by Michael McCarthy
I watched the fourth season of Wrong Side of the Tracks (also known as Entrevias) on Netflix this weekend. It’s an excellent Spanish series about this small suburb where the elderly old guys who’ve lived there all of their lives clash with the drug dealers and other assorted thugs. Definitely a vigilante sort of story.
I think the series was inspired by Gran Turino, that Clint Eastwood movie where he played the racist who ended up taking that kid under his wing and realizing that his racists beliefs were factually incorrect and morally wrong. The main character in Wrong Side of the Tracks, Tirso, starts off as a racist who doesn’t want his granddaughter to come live with him because she’s adopted and she’s Asian. He also doesn’t particularly like his daughter because she’s a lesbian. And he doesn’t like the Brazilian woman who’s squatting in the apartment across from him for racist reasons, too. Honestly, he’s a real asshole when season one begins. But as the series progresses, he gradually changes for the better.
Tirso is played by Jose Coronado (pictured below), a famous Spanish actor. The only other thing I’ve seen him in is The Snow Girl. There’s a second season of The Snow Girl that just came out recently, too, which is called The Snow Girl 2: The Soul Game. But Coronado isn’t in the second season of The Snow Girl much, probably because he was too busy with Wrong Side of the Tracks. In any case, there’s just something I really like about that guy. There’s a Chinese actor named Chow Yun Fat and everyone used to say that he was “the coolest man in the world.” That was his unofficial nickname that followed him everywhere. He just had a certain vibe about him and charisma. And Jose Coronado is kind of like that. I could probably watch Spanish things he’s in even if they didn’t have subtitles in English just because he’s so fascinating to watch.
Entrevias, the title in the photo here, is the original Spanish language title and I think that’s what it’s called in most countries. So far as I have been able to tell, the U.S. is the only place where they dubbed it Wrong Side of the Tracks.
Getting back to The Snow Girl, I felt like season two had an intriguing premise, but then it just made a royal mess with it. And it’s one of those shows where the characters keep doing things that are obviously incredibly stupid of them yet they just keep doing them anyway. Which I blame the writers for. I feel like the writers were just lazy and didn’t give things enough thought. Plus, the game in the show starts off seeming really dark and twisted and you expect the mystery to have an ending that will blow your mind and it just ends up being dumb and illogical. I guess if you loved The Snow Girl you might want to watch it but I really can’t recommend it.
Another show I watched recently was The Recruit. Season 2 just came out. I had thought that I’d watched the first season but then when I went to watch season 2 Netflix started me on the first episode of season 1 because I actually had not watched it. It ended up being a really, really smart spy thriller. Netflix certainly does a lot of spy thrillers and some of them are pretty cheesy but this one was really stylish and different. In some ways, it’s actually a comedy. In any case, the first two episodes were directed by Doug Liman, the director of the movies Swingers, Go and The Bourne Identity. He doesn’t usually direct TV but I think he was one of the producers of this one. If you like stories with spies and lots of action and twists then I would definitely recommend it.
Leave a Reply