I’m not going to finish watching Romancero in its entirety because even after half the season I’ve seen it I’m still not very clear about what it’s about, the next half doesn’t interest me in the least. It’s not that I don’t understand what happens in this Spanish Prime Video series, it’s that I don’t detect what its creators want to tell us. Romancero is a colorful hodgepodge of things that are “very cool” (ironic quotes) and colorful lights. Also a collection of commonplaces, misinterpretations and funny references to movies, series and comics that, ahem, are very cool. Preceded by a discreet and not very effective promotional campaign (it was as indefinite as the series itself), Romancero is the perfect example of a false good series.
We must give him credit, however, for not having sold himself beyond his means. Prime Video has not built a marketing strategy around it that, as has happened to HBO with 30 coins, rather than highlighting its successes, it highlights its shortcomings. I suppose the idea was to wait to see the first reactions from the public and, if they were enthusiastic, add gasoline to the fire of hype for the series. But that has not happened and Romancero joins the long, and in some cases humiliating, list of series that even their own owners despise.
The mixture of customs and genre, of chorizo ??sandwiches with monsters, of neons with open fields, does not work in Romancero. His surprisingly short episodes pile up dangerously without building anything really worthwhile. It is not quite a high concept, since we cannot explain it in a single sentence, but it also does not manage to be a choral portrait of characters who do not hide that they are clichés. Lackluster and autopilot interpretations (like Willy Toledo’s) coexist with attempts to exploit the charisma of actresses like Belén Cuesta or Alba Flores, wasted by scripts that give them nothing. And then we have Ricardo Gómez, who seems to continue insisting that he is no longer Carlitos from Tell Me How It Happened, as if he had not already made it very clear to us with the splendid La ruta. There are also vampires, witches and more things in Romancero that, since I suppose they appear more in episodes that I have not seen, I imagine that they will be very cool and will be photographed with good light and color contrasts. Mixing cañí Spain with the supernatural is a complicated bet. From there you can get The Day of the Beast or Holy Spirit, but also 30 coins or Romancero.
The Prime Video series seems to have a generous budget. It also seems that they have been involved in various nonsense and freakouts, instead of in script rewrites and meetings in which we ask ourselves what we want our series to be about, what we want it to tell and what all this is for. Romancero is an expensive toy that I don’t want to play with. The best way to like it is not to see it. As an idea it’s much cooler than as a series. In his head it sounded spectacular.
