Review by xabieruk

Porca Misèria is a mature series by the team that signed the brilliant comedy series "Plats Bruts". The characters are just above thirty and have very different attitudes to life; there's a scriptwriter for a TV show, his posh businessman of a brother; a female cancer researcher (! yeah, no kidding), etc.

I think the music is a major element of the series, and we must thank David Bustamanet and Andy Willys for this; there is a combination of songs taken from albums and music specifically created for the series that works very well; the album songs tend to close the chapters, and really give the overall tone.

But there are two other aspects that I find remarkable; one political and one linguistic.

1.- politically, Joel Joan explained in a talk he offered in Lleida that SONY had offered to pay for the production of the series (when it was just a project), but they wanted to impose a casting, and... the Spanish language. They wanted the series to be film in Spanish, and then dubbed into the minor languages of the Spanish State. Joal Joan, a declared independentist, refused and took all the risk. He just couldn't understand SONY's attitude, because the series had Catalan characters, was based in BArcelona city, and so on 2.- linguistically, it's refreshing to hear American characters using English, Latin-American characters using their dialectal Spanish, and so on. In Catalonia we are used to an ultra-protection i linguistic affairs, as if listening to too much Spanish or English would pollute our ears.