#like the regime or mr and mrs smith or das signal jfc

[cantsayidont]

ÉLITE (2018–2024): Trashy, high-gloss Spanish soap opera about students at posh private high school Las Encinas, initially a mix of rich brats and social-climbing scholarship students, whose conflicts result in murders, near-fatalities, and mysterious disappearances: Each of the first five seasons is framed by a police investigation of the latest casualty, a gimmick that really only works in the first season (where it provides a degree of narrative structure and gravitas that would otherwise be lacking).

Even in its best moments, the show's relationship to reality is never strong, and it's sometimes rather witlessly hypocritical (for instance, the narrative is capable of recognizing the injustice of the school forcing Palestinian scholarship student Nadia (Mina El Hammani) to remove her hijab in class, but not enough to not indulge in its own array of islamophobic cliches in its depiction of Nadia's conservative working-class family). Nonetheless, the show gets by for a surprisingly long time on the strength of its cast and direction, buoyed by a welcome refusal to descend into self-mockery even when the plot leaves the rails. None of the male characters is especially endearing, with Itzan Escamilla (as scholarship student Samuel) becoming particularly insufferable and Miguel Bernardeau (more recently the lead on the disappointing 2024 ZORRO show) a little too convincing as rich dickhead Guzmán, but the girls are consistently more interesting, with Mina El Hammani (as Nadia), Ester Expósito (as morally compromised aristocratic rich bitch Carla), and Claudia Salas (as the salty Rebeka, whose mother is a drug dealer, and who ends up one of the show's most genuinely sympathetic characters) making the strongest impressions.

It's not until the sixth season, with all the original cast gone (several of them feet-first), that ÉLITE starts to feel like it's overstayed its welcome, with some flailing attempts to examine serious themes like abusive relationships tripping over the increasingly orgiastic celebration of wealth and privilege (any interest in characters who aren't filthy rich having departed with the last stragglers from the original cast). Although more visually stylish, it feels like it's become a different, much weaker show, and the writers seem to no longer grasp the distinction between "entertainingly messy bitches" and "grating assholes who are no fun to watch"; by the seventh season, there isn't a single character interesting or sympathetic enough to sustain the plot's frequent lurid detours into cloud cuckoo land. (It does at least have the decency to throw one of its most hateful recurring characters off a roof at the end, which I appreciated.)

The forthcoming eighth season will be the last, but Season 7 was already at least two too many, IME. CONTAINS LESBIANS? One of the boys from the early seasons has two moms, but while there are a surprising number of acknowledged mmf and mmm triads, it's not until the fourth season that there are really any wlw relationships among the principal characters, and they always remain distinctly secondary to the boys. VERDICT: More enjoyable than it has any right to be, at least for a while, but its watchability begins a marked decline after the fourth season, and the sixth and seventh seasons are no longer much fun even as trash TV.