There is a very specific genre of series that I don’t know if it should have space in this section: Netflix filler series. The fact that almost all of us are very clear about what they are and what they are for indicates that the genre is real. “Filling series” could be one of the linear applications. Some belong to that category so obviously that it doesn’t take a minute to classify them. Who is Erin Carter? she is one of them. This British production is exactly what you imagine. That bad.
It generates such a feeling of “I’ve seen this before” that one can only cling to the extra-television to survive it. Or to write a text like this. Who is Erin Carter? It is set in a plausible Barcelona as Marvel’s Wakanda is plausible. Jack Lothian has every right to fictionalize the location as much as he wants, but he will have to assume that in Barcelona, ??where I am writing this, his series seems like nonsense to us. That a substitute teacher (the Erin Carter of the title) and her boyfriend, her nurse, live in a house whose rent they could never afford in the real Barcelona is just one of the details that has made me laugh in a series that is everything. less a comedy. If the fiction in which Erin lives (she hides her real identity and her past: oh, surprise) also proposed a Barcelona that really is another place, who is Erin Carter? It might be funny. That nothing was what it seems because everything is a lie. If that comes in the last stretch of episodes, forget this review. I haven’t gotten that far because the real end of a filler series is when you hit stop.
There is nothing in Who is Erin Carter? to hold on to. The clash of cultures that Jack Lothian could propose does not really happen (for him Barcelona is a sunny London with a beach) and the interactions between characters are so cold that they seem filmed separately. When the always reliable and extremely wasted Pep Ambròs has to defend the worst scene I have seen in recent years, the series is haughtily grotesque. At that point, nothing is credible, nothing makes sense and, above all, nothing has a reason for being.
When it wants, Netflix dares with fictions capable of bending conventions and tropes. Just look at Black Mirror’s Joan is Awful, with Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek, or quirky whims like Wormwood. The platform knows when one of its series is something or nothing, when it is likely to spark a conversation around it and when it is just the background noise of a long nap. The good thing is that almost all of us have already learned to distinguish one from the other.
I started watching Who is Erin Carter? being fully aware that she was pure stuffing, pillow lint and contact lens fluid. What I didn’t imagine was that it would also be absurd that in other places it could be sold as Catalan exoticism but here it only causes embarrassment to others. I don’t care who Erin Carter is.