Alberto Caballero: "The fun thing about TV is that nobody has any idea what's going to hit it"

The production company of the Caballero brothers, Laura and Alberto, is called Contubernio —all meanings of the term according to the RAE apply to them, they say— and it is located on Calle de José Isbert, in a polygon on the outskirts of Madrid that is deserted early in the morning. pm.

Alberto, co-creator with Laura of the soap operas

(

) and

(

), arrives on time for the appointment, enters his domain skidding behind the wheel of a red Porsche sports convertible, says hello, super colleague, and begins to return verbal balls with very wide sleeves, a fencer's waist and machine gun speed.

He doesn't miss a single one.

What kind of neighbor could Pepe Isbert have played in the series?

To anyone, I wish it had been possible.

We almost managed, yes, that José Sazatornil,

, was Bartolomé Zuluaga, the "teacher and mentor" of the president of the community, Juan Cuesta.

A kind of president emeritus.

But by then he was already half retired.

Our great luxuries have been having Emma Penella, Mariví Bilbao, Eduardo Gómez, Gemma Cuervo and so many wonderful veterans.

I have to confess that I hate him a little: if I want to watch something on TV with my twenty-something daughters, I have to swallow old

They tell me that a lot on the street.

Parents with hooked children who also begin to use ploys from the series with them.

And then there are the people who wear it to disconnect, to relax, even to sleep.

Think that we have had one crisis after another, a pandemic and a war.

The series is kind of a comfortable place to come back to.

Paolo Vasile called it “the karaoke effect

.

Knowing the series plays in favor of history.

We all have our karaoke set.

The revenge of comedy is its permanence in time.

Do they recognize you on the street?

Well, there are a lot of geeks in the series, yes, but above all they recognize me through my partners.

[Caballero has successively dated actresses María Adánez, Vanessa Romero, whom he eventually married, and Miren Ibarguren, with whom he became a father this summer].

The job has been his Tinder.

Totally, but there is an explanation: from the age of 30 to 40, I practically lived on the filming

.

If I had had to go out to meet people I would have died.

So, one thing led to another, but then they have been long and satisfying relationships, huh?

[laughs] and we're such friends.

Phrases like “how cute this girl is always”, or “I'm Concha, I'm coming in”, have become commonly used fillers.

For when an

None of it is premeditated.

Those things were arising naturally and absurdly.

And when we realized that they worked, we slipped them into the plots in an economy of means plan.

You never know which one is going to work.

The funny thing about the TV business is that no one has a fucking clue what's going to blow up, and that's great.

You can learn what you don't have to do.

But why your story suddenly hits the mark or is a failure, no one knows.

Neither the gurus, nor the managers, nobody.

It's very cool because an entire industry has been created around something that nobody knows.

And among the ignorance, are you the smart ones or the lucky ones?

I think there is some filly, yes.

And, also, a certain way of connecting with reality.

To be attentive to what happens.

They said of Arniches that when he ran out of ideas, he took the tram and listened to what people were talking about.

You are in a Porsche.

But I am alert.

To my environment, to the conversations, to the media, to your friends, to what they tell you, to the newspapers, to the networks.

For me, as a screenwriter, he puts me in the here and now.

Even go a little further.

In

, Mauri, a gay character, had a child with Bea, who was a lesbian, and that was almost 20 years ago.

We didn't have a secret plan to modernize the audience.

What we wanted was to be free, and we were young and unconscious.

Then, when you notice success, when two channels fight to broadcast you, you take responsibility.

But it has always given us the transgressive dot.

Also to continue in this after so long.

Now, with

, we are going to make a self-criticism about how lost we guys are in the face of feminism.

And we're going to sack.

Are you

Well, both things, and others, sure.

White, posh, It's about laughing at it without fear.

Surely there are those who accuse us of being macho and

, and, others, of wanting to indoctrinate the audience.

My co-writer and friend Dani Deorador already says it: whoever wants to see faces in the gotelé will see them.

But we are going to make a transgressive series, without that the comedy remains mere nonsense.

Does white humor bore you?

It's not that I'm bored, it's that I hate it.

For that, I would do drama, so that you can talk about

things .

We have never done white comedy and I don't think we will.

Another thing is that it can come out more or less tender.

I'd rather there be no morally defensible character than a soft one.

Your neighbors are losers.

It is that the basis of comedy is misfortune.

Almost all of our stories are about decay.

In a community of neighbors you have the entire catalog of human misery.

's success

is the miserability of its characters.

You consider yourself a good person, but sometimes you can think really barbaric things.

For this reason, a character like Antonio Recio or Amador Ríos, macho, homophobic, xenophobic, can be any of us from time to time, if only because of the culture we have sucked into.

It is very sad to see deceased actors in old chapters of their series: Emma Penella, Mariví Bilbao, Eduardo Gómez, or retired due to health, such as José Luis Gil, the mythical president Juan Cuesta.

That is tremendous.

But it is going to be 20 years since the premiere of

.

It is a generation.

Right now, the average age of the actors is 55 years old, and here we don't throw anyone out of age.

Look: last year, before he suffered a stroke, I took a photo with José Luis Gil, who plays Juan Cuesta, and I was already as old as his character when we started.

So, I saw him as a family man, not as an old man, but as a gentleman.

At 48, aren't you a gentleman?

Well, I should start to see myself as such, but I can't.

Mentally, I have stayed in my 30s. We are from a generation, that of the Transition, that we have not had great battles or suffering, very pampered, so, mature for what?

Now you have a baby.

Let's see, I'm pretty much Peter Pan, but not a particularly crazed person.

Keep in mind, this is what my sister Laura says a lot, that we have been managing a series with tons of people for 20 years and, sometimes, the neighborhood associations were a schoolyard.

What is it like to manage so much ego and get out alive?

Forge character, you learn and you take sticks.

The first thing you have to manage is yours.

Are you well served?

Some will tell you that I am the most conceited in the world and others, that I am super humble and super nice.

In the end, my sister and I have tried to tame our egos, because we have been very, very lucky.

Things have happened to us that normally don't happen.

You don't have to be successful in life, nor so sustained over time.

We have been working on series that work for 20 uninterrupted years and that, ask any writer or director, is a very rare thing.

You must be the most lined family business in Spanish audiovisual.

Well, familiar, sure, because we have remained independent and this has been very important to continue, because there is an obsession in the audiovisual industry to make conglomerates and buy you.

We have not sold ourselves basically for comfort, so as not to explain to anyone what we want to do and because next year, what I want is to retire to raise my baby.

Pasta is never enough.

Lie.

Pasta is a means, not an end.

We are a creative producer.

If you think of a mega company, you lose the essence of why you started in this, what you liked, which is saying bullshit in front of two of your friends and a computer, which is basically what we continue to do.

POWERFULL KNIGHT

Alberto Caballero (Madrid, 48 years old) is the nephew of the legendary, and controversial, ventriloquist and producer José Luis Moreno, from whom he separated professionally and personally a long time ago.

"We are very different," explains Caballero, "for a long time, it was a blessing to be able to learn about the trade through him, we lived through great times and learned a lot, but the massive success changed everything. He is a difficult man, there came a time in which our ways of seeing production and the relationship with the teams were totally different, and that became unfeasible".

Alberto and his sister Laura, creators, writers and producers of some of the most successful television series of the last 20 years, have not had any relationship with his uncle for a long time.

The first of those series,

It has become a classic that continues to be among the most watched on the platforms where it is shown, revitalized by one and even two generations of new viewers.

Its sequel,

, recently awarded the Ondas award, has just premiered its thirteenth season.

In it, the residents of Montepinar move to a building in the center of the city with two wings: the rich and the poor, unleashing plots in which rancor and class aspirations are mixed between characters of all stripes.

This social satire is the essence of the Caballero label. 

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