monumental bore, a toxic guy who whines at women if they don’t take him home”. For the writers of the Sex and the City Podcast, their series has aged pretty badly. “Anything to do with gender politics is complex,” says Raquel Piñeiro. “The series was groundbreaking and is both revolutionary and at times reactionary. There are millions of things that squeak, but many squeaked even then. But it continues to stand up wonderfully to infinite revisions,” he concludes.
Noel Ceballos highlights the enormous distance between the memory of Family Doctor as a product for the whole family and its reality. “If these scripts were filmed today, prosecutors would act ex officio: jokes about pedophilia, wild classism, constant sexual innuendos, racism, homophobia… To watch those first seasons again is to realize how far we’ve come because the series was nothing more than a reflection of that society.” For Nacho Toribio and Alba Cordero there are things in compañeros that are “enormously progressive for their time”. Despite this, they acknowledge that there were still many steps to be taken in terms of machismo, homophobia or inclusion since it was a series that began in 1998.
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