When The Other Side wants to be scary, it does; When he wants to make us laugh, he succeeds. Sometimes that happens in the same scene, with the same dialogue and within the same shot. Where is the trick? how do you achieve it? Very simple: having an absolute genius at the helm. Berto Romero is a wonderful television creator. He was in Look What You’ve Done and he is in The Other Side.
Making humor with parapsychological journalism is not difficult at all. Just mixing those two terms already leads to laughter. The other side uses that little joke that comes out only to build a much more complex building. Nacho Nieto’s (Romero) life crisis has to do with the beyond, but above all with the hereafter. After being practically expelled from the system, Nacho finds one last opportunity to give meaning to his life. He will have to face living enemies and dead villains, with real ghosts and imaginary specters, with an old boss who appears to him (an unusual and superlative Andreu Buenafuente) and with a nemesis in the form of Nacho Vigalondo and the background of that star of the parapsychological journalism [pause for everyone to laugh] that we all know.
The Other Side is a prodigy of writing, directing and acting. In Berto Romero’s second fiction project for Movistar, “the humor is serious and the drama has a comedy rhythm.” This is how Javier Olivares, creator of The Ministry of Time, describes the series’ particular way of mixing genres. The other side is Verónica (that block of flats), it is The Community, it is The Devil’s Seed, it is Scoop, it is The sixth sense and it is Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s horror, it’s comedy and it’s customs.
As in Look What You’ve Done, Berto Romero also leads the cast of The Other Side. But in this case there are no games between reality and fiction (Look What You’ve Done is an autobiographical comedy) and Romero exposes himself a lot as an actor. Test passed. One more.
The other side begins by setting itself a challenge that is as unnecessary as it is challenging: to make a suicide attempt fun without downplaying what it really means to want to take your own life. He also gets it. Shortly after, Buenafuente enters the scene, with all the risk that this entails. Again, Berto gets his way and the duo works perfectly. It is not the perfection that we already know from their joint interventions on TV and podcasts. It’s a different one. It’s new. It’s another side.
“This country is very lucky to have creators like Berto and Los Javis. Very lucky,” Javier Olivares also says. It be absolutely right in the world. Experiencing the careers of Romero, Calvo and Ambrossi in real time is one of the best things about being a spectator of 2023. They are creators who use their enormous audiovisual culture to experiment and propose new paths. And they do it through television series, the most popular audiovisual product that exists. They operate at another level. They are on the other side. The good side.