Just because a piece of content can defy the odds and top a streaming platform's Top 10 list doesn't mean it's a guarantee of quality. Prime Video recently proved this to us with a film that held the top spot for several days, even though, in our opinion, it should never have existed. And no, we can't criticize The Gardener enough. However, today, another dud that caught our attention, the current Top 2 in the Netflix catalog. Yes, we know, tastes and colors... It takes all sorts to make a world... all that, all that. But still. You have to know how to push Medusa into the nettles.
What is the story of Medusa?
Bárbara Hidalgo is the future CEO of Medusa, a powerful group with businesses in everything from restaurants to sports. Alone aboard her yacht, she is the victim of an assassination attempt. Suffering from memory loss, with the help of Inspector Danger, she will try to find the culprit. He could well be hiding within her own family. A family where each member has seen power go to their head and where everyone has something to hide.
This is the plot of the 12 episodes of approximately 35 minutes that make up the series. It's worth noting that this is currently at the heart of a controversy, as the characters are reportedly inspired by a prominent family in Barranquilla, where the story takes place, and a lawyer has reportedly taken legal action. Netflix has not responded, and the actors maintain that this is all fiction. In our opinion, if there was a trial, it should be on the quality of the show.
A series written for and by sex
Alone on her yacht, Bárbara has flashbacks of all her sex with various partners, and begins to touch herself before an explosion throws her overboard. We were far from imagining that the first minutes of Medusa would set the tone for the series as a whole.
With its family plot where everyone tries to get their piece of the pie by sticking knives in each other's backs, we saw the show as a substitute for Succession, HBO's flagship series. Less qualitative, certainly, but watchable. And as a common thread, a police intrigue led by an inspector with a catchy name, Danger (Manolo Cardona, seen in Who Killed Sarah?). In short, when it came to choosing which new release to watch on Netflix, we have to admit that Medusa had at least some entertaining arguments. And 35 minutes goes by quickly.
So far from us to play modesty for a few picoti picota scenes, quite the contrary, but it seems important to make a distinction: how to separate the adult film from a Netflix series. In the former, the scenario is only a pretext to get two, three, or more people to play Twister without Twister. In the latter, normally, it's the opposite, the intimate scene being justified by the story or the construction of the characters. Medusa has the appearance of a Netflix series, but the narrative of an adult film.
Concretely, every five minutes, a sequence of a two-backed beast will undress the little storyline on the screen. A stripping that the story tries to justify by basing its entire plot on the sleeping of some, of others, of each other. And when there's a gap, here come Bárbara's erotic flashes being edited for the fourth time. Sexuality is so prevalent in the show that it quickly becomes ridiculous, like when our dear "Danger" flirts with the main person concerned in his investigation in minute 2, then gets very close to her in minute 4. We imagined a series that wouldn't fly high, we didn't suspect that it would fly so horizontally.
An observation that could have been forgiven if, at least, Medusa had done things right on this level. But no. The crude scenes are so tame and so fast that we don't even get our money's worth, even though that's all the series is trying to sell us. Especially since the show makes a lot of effort to play the game of spot the difference with more racy content with its actors reproducing a bad telenovela. Medusa is conceived as an adult film, without the main interest of an adult film. The results were catastrophic, and now it's frustrating too.
We'll end with a list of things that are better to do instead of watching Medusa: empty the washing machine, organize your pens by color, try to touch your nose with the tip of your tongue, discover that you can multiply the 9 times table with your fingers, assemble a piece of furniture, or even make love to your partner as a tribute to the series.
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