The Jo mai mai colognes can be considered an attempt by TV3 to attract young audiences as the house’s iconic series such as Polseres vermelles or Merlí did before. This time the maneuver, as the audience was able to see this Monday, is a little more risky by allocating the 50 minutes of primetime to almost exclusively (and praiseworthy) capturing the teenage target.
It doesn’t have the familiar white tone of Albert Espinosa and it doesn’t include a charismatic Francesc Orella to serve as an anchor for adults accustomed to watching the Catalan channel. The most adult thing that Marc Roma, Uri Garcia, Sergi Pompermayer and Mar Picó offer is the character of Clàudia Riera: a post-adolescent who is as sexually libertine as she is professionally useless, in a constant escape from the obligations of adult life. But let’s go in parts.
When Mai (Clàudia Riera) is caught by her girlfriend in bed with another man, she is left homeless. This forces her to ask for help from her parents (Mireia Aixalà and Pere Ponce), who have not seen her for three years and who know perfectly well that they have a crazy goat as a daughter. If she wants money to go to Canada, she will have to work: the family business is a camp house and Mai will be the monitor of the elderly.
On the first day he has to wake up from his egocentric and responsibilities-free gaze when the kids escape at night to go out to party. And, as the fiction progresses, the colonies will end up with the protagonists lost in the forest while the emergency services search for them against the clock.
It cannot be said that Jo mai mai defies the expectations of what a teen series is. In the pilot episode, the themes and conflicts of the season are hinted at: sexual awakening, cell phone use, sexual identity, insecurities that can mutate into suicidal thoughts and, thanks to the character of Mai, also how coming of age does not entail have clear ideas and understand the path to follow until the deathbed.
At times it seems that Jo mai mai is trying hard to score points in a hurry. He offers a sex scene (without shocking) with Miki Núñez in his first role as an actor. Drugs have to make an appearance with a bag of cocaine on the unexpected initial crazy night. And, to hint at a particularly dramatic character arc that will have to be discovered, one of those registered almost commits suicide while drunk.
To write correct fiction, however, it is not essential to surprise with the treatment of plots or characters. Sometimes it is enough to have a classic and functional presentation, a direction that knows how to convey sympathy with an excessively tight budget (TV3’s eternal obstacle in recent years) and a cast with support points to sustain the story.
The Andorran Clàudia Riera has the talent and charisma to be the pillar that the series needs (and how much her Catalan is appreciated on a TV3 that often forgets about dialect diversity or the quality of the language). She conveys the duplicity of her character: how immature she is with respect to parents and the challenges of adult life, and how older she is compared to the kids she has to supervise. Mireia Aixalà offers a contagious self-confidence as a reference adult, and Maria Morera and Biel Rossell, who surprised in The Messiah, exhibit a more mature interpretive naturalness than expected for her age.
There are moments, in fact, in which Jo mai mai forces the adult viewer to blush when they become aware that it is a product designed for young people: if young people feel challenged by these scenes without feeling ashamed, it will mean that the team has complied with his task. Let’s see if, in addition to having a clear target, he also manages to build solid characters that organically live the expected arcs and musical moments.
