The woman who attends at the counter at Barajas airport has rehearsed the phrase and makes a face that what is happening is something normal in her day-to-day life. And the normal thing is that Teresa Lourdes Borrego Campos, Terelu for all of Spain and now for Miami as a whole, wants to check in the two-by-two portrait of Mediaset's star presenters and send it to the United States along with her suitcase. Because without seeing her well-lit face (and without her ColaCao) she doesn't know how to live.
Meanwhile, the rest of his companions (the Kikos, Matamoros and Hernández, María Patiño, Lydia Lozano, Belén Esteban, Víctor Sandoval and Chelo García Cortés) try to make the pulpit – a kind of giant lectern with stairs – that has served to give the best exclusives and the best laughs of the late Sálvame. The woman who attends them at the counter at Barajas airport smiles a little at such nonsense. And so, ladies and gentlemen, begins ¡Sálvese quien puede!, just released on Netflix.
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The first three episodes are an almost perfect example of what to cram into a reality show set in Florida. All possible colors gathered in a dress, huge sunglasses and always worn indoors. Extensions, false eyelashes, facial fillers fighting sagging, hair grafts, botulinum toxin and hyaluronic acid in industrial quantities. Clearly visible logos, tattoos, lots of tattoos. Gym and operating room. Grandiloquent buildings, giant and polluting cars. Where did the collaborators of Sálvame end up if not in Miami Beach? It is their ecosystem, their holy see, their amniotic fluid. Fantasy, of course, for coffee lovers.
Kiko Matamoros, Kiko Hernández, Terelu Campos and Belén Esteban, at one point in the first episode of '¡Sálvese quien puede!'. FELIPE HERNANDEZ/NETFLIX
TV collaborators do what they can with scripts. Perhaps the creators are aware, as any viewer would be, that such creatures cannot be left unchecked, without rhyme or reason. But it's precisely leaving them loose and oil comes out. When you first land at the Miami airport, while traveling on the bus on your way to the hotel, magic happens. When María Patiño looks out the window and says: "Miami reminds me of Australia. It's very beachy." And Belén, Belén from Spain and wherever she wants, answers: "But you haven't been to Australia! Well, Miami reminds me of Paracuellos." Detail: Paracuellos del Jarama is the town where the princess of the people and queen of our hearts lives.
From the beginning, it is clear that as much as they speak Spanish in the city where Enrique Iglesias grew up, there are a thousand and one differences between their culture and ours. To begin with, in language, because the characters in Sálvame are "panelists" here, and not collaborators. Because they warn them, in that excuse that serves as the axis of the reality, that of finding a job instead of asking for a time in a SEPE office, that be careful with what is said, because here the lawsuits and the lawyers are serious and rumors are not admitted, but certainties. And to succeed you need much more than the recipe that has worked for Kiko Hernández since he left the second edition of Big Brother: "Dialectic and bad host".
Characters
The backbone of the program is María Belén Esteban Menéndez, stripped for centuries of that shyness of the first interview that María Teresa Campos did with her on television, when it seemed that she would be the first bullfighter's wife to whom her husband had set up a bag shop to pass the time. Now she has another face, another body and a husband who is an ambulance driver, a daughter who doesn't want to be famous and a million new friends. He loves to take pictures with other celebrities like many Spaniards, insatiable at the possibility of showing off later with colleagues and especially with enemies. Although Belén defines it as "throwing" or "throwing" photos. It is of a frightening purity, capable of being the most ordinary of all and also the most sensitive. Like when she consoles María Patiño while she cries remembering her parents or scolding Víctor Sandoval for the grudge that lingers in him after her failed marriage to Nacho Polo. Another detail: after the divorce he dedicated a song to her that basically consisted of repeating two words very quickly, "Nacho Polo". And so on.
Lydia Lozano, in the first episode of '¡Sálvese quien puede!'. FELIPE HERNANDEZ/NETFLIX
Sandoval, by the way, is a person who would wear out Job's patience, but he is a TV personality who cries, who exaggerates, who says that the Miami house he lived in for eight years is cursed because the former owner buried her children in the garden. And so, from that comes this whole series of misfortunes that happen to him non-stop, including that time when he was bitten by a spider and almost made him log out. "But how do you know about the old owner?" they ask. "Cristina Tárrega told me about it," he replies very seriously. This Spain should be granted amnesty.
The plots in local TV shows are irregular, no matter how good the intentions. Only Belén knows who Jenni Rivera is (not only does she know it, she knows everything about her and her relatives), Anuel ("the one who was Karol G's boyfriend") and brags about his friendship with Rosalía. The rest of his teammates have more of a holiday attitude, which is understandable in that beastly Benidorm that is Miami. And the panelists there have little experience on a TV like the Spanish one, although we have met some of them in the also deceased Cuentos chinosby Jorge Javier Vázquez.
The show rejoices, laughs and cries if you are one of those people who has seen its protagonists much more than some members of your family. If you know, for example, of Lydia Lozano's facility for crying, that the two Kikos united will never be defeated, that Chelo García Cortés is accused of passivity and is called Chelordomo for his servile attitude towards Isabel Pantoja in an edition of Survivors. If you know that Terelu has a reputation for being haughty, that Patiño went to Miami as the owner of two chinchillas and one of them just died. If he cries with laughter when Bethlehem says to Mary in the middle of a party aboard a yacht: "His name is José Luis, isn't he? I don't want to call him El Puma."
As wonderful as it is indescribable. It's very beachy.
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