“My name is Tokyo…”
In the grand tradition of heist crews — and books/movies/TV shows about crooks coming together to pull off a big winner-take-all job — no one uses their real names. They are only known by the cities they live in. You know those two burly, bearded men? That’s Helsinki and Oslo. The Romani with the first-rate take no-shit glare. She’s Nairobi. The baby-faced hacker is Rio, the father-son team go by Moscow and Denver, and the impeccably dressed gent who’ll turn out to be a bit of a sociopath (there’s one in every gang) answers to Berlin. Is the young woman, pointing a gun at camera in the first scene already on the run? Tokyo. She’s going to be your narrator over the next five seasons.
None of them are actually from those places, mind you; they’re all either Spanish or Serbian. It’s just that crafting code names using colors is so 1992, numbers aren’t a feasible option and planets are out of the question because no one wants to be “Mr. Uranus.”It’s so cities. As for the mastermind who’s brought all of them together, the quiet, socially awkward guy with the glasses? He’s the Professor. The plan is to have his associates wear Salvador Dali masks with red jumpsuits, enter Spain’s Royal Mint of Spain, then rob the joint. He knows it won’t be an easy in-and-out job. He’s well aware that the police (notably Raquel, the female officer heading up the response team), the government, and the media will be watching their every move. And the Professor understands that while all of this is happening, he’ll be able to execute his real caper, which is a lot more complicated than what appears to be happening on the surface….
The Spanish TV Show could be called Money HeistA serial crime thriller, a bullet-pocked soap-opera, an epic story about love, or, depending upon your perspective on genres, a makeshift drama for the family and a hilarious workplace comedy. What it is above all else, however, is a massive international crossover hit, and the sort of flex that’s allowed Netflix to both sell foreign-language entertainment in America and bingeable programming around the world. Original title was a 15-episode, two-season series. La Casa de Papel that aired on Spain’s Antena 3 channel in 2017, writer-producer Álex Pina’s story of a stand-off between smooth criminals and the state was purchased by the streaming service, diced up into 22 smaller installments and unleashed upon an unsuspecting global public. The results were so impressive that Netflix ordered three more seasons with huge budgets and high-quality set pieces. What started as a popular regional show that went out with a whimper — viewership in Spain dropped by half during the original run of its second half — turned into a phenomenon that’s inspired copycat crimes and real-life resistance symbology.
It is possible to make Stefon NYC club recommendations if you try to describe the creations and cast. This series It has everything: Shootouts, stand-offs, and screaming matches. Criminal chessmaster, who thinks 15 moves ahead. A HeatA cop-versus criminal scenario in the De Niro style, except that the Pacino counterpart is actively seducing her. This ensemble of actors is a stunning photogenic group. Two major robberies were committed, as well as mini-heists that took place within the main heists. Drunken twerking, Stockholm-syndrome stripteases and a group dance-off to James Brown’s “Sex Machine.”Multidimensional, sympathetic trans character (albeit played by a cisgender performer). A decades-old Italian anti-fascist song (“Bella Ciao”) resurrected as a chart-topping dance hitThis is a short, sharp, slightly off-color description for quick-and-dirty hookups.“Boom, boom, ciao!”).
But wait, there’s more. Later seasons will feature discussions about the ethical ramifications state-sanctioned torture as well as the fragility the global economy and a blimp raining money over Madrid. A pregnant police officer is also featured. Crew members come and go; you witness the death of several major characters, though that doesn’t stop them from returning in a narrative that prizes flashbacks, flip-forwards and a fast, loose approach to timelines. The film features chase scenes, complex action sequences, and an extended siege that feels straight out of a war movie. “Good”Guys become “bad”Via double crosses, triple-crosses and quadruple crosses, guys can be men, and vice versa Violence? There’s lots of it. Sex? Many There are many!It is a lot. The number of plot twists in each episode can become dizzying. At certain points during Money Heist‘s five-season run, it doesn’He can’t seem to leap the shark as much as he can jump over an entire water park filled with Great Whites. This is Prestige TV.
Yet despite — or possibly because of — the sheer volume of ridiculous, logic-straining turns, Heist has not only translated well outside of Spain, it’s managed to become one of the single most watched shows around the world. Before Squid Game the equally popular dystopian thriller from South Korea, the show was Netflix’s number-one foreign-language series by a large margin. In a rare act of corporate synergy and God-level cooperation, Squid Game‘s Park Hae-soo will soon star in a South Korean version of the show, produced by Pina for Netflix.) And given the fact that the streaming service quietly dropped the first two seasons of the show shortly after it had concluded its run on Antena without any promotion whatsoever, the sudden broadening of its fanbase came as a shock. Virtually overnight, the show’The ensemble became stars, and the Dali masks were replaced by them “Anonymous”Guy Fawkes’ mask is used to represent worldwide rebellion. It had been nominated for numerous awards and had become the most-watched television program in more than a dozen countries in Europe and Latin America by the end of the last season. It was the most natural Netflix bump possible, thanks to a lingua francisca of style, a strong cast, and a subversive, anti-authoritarian bent.
TAMARA ARRANZ/NETFLIX
This is a key aspect to understanding why a Spanish citizen would choose to live in Spain. “event”This TV show, which was briefly canceled before it ended, became a huge success. A key part of the Professor’s plan is to turn his gang in to folk heroes — and by keeping the public on their side, they can keep the police and the military from storming the gates, should the presence of hostages stop being a deterrent. Never mind that they are, for practical purposes, a for-profit criminal organization, or the eventual revelation that the Professor has a very personal reason for staging this raiding of the country’s royal mint (and, later, the Bank of Spain). They are modern-day Robin Hoods disguised as capital-R Resistance warriors. Their strategy is to use the media and surveillance tactics as moral jujitsu against state. Documents that indict Spain or other E.U. countries will be exposed. In the third season, they play a central role in exposing documents that indict Spain and other E.U. members for war crimes and other dodgy acts. They become the “good guys”Comparative.
Once you get into the Netflix-produced seasons, with their cash-infused production design and globetrotting location shoots, you can feel the show retrofitting that aspect — the gang members are now internationally recognized as outlaws who stuck it to the man, the Dali visage as meme-to-logo–friendly as Shepard Fairey street art or Che Guevara t-shirt. After the incident, activists and protestors from the Middle East and Asia had adopted red jumpsuits or masks as their uniform. Money HeistThe show was a success at first, and then it grew to be a huge hit with viewers. It evolved into a melodrama that was infused with a sense of rebellion. Spain critics may have criticized the pop resistance stance of Spain as a response to. the country’s austerity measuresFinancial instability and financial problems on the continent. Once HeistHowever, the play was also performed in other parts of the country. Casa de Papel gang’s flipped bird as a mirror to their own issues, whether it was standing up for human rights, standing against totalitarianism or repression, you name it. It was possible to indulge in the usual wish-fulfillment you get with grand escapist entertainment — who wouldn’t be stage an elaborately complex heist and look impossibly cool while doing it, before retiring to your own tropical island? — while plugging in your own subjective machine to rage against. It may have taken stances against sanctioned torture, but the show’s overall political stance was a sexier version of This.
Still, that doesn’t explain how Money Heist managed to conquer the world in record time, or made the seismic impact it’s made everywhere from North Africa to South America. Or how it’s propulsive mix of high melodrama and lowbrow pulp, combined with a slew of genre mash-ups and relentless hit-or-miss twists — we’re still unsure why one already-established bad guy had to inexplicably become a sexual predator in addition to a standard heel — managed to strike a chord with American audiences, even ones weened on post-Reservoir Dogs pomo heist flicks. The fact that the dubbed version seemed to have an edge on its original-language iteration in the U.S. may make those of us who view subtitles as a necessity rather than a hindrance gnash our in teeth in frustration, yet if Netflix’s numbers are to be believed, the show seems to be making audiences more receptive to their foreign programming overall. (Money HeistCrawled so Squid GameCould sprint.
Several of its stars have become bankable outside of Spain as well: Úrsula Corberó, who plays Tokyo, showed up a music video for the J.Balvin/Bad Bunny/Duo LIpa cut “Un Dia”Now, he plays a recurring part in the G.I. Joe franchise; you can catch Álvaro Morte, the charismatic actor who plays the Professor, in Amazon’s bid for the GoT fantasy bullseye, The Wheel of Time. A spin-off series for Pedro Alonso’s Berlin character is in the works, and we assume other beloved characters from the show will drop by as well. To get into the crime-pays side of things, we have yet to do so. Telenovela that first brought them to our attention, as it swerves from thriller to romance to camp to black comedy to WTF face-palming cliffhangers, is to feel like you’ve inhaled a gateway drug of sorts. As the Spanish-Italian. “Spaghetti” Westerns of the 1960s and early ’70s that took a familiar set of genre conventions and Euro-subverted them for their own means, Pina and Co.’s series feels like it bending and banging around heist-movie stories in order to make them its own. It makes a dozen mistakes, but it still gives you plenty of reasons to be giddy at its sheer courage and how high it can go off its own genre fumes. It keeps stealing your heart back. That’s the Real heist.