Rankings of a streaming platform's most-watched programs have never been a guarantee of quality, especially since we don't know the proportion of subscribers who started the content only to abandon it halfway through. But when you're at the top of an SVoD service like Netflix, whose catalog fills up almost daily, you might think your position is deserved, or at least that the film or series lives up to some of its promises. And sometimes, we simply suspect very good work from the marketing team. Like El Jardinero.
You know us, we never miss an opportunity to (re)slip in a little dig at The Gardener, the film that itself climbed to first place in the Prime Video Top 10 at the beginning of the year when its place was more at the bottom of the Turkish toilet of hell. So, we admit it, beyond its Netflix ranking, we wanted to start El Jardinero just to have fun making comparisons between our two plant lovers. In the end, this intention will stop there, not for lack of desire, but because The Gardener at least had the luxury of only harming humor and cinema. El Jardinero, for its part, decided to be just as badly made AND equally unhealthy. Why do things by halves…
What is the series about?
When he was a child, Elmer and his mother, La China Jurado, had a car accident, causing the young man a brain injury that deprived him of all emotion. A trait that his mother has been able to take advantage of by turning him into a hitman.
His new mission is to make Violeta, a schoolteacher, disappear. But through her, Elmer will rediscover emotions, and even love. Killing her is no longer an option. Except that La China takes a dim view of this relationship, which risks jeopardizing their way of life and her relationship with Elmer.
Why El Jardinero Isn't Worth Your Time
We know that the series created by Miguel Sáez Carral hasn't insulted anyone, and if you're having a good time watching it, we're not the ones who are going to tell you what to do. That's not our role. Our role is to guide you in your choices because Netflix is full of much more enjoyable productions, and less harmful. We advise or, in this case, we don't advise. And this is for two main reasons.
The first is the least annoying since it concerns the quality of the series itself. The introductory episode suggests that El Jardinero was going to play on the same level as Dexter and You, with an atmosphere somewhere between a dark thriller and a romance, Elmer's lack of emotion being one of the key points of the concept. With deaths, lies, and a castrating mother on the agenda, the show's introduction has its cards to play, and we're intrigued.
Then, the story unfolds over five more episodes, and we realize that there's been a scam on the merchandise. The murderous sequences are extremely rare, the romance between Elmer and Violeta takes over the entire plot, and the killer's apathy is swept under the rug most of the time. We're promised a killer without emotion, but he discovers one after ten minutes, then it goes away and comes back, it's made up of tiny nothings. A season in six episodes when in one hour, we seem to have covered everything.
Especially since the form doesn't help. All tenderness for Elmer aside (we'll come back to this), it must be recognized that the casting plays poorly in every other scene; the staging doesn't allow us to distinguish a murder from an intimate sequence; the omnipresent voiceover of Cecilia Suárez (La China) literally explains to us what we see very clearly on screen; and we almost forget this altar with a photo openly made by AI. Even without being demanding, it's difficult to vibrate in front of El Jardinero, of which we only save the credits.
The second reason for our disenchantment comes from the message portrayed on screen. We know that the attraction to the bad boy has existed since the dawn of time and that productions have always known how to make them sympathetic, even charming, with the so-called "lesser worst of the two" technique. Basically, you get a problematic guy on screen, then you get an even more toxic guy opposite you, to make the first one acceptable. Beauty and the Beast, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey… the list is very, very long and always a hit with audiences. To the point where we've had projects that take the vice much further, like 365 Days. As a reminder, even Penn Badgley was sorry to see so many people supporting his character in You.
El Jardinero is part of this movement. Everything is done to make our killer, who will accumulate toxic actions well beyond... his murders (already a big clue), enjoyable. He only kills violent men, he's under control, he has the emotional quotient of a child... Each of his "bad" actions has a forgivable justification. And although all the strong roles in the series are played by women, the writing of the latter must be questioned, since they are portrayed as the responsible for men's misfortune. The innocent Violeta is not the supposed victim, the mother is manipulative, and even in the cop duo, it's the investigator who pushes for infidelity. In short, we're charging women to make our gardener the ultimate victim.
El Jardinero doesn't belong in the Top 10 and doesn't even have the qualities to be in the Netflix catalog in 2025. And the worst part is that it's planning a season 2.
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