Glória

Gloria is a slow burning espionage tv show which takes place in Portugal during the 1960's. By then it was still ruled by a fascist dictatorship and was mainly a county with a very outdated culture, a society where amongst the poorer people women had no liberty and even on higher society stratuses we could witness something similar . The story shows much of that culture and time, but it's also a very good espionage story , with crime, suspense, intrigue and some action.

Acting is appropriate, I wouldn't say it's superb , but it doesn't fall below par ... and the story is very engaging, I found myself very curious on knowing what would happen next . Yes, it's a bit on the slower pace but that's perfectly fine for me, a person who loved the slow paced True Detective show.

Gloria deserves some praise because it comes from a country of a very old movie culture which unfortunately was dominated by tedious and ethereal films during some decades . I hope this is the first of many Portuguese tv shows in Netflix because it doesn't fall short in any department when compared with similar shows from other countries .

The show is good. Quite a surprise for me actually.

No, it's not perfect, the American actors seem to not know what they are saying when speaking Portuguese, some actors have a very stiff face and don't give off any facial expression and some lines are delivered in a strange/rushed way, the English parts of the script seem to have been directly translated from Portuguese at times, creating odd expressions, the soundtrack is incredibly repetitive and all over the place (definitely the weakest spot of the whole thing) and the first episode was confusing, which, to be fair, the exposition for such a branched plot was never going to be easy.

The story, though, that is what ultimately matters and it is a good one. It has good character developments, interesting side plots that let the viewer feel what it was like to live at that time in Portugal and interesting/unpredictable plot twists. The cinematography, costume/production design and grading were also on point.

Ultimately it was an enjoyable time. The flaws, while there, did not distract completely from the main story which has still room to grow on a second season.

P. S. Please ignore any comparison of this show with Portuguese Soap Operas, the actors are the same, yes, and they did bring some of that background but, apart from that, the show is nothing like soap operas.

This is a well set, well cast show with a semi believable plot. The characters are all well played. Someone has gone to great effort to get the clothing and the cars right. It's not quite so accurate on the technical details. Sabotaging the transmitter by opening a door and defeating an interlock is not possible. The interlock can be defeated but the transmitter will have gone off the moment the door opens. Then be restarted. Such offs generally trigger alarms. Frequency hopping is a little more complicated and was generally achieved by running several frequencies simultaneously. As long as you have more transmissions than the Russians have Jammers the signal will get through. I am keen to know which site was used for the exterior shots. The Gloria site has been dismantled. Technical details aside it's a good story and shows people as they are especially in a somewhat remote site.

This first Portuguese Netflix series is a very clever production effort, with a decent casting and a good cinematography.

However, there are several things that could have contributed for a better final product:

• The script is not as bad as some users have written here, but there is a lot of room form improvement it that department..

• The lack of accuracy or basic common sense in ever scene featuring uniforms and ranks;

• João Vidal was an army officer in the war in Angola but he is always depicted as a foot soldiers.

• The scenes with the GNR (wrongly subtitled as military police) are pathetic to the point where you have a foot soldier issuing orders to a 1st Sargent in the prison escape scene.

• Even the way how the army solders and GNR troopers carry their G3 rifles is wrong!

• Not to mention the GNR's uniforms.. oh man!

-A simple technical advisor could have done magic for the accuracy of all those visual and historical details.

Anyway, having said that, I liked the show. I am Portuguese and I am proud and happy to see my country honestly trying to step up and create a decent TV series. The aforementioned details are just that; details that could have been handled properly.

Finally, it's really sad to see how some of my Portuguese brothers and sisters come just to mock and demean when if fact we should all be at least a bit proud.

I've seen my fair share of movies and TV shows and as a Portuguese, I've grown up to have a very biased opinion towards Portuguese content - culturally speaking we are known to produce an insane amount of soap operas but not so much movies or TV shows - and as I grew up I had this completely wrong idea that we simply lacked the quality to do so.

As I started to consume more Portuguese content, it became clear that our main problem is actually budget; we don't lack at all in creativity or fantastic actors, we do lack in funding from the Government in our culture and that of course reflects on the content no matter how good the original idea is.

With that being said, we are seeing a change in trend, and thanks to partnerships and opportunities like this (Netflix actually producing a Portuguese TV show) we can clearly see the proof how much the budget can make a difference.

The story is a fictional one, yet is set on a very real context in history - there are a lot of things I can point as very positive: the cinematography is amazing, the direction and camera work are on point for the spy genre, most actors do an amazing job (the main character I had some troubles at first as it seemed to have some lack of charisma, but he does get better as the story unfolds) and the plot itself is engaging, some predictable twists but other unexpected events as well.

It might not be a brilliant or ground breaking series, but it is original on some aspects, believable, and most of all a truly great achievement for Portugal - I can't stress this enough, I've already seen some not so commercial series and even Portuguese movies fantastically made, but Glória is probably the best national content I've seen that has the most probable global recognition.

In our country we tend to be very critical, but I leave you with some final thoughts that hopefully convince you to watch: no it has absolutely nothing to do with how soap operas are made; yes you are not used to listen to Portuguese on a movie so give it some time it and you'll get through that and finally GIVE IT A SHOT, don't see just 1 or 2 episodes and give it a low rating based on that - kudos to the people involved, we need more content like this coming from Portugal.