Panel in San Sebastián debates the extraordinary boom in Spanish crime series

SAN SEBASTIAN — Since the city began incorporating Spanish television series into its official schedule — think of “The Plague” in 2017 or the one-two punch of “Patria” and “Riot Police” in 2020 — it has used its first Saturday to debate television issues.

This time, the panel focused on crime series with Susana Herreras of Movistar Plus+, Laura Sarmiento, showrunner of the Netflix hit “Intimacy” and lead writer of “Burning Body,” and Elías León Siminiani, co-creator of the 2017 documentaries “El caso Asunta (Operación Nenúfar),” which inspired the 2024 Netflix fiction series “El Caso Asunta.”

Six voices on the panel discussion:

Boom in Spanish crime series

The panel was titled in Spanish “The boom of Spanish crime series.” That seems to be an understatement. According to diversity According to a recent survey by Netflix, seven Spanish titles reached No. 1 on Netflix’s global non-English TV series charts through September 13 this year, spending 15 of the 35 weeks at the top spot during that period. That’s a far better performance than any other non-English speaking country in the world: Korea (8 weeks), Japan (3) and France (2) followed behind. Six of the seven series that reached No. 1 worldwide, spending 13 weeks at the top, were crime series or semi-crime series, from the heist dramedy “Berlin” to the drug cartel drama “Gangs of Galicia” to the gender abuse thriller “Raising Voices”. The boom in crime series is not only evident in Spain. The number of fictionalized true crime series increased by 39% from Sept. 2022 to Aug. 2023 compared to the previous year, as Virginie Mouseler noted at The Wit’s Fresh TV Fiction 2023 Mipcom showcase. Still, Spain’s case is notable.

Streamer Driver

“The advent of platforms changed everything,” Siminiani said. This has several consequences. “The platforms enabled budgets that didn’t exist before, allowing for longer series and far more research,” he said. In addition, series creators began to incorporate their investigative process into the content of the titles, and these were created by investigators and creators without formal legal training. This opened access to the true crime genre in particular, Siminiani argued. For about two years, platforms have also been asking for sister titles, fiction and documentary series. “The opportunity to invent something in a fiction series is much greater today than it was a decade ago. This is a tectonic shift,” he said. One result is the fiction series “El Caso Asunta”, due to be released on Netflix in 2024, one of Spain’s biggest global hits this year.

True crimes bring momentum to crime literature

When series today dramatize criminal proceedings, the pressure and the possibility of investigating motivates others – and for the better. Fran Araujo and Pepe Coira, the main writers of the successful Movistar Plus+ crime series “Hierro” and “Rapa,” “researched, read and created documentaries before and during writing. They let reality overturn their thoughts and changed entire scenes, plots and characters,” said Herreras. “That’s all Movistar Plus+. We don’t want our characters to be clones of foreign crime series, American, French or English lawyers. They have to be lawyers who work here and from here. That is only possible if you make voluntary references to reality.”

character, character

In addition to research, the key to a crime series, Sarmiento argued, is character. “Burning Body,” for example, is inspired by a true crime. But the burning question for Sarmiento is “why?” “There were things about the characters, their lust for life, their dissatisfaction, that seemed very human and recognizable to me,” she said at the panel. So why would such recognizable people, even if they were a little crazy, go so far as to commit murder? That’s what I wanted to find out.”

The advantages of crime novels

“Querer,” the biggest Movistar Plus+ series at this year’s San Sebastián Festival, directed by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, centers on a woman who, after 30 years of a seemingly stable marriage, takes her husband to court, accusing him of three decades of sexual abuse. The series is fictional but inspired by “a mix of real cases,” Herreras said. “Fiction allows us to talk about highly polemical issues, but to frame and nuance them in a way that makes them understandable,” she added. Depending on the case, fiction can give you more tools than nonfiction, Herreras argued, citing the case of Federation Studios’ hit “Samber” at London TV Screenings, in which women from the north of France in the late ’80s are sexually harassed on the same street by the Samber river. It takes more than 30 years to catch a man. “Samber” portrays a society. It seems like a lot of time has passed, but it ties in with current cases in France and indeed with “Querer”.

Partial crime and real crime?

France is proud of its “light crime” series – think of “HPI” or “Tandem”; “Tom & Lola” is also a candidate – which mix the work of female detectives with domestic life and are set in the bright south. Spain, on the other hand, has been mixing crime stories with other genres for years to fill the 70-minute episodes of traditional prime-time series. These now last 45 minutes, but the tradition of the crime mix remains. “Elite”, for example, mixes one death per season, controversial topics and, especially in the earlier episodes, a lot of sex. Crime series are indeed splitting into several subgenres, the panelists noted. One of these is particularly highlighted at this year’s edition in San Sebastián: real crime? In both “I’m Nevenka” by Iciar Bollain and “Querer”, women have to prove in court that sexual harassment or abuse has occurred. This is not a sure-fire success.