RTVE confirms the definitive end of 'Cuéntame': this will be its last season

Cuéntame

is the series that made nostalgia something everyday, so long-lasting and stable that it turned the past into the present.

After more than two decades and more than 400 broadcast episodes, the RTVE Board of Directors has approved this Thursday the production of the last season of the series, carried out in collaboration with Ganga Producciones.

As confirmed by the public entity to this newspaper, this year a final batch will be broadcast, of only seven chapters, which will close the experiences of the Alcántara family during almost 60 years of the history of Spain.

The episodes of season 23 will narrate nothing less than the jump to the new millennium, covering the period between 1994 and 2001, the public channel has explained.

Each of the seven installments will be dedicated to one of the central characters of the series.

The Alcántara couple (Mercedes and Antonio), her four children (Inés, Toni, Carlos and María)

and the grandmother of the family, Herminia.

In the episodes that are yet to be broadcast from the Spanish series, events such as Felipe González's departure from Moncloa and the arrival of José María Aznar, the murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, the weddings of the princesses Elena and Cristina, the deaths of Lola and Antonio Flores, the feared Y2K effect that threatened to paralyze the planet and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

The series began by recalling 1968 and, since it was so long-lived, it has had time to extend its plots until the beginning of the 1990s, going through the Franco regime, the death of Franco, the Spanish Transition and the Movida.

In the last chapters of the previous season, he even jumped in time to transfer his characters to the coronavirus crisis.

Its protagonist, Antonio Alcántara, died in 2021 in one of those chapters set today, as a tribute to all those Spaniards who died every day from the pandemic.

"It even seemed disrespectful to us that he survived the covid having died so many people," said Joaquín Oristrell, the series' script coordinator, at the time.

Imanol Arias, in 'Tell me how it happened'.

No matter what has happened in the country in all these years, the Álcantara have continued to be a constant in the lives of many Spaniards.

Some of them have reached the age of majority without having known a television prior to

.

The project remained for years in the drawers of public and private channels, without anyone deciding to give it a try.

When it finally reached the La 1 screen, on September 13, 2001, a few weeks before the arrival of

, it almost immediately became a social phenomenon as powerful as the musical contest.

At least it was like that in its first seasons.

Its most watched chapter, the one on July 3, 2003, brought together an average of more than seven million viewers with a 51% audience share.

Half of the Spanish viewers chose that day to spend the night with the Alcántaras.

The phenomenon has spread to other countries, with adaptations in Portugal, Chile, Argentina, and Italy failing to outlive the original series.

Great actors and singers

Some of the great actors of the Spanish industry have passed through it, from its protagonists, Imanol Arias and Ana Duato, to supporting actors such as María Galiana, Juan Echanove, Terele Pávez and Pere Ponce.

Carlos Hipólito has given the voice to the narrator of the series, one of the sons of the family, Carlos Alcántara, who in his childhood and youth has played Ricardo Gómez on screen.

Irene Visedo, Pablo Rivero, Pilar Punzano and Paula Gallego have also appeared as other children of the leading couple.

Even its tune has been a parade of musical icons of the country: Ana Belén, Rosario Flores, Miguel Bosé, Miguel Ríos, Ana Torroja and Raphael, among others, have covered in one of their seasons the Formula V classic that gives its name to the series.

Officially, the series is titled

so as not to incur conflicts in the registration of the original name.

Although controversies have also marked fiction.

Almost all of them were focused on their protagonist, Imanol Arias.

The most notorious has been the conflict with the Treasury that both he and Ana Duato have had, to which are added the controversial criticisms that Arias has dedicated from time to time to TVE and the public fight he had with Pilar Punzano, an actress who played a of his daughters for five seasons.

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