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Rafael Cobos is very comfortable in Seville... And he knows how to ensure that we are not. Alberto Rodríguez's trusted screenwriter is now a solo creator. With El hijo zurdo, a series recently released on Movistar+, Cobos shows that he is perfectly prepared to fly alone. Without leaving your city, yes. You know: that the most local is always the most universal. The left-handed son could not be more local and yet he comes from winning a very important award at the Cannesseries Festival, where his extreme Sevillanismo gives them the same. It's not an exotic series, it's a good series.

There is no script by Cobos that has not managed to bother me. In La peste (2018), his exploration of the human condition was somewhat overshadowed by the overwhelming production of Movistar+'s first megaproject, but on other occasions, as in the unjustly little remembered After (2009), his gaze on our miseries is the absolute center of the story. And it hurts.

The absolutely contemporary and at the same time nightmarish Seville of After is very similar to that of El hijo zurdo. A bright and vibrant city but also full of forgotten corners, outcasts of the system and problems to solve. We can believe that those of Lola (María León) and her son Lorenzo (Hugo Welzel) are metaphors. We can also read them literally and enjoy the series only as a plot. So I did, preventing The Left-Handed Son from hurting me too much.

There are stories that put you in front of your prejudices. This is one of them. Prejudices about poverty and wealth, class preconceptions about "the Andalusian" or reductionist ideas about having children and knowing how to educate them. It could be that Lola has not known how to raise her own. Or it could all be much more complicated. Because everything is always much more complicated.

El hijo zurdo, which adapts a novel by Rosario Izquierdo, would not be possible on television without the very personal vision of Rafael Cobos. Nor without interpretations such as those of María León or Hugo Welzel. She gets us to love a Lola who couldn't be more confused (wrong?) and he makes us not see him as just another conflict-teenager. A "child/problem," as I heard the other day.

The wonderful Tamara Casellas is not a friend / enemy to use. Maru, his character is, as Casellas defines him, "the light of the series". And light is something that is sorely missed here. Seville has a special color and in El hijo zurdo that color is dark gray pulling black. A twilight and menacing city. A dangerous place where (is it also a metaphor?) it even rains.

Rafael Cobos is not one of those writers who "sell" his series in the first episode. He assumes we'll see it whole. Theirs is something else. A thing that for some will be anti-television, but that, without a doubt, has its space in a panorama, that of the current series, where almost anyone calls himself an author and very few are. Rafael Cobos is and with El hijo zurdo he proves it again.

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