Charlotte Davies Madrid

Madrid

Updated Wednesday, April 3, 2024-21:33

"Canary Islands: natural paradise. A place to get lost, relax... and rest in peace."

Sun, beach, sand... and

murders

. All of them ideal ingredients for a tropical vacation with a touch of unbridled adventure (note the irony) or, better yet, for a detective story set in the paradisiacal environment that is the Canary archipelago.

With such a letter of introduction, as discreet as it is direct, Atresmedia launched on January 28 its new fiction bet

Una vida más en Canarias

exclusively on its payment platform, which lands this Thursday in

prime time

on

Antena 3

.

"No one can leave this place. Cancel all trips. There is a murderer on this island."

The person who speaks these words is the veteran homicide inspector

Luis Lacasa

, played by

Ginés García Millán

. Sullen, cold and cerebral, he is a kind of plateau Sherlock Holmes who

harbors a deep hatred for heat, tourists and the world of vacations

. So it does not seem logical precisely that the police officer would disembark in Tenerife to spend a few days

relaxing

after being suspended from the force thanks to a blunder caused by his achromatopsia, a visual disability that makes him see life in shades of gray, without color, a metaphor. of his own existence, after the loss of his wife and the estrangement with his daughter, Jimena (

Luna Zuazu

).

Little did he know, however, that crime would find him in his own hotel when the man he shared a wall with falls off a cliff, with penetrating abdominal trauma - or what appears to be it, without spoilers

,

of course. -. Nor that he is forced to work with the charismatic

Naira Oramas

, played by

Natalia Verbeke

, his "polar opposite", as is the rule in this type of series, to resolve the mess.

"Evidently, Luis is a lonely character who has experienced a lot of pain," García Millán explains to EL MUNDO. "If before he was a very inward person, this physical circumstance - achromatopsia - has made him withdraw more into his world and not be so empathetic with the outside." Naira, on the other hand, "sees everything with optimism and tries to get the positive side of things," as Verbeke describes her. She loves her land, "she is a very intelligent detective, but at the same time she empathizes a lot with the victims, with the pain of others. And from there she works the investigations and at that point she represents a very marked contrast with Luis ".

"It's night and day

," laughs the man from Murcia, whose character meets his match with the detective.

How much truth... The inspector disembarks with the arrogance of the capital, where efficiency and punctuality prevail, but he runs into a Canarian Homicide team - in which he can enjoy the native talent of the hand of

Mari Carmen Sánchez

, who plays Commissioner Cruz Betancourt or

Silvia Naval

and

Sergio Momo

as the young agents Cata and Perdomo, respectively - who arrives at work without rushing, has breakfast twice and has no problem waiting three days for a scientific test. It is not surprising, then, that Luis finds it difficult to get used to life on the islet - sometimes due to lack of desire, yes. What if the tap water, what if the coffee, the

guagua

, the mojo picón and so on...

But, as time goes by, his new reality in the Canary Islands pushes him to leave his comfort zone, reunite with his daughter "and be amazed at a disturbing detail; sometimes, he perceives color in the inspector," reads the synopsis of the fiction, produced by Buendía Estudios Canarias in collaboration with Plano a Plano.

Paco Marín as Ramón Junquera, Luis Lacasa's right hand man.

Paco Marín

, Dariam Coco, María Garralón, Elisa Matilla, Thais Blume and Elena Ballesteros, among others, complete the cast of the series, which was filmed last September in Tenerife, thus becoming

one of the 163 audiovisual productions that the island hosted

in 2023, a new historical record.

"Tenerfeños have a joy of living and, for the contrast between the two characters, it is an idyllic and ideal place. Of course, it is an idyllic place where crimes occur. It sounds paradoxical, doesn't it? That in such a wonderful environment there are dead people "comments the Argentine.

There are dead people at the resort, at the aquarium, at the university - where the

noir

novel reveals its own

whodunnit

- and even on a

film

set

. The scripts are like small scores, thus giving the series a flavor of

Crime in Paradise

- the veteran Franco-British co-production starring a London inspector transferred to an overseas territory that the United Kingdom holds in the Caribbean -, and in each one of them the Homicide team has to solve a criminal case.

Curiously,

One Less Life in the Canary Islands

has

only five 50-minute episodes

, a particularly short season for the habits of free-to-air television in Spain, whose format presented some difficulties for its protagonists.

"The tone of the series," Verbeke begins, "was what cost the most," García Millán interrupts. "Building a series is very difficult because there is a structure that seems determined, but then you make the first chapters and

you have to adjust the tones and that is complicated

," he continues. "Because obviously the characters had to have the seriousness to solve murder cases, but they also needed to have humor and be empathetic and lovable by the public. So

all this was what it cost us in five chapters

, but I think we have defended it well" , explains the actor.

It is not the first time that García Millán and Verbeke coincide on a project. In 2018, they toured national stages with

Espía a una mujer que se mata

, a work based on

Uncle Vania

by Antón Chekhov, covered and directed by Argentine playwright Daniel Veronese. And they hope to do it again in a second season of the series.

"We want to make many more episodes because the characters are going to evolve and will surely later look less like the characters from the first installments. Series are created by walking, they are created by making chapters. And if they are characters loved by the public, you can afford more licenses because the viewers will endure many things," concludes García Millán.