If everything continues as before, when we reach the Qatar World Cup in 2022, nearly 4,000 workers will have died in the construction of air-conditioned soccer stadiums in the middle of the desert. It is not clear what exactly such a crazy nonsense raged by all of us, lovers of the king sport, is, but surely something says about the world that we tread and consent. And nothing good. With El Presidente, the eight-episode miniseries by Armando Bó ( The Last Elvis or Animal ) that hides Pablo Larraín among its producers and that premieres today on Amazon Prime happens something similar. On paper it is about bringing to the screen everything that preceded the so - called Fifa-gatewith its outbreak in the media back in 2015. But what you see is not so much the meticulous description of a network as crude as it is laced with bribes, ambitions, robberies, contempt and deaths, which also, like the cold and ruthless radiography of the state (or stage) of things.

It all starts with the death of Humberto Grondona , the almighty godfather of the AFA (the Argentine Football Association). He will be the one who, from the grave as in Billy Wilder's Twilight of the Gods , tells almost in first person how we got here. It is rare because none of the characters is recognizable to a Spanish viewer, even if they know the subject matter, and yet, in the archetype of club director, tripón, stupid, stale and majority shareholder of a construction company, everything seems like a familiarity that scares The ones there are exactly like the ones here. It could not be otherwise.

The series follows the rise and subsequent fall to his golden exile in the United States of Sergio Jaude (gracefully played by Andrés Parra), the former president of the Chilean federation. In a tone of lucid farce, of baroque satire, The President plays at braiding misery with a rashness only seemingly innocent. And there we see how raffles work out, how the brutality of the ultras is fed, how the ignominy of genocides is made up, how corrupts are corrupted and how enormous amounts of money are distributed from a blackness near the blood. All this in an environment that literally explodes the seams of concepts such as machismo, xenophobia, shamelessness or the simplest stupidity. And all, obviously, with the complacency and complicity of the fans. Of all of it, of the fans, of the philosophers of the ball, of the socialists, of the tweeters ...

The entire film is kept at a prudent distance from the moral of what is narrated. It is not the sour speech of the one who rebukes, but rather the wise opinion of the one who, after all, accepts his weaknesses. Yes, it is all a great and cruel lie and, probably, it is the most impudent exhibition of what we are capable of, but it is us. Mysticism does not run hand in hand with that impossible goal or that miraculous gap. He sends the bombastic gesture and in his own way exemplary of the pathetic. Soccer is soccer.

Borges said that soccer is less interesting as a sport than as a generator of fanaticism. So obvious. He also affirmed, in the most popular of his sentences, that soccer is popular because idiocy is also. The president accepts the stupid condition of a reality that is clear that the measure of success, whatever it is and about the pandemic of whoever it is, is always the collective joy of a World Cup.

And four more for this month

1. The head

The Pastor brothers, always so devoted to classic terror and the eternal pandemic, pay homage to John Carpenter's classic The Thing (the enigma of another world) and lock up a group of researchers at the Antarctic International Station. The Mediapro series , which premieres on Orange TV on June 12, promises a rigorously chilling thriller between elusive mystery and blatant survival. It is surprising how good the snow looks in Tenerife, which is where it was shot. That and the fixation of Álex and David for the worlds that end. They are other worlds, but they are in this one.

2. Dark

A journey through time has gone from being an improbable fold in the space-time continuity to, given the pandemic that does not stop, the best vacation option today. On June 27, one of the most addictive, brilliant, unpredictable, and vocationally rare series that recent television has produced lands on Netflix. And the German. We are facing the third and last installment of the labyrinth devised by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. From the first to the last second, everything is a happy paradox. Let's hope that this time the chain will end the ugly vice of impaling English on the original language.

3. Look what you have done

Berto and Sandra grow. They and, above all, their offspring: they are now a large family with twins. Movistar premieres next 18 which is the third season and so a thousand more come. From the first chapter, it has always been a question of building a Morettian comedy in which the lucid newspaper mixes with the obvious joke without giving up mixing fable and reality in what post-humor, as a branch of meta-humor, calls postfiction, which is also metafiction. If you get lost, always follow Eva Ugarte.

4. Perry Mason

For the oldest (but very much), it is impossible not to remember the immense (in the widest sense) Raymond Burr. The youngest (or not so much) will finally be able to know what Chiquito was referring to when he said that of "I am going to put a fine on you that doesn't take it from you or a perrimanso ". On the 22nd , one of his star productions arrives on HBO. Now Matthew Rhys is the mythical lawyer that Erle Stanley Gardner devised in the 1950s. Everything takes place in Los Angeles in the 1930s and the series wants to tell us about the origin of the character who did so much to mythologize and popularize the scene of a trial.

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