Split
Netflix tried to make its first Italian Christmas series Odio il Natale. How did it come out? Well he’s put together all the right ingredients for a respectable cinematic rom-com, there’s the single 30-year-old looking for love over the Christmas holidays, an old-fashioned family who does nothing but ask her when she’ll get it engaged, the lie about the wrong boyfriend, an unbelievable bad luck in love that doesn’t allow her to find a soul mate, the colorful friends from the mother of the family to the virgin girl to the hard-nosed single who doesn’t sleep with men but if you get into it amorous. So far it has to be said that we have the perfect recipe for a successful (and reaching a certain target audience) romantic series. If we then add a suggestive place like Chioggia with its small canals decorated for the festivities, boats, the Venetian Lagoon and a Venice that peeps out with all its charm, then we have bingo, yes, but on paper.
In fact, I hate Christmas is a real triumph (of clichés) and a kind of mega-commercial from the Veneto region, where the place chosen as the setting for this story is so detached from its protagonists (just hear the actors’ accents , who have nothing to do with the place they are in or see how they relate to local culinary traditions, almost as if they are tourists and not locals), to be soulless and just a way to be the public (cunning) to conquer.
The best aspect of the series? Its protagonist, Pilar Fogliati, who manages to give credibility to her character and maintains well the overall framework of the series, which, more than a Netflix title, was perhaps more suited as a television drama.
In summary, I hate Christmas is a series that you can watch without too much effort and without too many expectations. A simple title with a super predictable plot and fairly obvious characters, but maybe that was the goal. One wonders, however, if it wouldn’t have been better to put a little more effort into giving a Christmas story that extra something that could make it different, unique, special and not always the usual hot soup.
Result: 5