My Picks for Spanish Immersion (Partially) on Netflix, Part Two
In my first post on this subject, I said I’d do another list of some of the shows I’ve been watching to keep practicing Spanish every day. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed the shows I picked, though a couple did leave something to be desired. But even the shows I had some complaints about had plenty of value for language practice. So without further ado, here are a few of the programs I’ve been watching lately.
Isabel
This one remains my absolute favorite of all the Spanish shows I’ve ever watched. I watched it from start to finish on Amazon Prime, though they seem to be wishy-washy in their commitment to keeping it available for streaming. This is another historical fiction offering from Spain, and it is one of their best. It follows the story of Isabel I of Castile, the female half of the Spanish Monarchs and the woman credited with setting Spain on its path from being a peninsula of tiny, warring kingdoms to one of Europe’s first modern nation-states. We begin with Isabel’s journey to the court of her half-brother Enrique IV (played by Pablo Derqui, which is totally worth mentioning), and follow her all the way through to her death in 1504, dealing with the drama that led up to her ascension and everything that came after.
The show’s costuming is beautiful, the characters compelling, the acting believable (for the most part), and the set pieces stunning. Though there were a few moments of melodrama that went way over the top, and though the battle scenes made the budget limitations of the show abundantly clear, the script, acting, and plot made these problems minor. This show is one of those real-life versions of Game of Thrones that’s a lot more intriguing because it actually happened. The showrunners generally avoid playing fast and loose with the history. They do take artistic license for the sake of drama and play with the timeline for the sake of runtime, but overall they do a decent job of sticking to the actual facts with comparatively little embellishment (not that the story of Isabel I needs embellishment to be dramatic).
I also appreciated the way the showrunners portrayed the queen. She isn’t lionized or deified, but portrayed as a human being, headstrong and self-assured, but still flawed — with terrible prejudices, oft-debilitating religious zealotry, and a tendency to listen to the wrong people to devastating results. While there were a few historical incidents that were spun more rosily than I’d have preferred (the conquest of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, and the subjugation of the New World all readily come to mind), the overall tendency of the show is to dramatize history without placing too much post-modern judgment or post-modern mindset on its late-medieval subjects, tendencies that many recent historical fiction shows have indulged in much more heavily than this one.
The language is Castellano (of course), but it’s a highly stylized Castellano meant to represent a version of how people would have spoken at the time without being so antiquated that modern audiences can’t understand it. If you’re wanting to improve your command of the “vosotros” tense (as a lot of us US-based learners need to do), this is a great show, since both “usted” and “tu” take a backseat to their second person plural counterpart.
Oscuro Deseo
This Mexican series (now slated for a second season), has all of the drama, suspense, plot twists, and downright fun you’d expect of a 90s telenovela without some of the soapier aspects of the genre. Set in Mexico City, it follows the affair between a married university professor and a one-night stand she meets at a party who isn’t who he says he is. Nobody’s who we think they are, in fact, and as the story unfolds we figure out who is covering for past sins, who’s just an innocent bystander, and who was planning this all along.
For the most part, this is a great series. Your sympathies as a viewer shift often as you discover more and more of the reasons why things happen the way they do and who did/wants what. It’s also refreshing to see a violent, suspenseful show set in Mexico that has nothing to do with drugs. Mexico has unfortunately been pigeonholed by the US entertainment industry as “narco/cartel land,” and it’s nice to see this series so enjoyably busting that stereotype.
One thing that was kind of annoying was all the sex. At first, I quite enjoyed the teasing, safe-for-cable/softcore porn aspect of the show. The actors are all stupendously hot, as are their sexual encounters. However, eventually, it just got to be so much that I started to get a little bored with it. Seriously, let’s either see some full-frontal or get on with the plot. This show chooses the latter option, and fortunately, the sex scenes that overly slow the pace become less frequent.
As far as language learning goes, this is an awesome show to learn Mexican slang. Words like “güey,” “bicho,” “mamar,” and “chingar” pop up frequently (note, some of these are bad words, so don’t throw them around if you don’t know what they mean). Since I’m not as well-versed in Mexican jargon as I am in some other regional dialects, I quite enjoyed getting to know it.
Bottom line: this is a great show and you should definitely give it a watch, especially if you’re headed to Mexico anytime soon.
Vis a Vis
If you liked Orange Is the New Black, this show will tickle your fancy. It’s almost like a Spanish spinoff with a different cast of characters. Besides both focusing on a young, pretty, blonde woman sent to prison even though she doesn’t “belong” there, this is where the similarities end. Most of the show is tied up in a plot about finding a sum of millions of Euros left behind by a now-deceased, bank-robbing former prisoner and the violent war over who gets to keep it once it’s located. The blood flows freely in this conflict, and the body count is way higher than OITNB. No character is really “safe.”
The show starts off kind of dull, but if you watch to about the middle of the first season, you’ll be hooked. The escalating violence of the main antagonists, the mystery of who’s going to wind up on top, and the descent of “normal” people into a world of violence and tit-for-tat vengeance schemes is enough to keep you entertained, at least for the first two seasons.
The biggest issues for me started in the third season. The show was canceled after its second season and then picked up by a different network. They lost a large number of cast members in the process — so many, in fact, that they had to orchestrate a pretty jarring and nonsensical prisoner transfer to explain why the majority of the cast was missing in the new season. This wasn’t necessarily an issue for me at first, but it became one later on when relationships began to lose my interest, character development got sloppier, and plotlines began to repeat themselves in really obvious ways. The final season (El Oasis) helped shake things up, but the finale was still a bit of a disappointment.
Despite its flaws, this show is another marvelous program for learning European Castellano, and an awesome perk is that it has several Latin American characters whose accents are distinct to even a non-native ear in this European setting. You’ll also get to hear Spanish spoken with a non-native accent (East Asian and Middle Eastern mostly), which will throw your ear for a fun little loop. And if you liked Casa de Papel, you’ll enjoy seeing members of its cast popping up throughout the series.
Narcos Mexico
This show deals with the rise of the Guadalajara Cartel and its vicious kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. It mainly focuses on Gallardo’s incredible business acumen and his willingness to sink to equally incredible depths of violence to gain and maintain power. It also deals with the cat-and-mouse games he plays with the DEA and the devastating fallout of his ultimate miscalculation — the torture and murder of Mexican American agent Kiki Camarena.
I said in the last post I liked the original Narcos better than this show, and I maintain that opinion, but that doesn’t mean this is a bad show. In fact, it’s a great show, and if you don’t compare it to its predecessor, you’ll never feel like you’re missing anything. Hell, I know quite a few people who liked this one better than the original. I just personally found myself more invested in the Escobar story than the Gallardo one. Nevertheless, if you liked Narcos, then Narcos Mexico is worth a watch for all the same reasons the original was. It’s got tons of action, tons of drama, and tons of suspense even if you’re already familiar with the history of the early stages of the drug war in Mexico.
On the subject of language learning, this show is basically an extension of Narcos in the sense that it’s Latin American Spanish interspersed with English whenever it’s dealing with the DEA agents or other characters from the US. However, a big difference is you’re going to be hearing a lot of Mexican accents, Mexican dialects, and Mexican slang (we are in Mexico after all). If you’re looking to brush up on your proficiency in the Spanish spoken by our closest neighbors, this is another great show to do it. It’s also just a great show for reviewing Spanish in general because it’ll keep you interested enough to binge watch and forget you’re practicing.
Alta Mar
This show follows two sisters, Eva and Carolina, and their close family members as they become ensnared in an ever-deepening web of mysterious and violent occurrences aboard their ship as it sails across the Atlantic on a voyage from Vigo to Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s. Nazi scheming, ghostly phenomena, and a deadly virus all feature across this show’s three seasons. For the most part, it is an interesting watch, though it missed the mark in a few areas.
On the positive side, the characters are compelling enough to get you to care about them, and their relationships will keep you intrigued for the long-haul. The costumes are fantastic — so fantastic, in fact, they almost make you wish you lived in the 40s just so you could dress like that. The mysteries the characters confront are usually interesting enough to keep you on your toes, and there were definitely a couple of plot twists I didn’t see coming.
On the downside, sometimes this show gets pretty campy. I mean, I know it’s a mystery series and not meant to be Citizen Kane or anything, but the cheesiness can get a little annoying on occasion. A few of the plotlines either go barely resolved or get dropped altogether for no apparent reason. In that same vein, the plot resolutions feel contrived sometimes as well — the characters figure things out way too easy or the solution to the mystery is just somehow magically in front of them. Also, the ending of the third season was rushed, unearned, and frankly quite ludicrous. Season three really could have stood to be as long as the previous two seasons to feel completely resolved.
None of these issues was a big enough deal for me to actually quit watching the show, and I made it all the way to the end, partially because the costumes were so great, partially because the mysteries were compelling enough to keep me watching, and partially because this show is super for language learning. Since the series seems to be marketed to a broader audience than just Spanish viewers, the actors’ accents were comparatively easy to understand. Most of the time I could get through an episode without following the subtitles very closely. Sometimes I even turned them off. So if you want a show you can watch without depending on closed captioning, this one is a good pick.
If you’re looking for an all-around great show to practice Spanish, or you want a deep dive into Castellano, I’d say Isabel is the frontrunner here. If you’re interested in brushing up on your Mexican slang, Oscuro Deseo wins out. And if you just love looking at pretty actors and actresses, Alta Mar will be your new best friend. As always, I’ll be watching more Spanish TV, so I’m sure I’ll do a Part Three to this post at some point in the future.
