“Valeria is no less like wanting a dress from the latest fashion week in New York and settling for a garment from a corner outlet that you can tell is from past seasons,” I wrote after the premiere of the first season on Netflix. In the adaptation of Elísabet Benavent’s novels, there was a dissonance between how modern it aspired to be, striving to be commercial, feminine and racy, and how old-fashioned it really was, without that witty and witty factor that it raged to have. But Netflix released a second season and I watched it, telling myself it was out of professional duty, and then they released a third and final season and I swallowed that too.
This time there was no possible alibi: the online expectation was more or less non-existent. But I put on the first five minutes expecting to hate it and, after confirming my suspicions, inertia led me to finish it. It is as if Netflix knew human weakness better than anyone, the kind that leads traditional television viewers to not change the channel despite being aware that certain programs suck their brains and souls, and knows how to produce such frivolous content. and easy to see that, given the overwhelming offer of streaming, they lead you to hit the play button because your food gets cold.
In the third season, Valeria is already a successful writer and, therefore, the series does not live in that contradiction of talking about the screwed up job market while its protagonist lives in a flat that would force her to deal with her own vital organs to pay the rent. Of contradictions, there are others, such as the episode dedicated explicitly to feminism in which misogynistic fatphobia is criticized based on the character of Carmen (Paula Malia). It is ironic that such a claim is made for non-regulatory bodies when in the casting process it seemed that there was a very clear requirement (and it was not exactly looking for all the silhouettes that we see on the street).
Valeria would be more digestible if she were more honest in her fantasy and did not make critical comments about our reality from time to time that emphasize the extent to which these characters do not live in our world. It doesn’t help that they live in Madrid but the production is not interested in showing anything about the city, as if the key to a fiction to connect with the international market was to relocate and be in a geographical vacuum. But if it’s bad, it’s because of the way it’s obvious in her monologues, because of the feminine advice that we’ve heard too many times and that here are recited as if Valeria were discovering garlic soup, because of her inability to count gracefully ( unfeigned) romantic and sexual ramblings, and wasted opportunities.
Just watch the bachelorette party episode. Are you telling me that some young women find themselves in a town lost in the middle of nowhere and it takes them more than four seconds to propose to drink themselves blind? Then there is the preparation for the wedding, which includes Carmen’s embarrassing initiative to appear perverted in front of the parish priest in order to marry civilly. Are we in the post-Franco regime and couples don’t talk about such simple issues before getting married? And, when one almost assumes that the characters have to talk about freezing the eggs, one of them celebrates thirty (and the respective crisis) in style at a party that, like so many things in Valeria, forces the viewer to to calculate how the hell you can pay for such self-centered waste.
But Valeria, despite the regrets, has that quality so accessible, so recognizable and so predictable that, by not requiring any effort on the part of the viewer, it is almost inevitable to watch one episode after another, criticizing them while folding clothes, feeling that you are before the white brand of Sex in New York, Girls or Insecure but without any of its virtues. And, watching those episodes, one comes to the conclusion that one still hasn’t understood one’s own mortality: if they had, possibly they wouldn’t have spent so many hours on Valeria, that girl that everyone finds so special and irresistible in this fictional universe. although in twenty-four episodes it has not been known to justify why beyond the color of her hair.
