The first time I heard about Netflix’s new teen drama “Élite” was from a friend was gushing about how it felt like several great shows in one. If it were a mathematical equation, he said, “Elite” would look something like, “The O.C.” multiplied by “Gossip Girl,” divided by “Veronica Mars,” to the power of “Big Little Lies” — which, to be frank, sounded overwhelming. How could it take on so many tropes at once without becoming an overstuffed Frankenstein of a show?Doona! Season 1 Download
Within 10 minutes, my fears started to melt away. “Élite” does indeed include countless teen show clichés, but it also relishes the opportunity to dig a bit deeper and twist them into more interesting shapes. It interrogates the very tropes it indulges by finding new gears in old plot engines. And with the addition of a smart flashback structure keeping its central murder mystery afloat, Darío Madrona and Carlos Montero’s drama quickly proves addictive enough that it’s hard to stop watching before the end of its eight-episode conclusion.(Though as a quick and crucial sidenote: make sure to select the original “European Spanish” as the overdub with English subtitles before watching; Netflix unfortunately defaults to a distracting English dub for all its foreign titles unless told explicitly otherwise.)
The drama takes place at a — you guessed it — elite Spanish private school, picking up at two crucial moments in its characters’ lives. In the past, three new scholarship students come to the school and quickly shake up its accepted social order. In the present, one of the students has been murdered, and everyone is a suspect.Given this setup of class warfare giving way to murder and intrigue, it’s not long before a bunch (of my favorite) teen show clichés turn up. Within just a couple acts, scholarship kids Samuel (Itzan Escamilla), Christian (Miguel Herrán), and Nadia (Mina El Hammani) find themselves at the epicenter of three classic storylines.
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