Cable Girls (Netflix Spain) S05: C

The long over due final season for this Spanish soap opera from the creators of Velvet and other soaps. I remember that I watched season 1 really excited about watching a Spanish Netflix production from the same people that hooked me with Miguel Angel Silvestre in Velvet. My first impression was that it had a lot of similarities between these series, that they were more soap operas than tv series. And that feminist was a very strong word to define this show. The first season of this cable girls revolved around men and their love life, not a strong feminist way to start. Still the series was somewhat a little bit of a guilty pleasure, but still far away from Velvet.

Five seasons later they lost track of the story completely, for starters our cable girls are not cable girls anymore. They toned down the love stories and built up a whole story line around equal rights and the Spanish Civil War, with our girls right in the middle of it. This was very far stretched and whatever guilty pleasure was left from watching this show was gone, and it wasn't good enough to be taken seriously. All of this came crumbling down from the third season to date.

For whatever reason Netflix decided to give them a fifth and last season and at the same time divide the 10 episodes into two batch of five episodes. Technically two seasons for the price of one. But season four was a drag, the same goes for the first five episodes of season five. The only thing that I was excited for, it was that it would finally be over. I don't have an answer for you as to why I kept watching if I didn't like it at all.

This last five episodes where very different and in fact it felt as a season six. The unofficial season six. And it was slightly better still they lost the whole charm the series had in favor of a more serious story line trying to give more credibility to the series, and failing to do so.

Still that final episode, in those final moments they did got me remembering the start of the series and how far this ladies have come. But I also remembered how much track they lost from the story. At one point they even say we would always be the cable girls Except they weren't anymore.

I did kinda miss Martiño Rivas who played Carlos Cifuentes even though that whole dynamic between him Lidia Aguilar (played by Blanca Suárez) and Francisco (played by Yon González) was really tiring. Yon was there till the end of the series, but at the same time he wasn't. They sidelined the male characters in favor of making stronger the female ones, specially Lidia.

Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira and Teresa Fernández-Valdés brought to Netflix other series following the same formula of Velvet. Like High Seas with Ivana Baquero, Morocco: Love In Times Of War with Amaia Salamanca, and Instinct with Mario Casas. This last one was internationally distributed by Amazon Prime and their next project is A Private Affair for that platform

Blanca Suárez would be back in the tv series Jaguar that seems to follow Velvet's formula. Although there is not much info about it so far.

This was the incredible and sad story of Cable Girls a series that promised you to become your newest guilty pleasure, but actually helped put Spain in Netflix sight, and with that some other and more memorable productions.