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Right now only three series automatically make me think about money: Billions, Succession and The Morning Show. Money as a concept and as reality. With Billions and Succession my mental mechanism is obvious: they're both about money. But with The Morning Show, jewel in the crown of Apple TV +, I think of pasta because the promotion of the series worked.

The staggering figures, starting with the salaries of its stars, handled by the glamorous drama of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, sent a clear message: Apple's series were neither afraid to spend nor pressure not to. None of the platform seems cheap (how much would the irrelevant See have cost? And Foundation?) but only The Morning Show managed to get us to take the bait: if it's that expensive, it will have to be good. And it was (it is), but not for that reason.

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Serial killer.

Amazon's message with 'Hunters': look at all the pasta we put in a product that almost nobody will see

  • Writing: ALBERTO REY Madrid

Amazon's message with 'Hunters': look at all the pasta we put in a product that almost nobody will see

Serial killer.

'The left-handed son', the best series of the week: Seville has a special (dark) color

  • Writing: ALBERTO REY Madrid

'The left-handed son', the best series of the week: Seville has a special (dark) color

The opposite is also the case: very expensive and bad series. Projects that are advertised as blockbusters that spare no expense and that when they are finally released ... in this you have polished such a fortune? That's what many of us have thought when watching the first episodes of Citadel. The Russo brothers' megaproject for Prime Video is, it is supposed, the second most expensive production on the platform. The first is, obviously, The Rings of Power, which is not the mother of all series, but at least you do not wonder where the millions have gone: they are on the screen and in the pocket of Tolkien's heirs. The Citadel millions seem to be nowhere.

Citadel proposes a universe that mixes James Bond, Bourne or even Tenet. Something that in theory works, because if not how its creators could have sold it. A very ambitious sale, because Citadel aspires to be an expandable universe, with series derived from the initial one in several territories and languages. The Indian and Italian Citadels are already underway. They have not been released and already drag the dead weight of the first.

Starring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden, Citadel is a series of action, intrigue, espionage, technology, luxury and power. That is also theoretical, because in practice the rehash is very short. The first action scene, set in an aseptic train, slackens on all sides: the choreography is botched, the direction is clumsy, the editing smells provisional and the stars (oh, the stars!) seem to want to give us the reason to those who think that Priyanka and Richard have everything to succeed in Hollywood ... And yet we would bet that they will never succeed.

They are a "yes but no", like everything else in Citadel, except Stanley Tucci and Lesley Manville, who not only surpass Chopra and Madden in charisma, but get their characters genuinely interested us. But the series is about other moves. Of throwing money, basically. Amazon (Prime Video) has plenty of that. What we don't have enough for viewers like me is the time to waste it on nonsense, however expensive it may be. To see things that I neither need nor are worth what they cost I go to Gucci.

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