All cities are the same: why Netflix wants Barcelona, Madrid or Paris to look the same in their series
It's hard to know when most Netflix series take place. Sex Education is set in a British institute with an American high school aesthetic (lockers, singing club, football jackets), in which the clothes are from the eighties, the furniture is from the seventies and the cars are from the nineties but internet exists. The characters have smartphones in their pockets and tube televisions in their living room. In another teen dramedy, I'm Overcome With This Shit, kids talk about vaping but say they prefer VHS to laser disc.
It is also not easy where they are located. The End of The F*** World takes place in a Britain full of American diners, motels, desert roads and Hawaiian shirts. His series exist in a non-place and a non-time so evident that its own components speak of it. “They are changing the rules that dictate how audiences receive shows, what they are willing to accept, and in which universes they are more or less gullible,” Sex Education actress Gillian Anderson told the Radio Times in 2019. “I think Netflix she feels satisfied with that combination.”
MORE INFORMATIONThe El Escorial reservoir that sets the scene for Netflix's great love storyIn search of a corrala to shoot the most impressive scene of the yearIn 'Veneno', the Parque del Oeste is actually the Casa de CampoThe timeless and misplaced dimension in which most Netflix series take place is largely a consequence of their first and greatest success, Stranger Things, set in (Hollywood's version of) the 1980s. It offers them an intergenerational claim because a father and a daughter can watch the same series and capture references to their respective adolescences. It makes its production resemble classic series that have been successful on the platform such as Friends or The Office. The real present is not televised: "If we were realistic, the characters would be looking at their mobiles all the time and that doesn't work dramatically," explains Carlos Montero, creator of Elite and The Disorder You Leave. But there is an added factor for this non-localization: Netflix series must work in 190 different countries. Does this mean that, in order to join the catalog of the largest Internet television platform in the world and succeed abroad, Spanish series must be de-Spanishized?
This Friday, the platform premieres The Innocent, by Oriol Paulo, which adapts the novel by the American Harlan Coben and moves its mystery from New Jersey to Barcelona. You don't even need to change all the names: everyone calls Mario Casas' character, Mateo, Mat. Similarly, depending on their character, the characters could be Japanese, Norwegian or Colombian: the entire script of The Innocent, without changing a single comma, could be set in any city in the world. "We wanted to place the story in Barcelona, but at the same time that the viewer can feel it as his city," explains Paulo, who cites David Fincher as the main aesthetic reference for his "sensation-generating naturalism."
In The Innocent Eixample is recognized, and several emblematic points of Barcelona are seen (the MNAC, the Fira or the Mapfre Towers, where Mat's office is). But the Anglo-Saxon aesthetic, says Laia Farrán, director of locations for The Innocent, "provides speed." She ensures that the viewer is not distracted from the plot because he recognizes the visual codes instinctively. Sylvia Steinbrecht, its art director, gives as an example that for the Madrid offices they were inspired by Black Mirror and Marvel: "A center of actions that suggests to you that they are the bad guys." This is key for the public to agree to believe the plot. A homicide detective as intrepid as Lorena (Alexandra Jiménez, combed and dressed like a Hollywood heroine) would not work if they put her in a police station in Albacete.
“The sets with international aesthetics make the public not question the plausibility of the plot. If you see something local you will need a more authentic aspect to believe it, but if you see situations that could happen anywhere you get more into the story, ”explains Steinbrecht, who points to the worldwide success of La casa de papel as a turning point in the loss definition of the inferiority complex of the Spanish series. “You see it and you don't think 'they are in Spain', it could be anywhere. Yesterday I saw a series set in the United States, today a Spanish one jumps out at me and I'm not shocked because both are within a very universal aesthetic code. It makes younger viewers more easily hooked.”
Also Bernat Bosch, director of photography for The Innocent, admits that they aspired to “an aesthetic as neutral as possible, that could happen in any European or American city, easily recognizable: this is a police station, etc. Going on a platform that is seen all over the world, you have to keep in mind that your audience is not just local.” Bosch believes that the market must be opened with "a more exportable product" first and then go making more local fictions. The truth is that the biggest international bombshell of Spanish fiction in 2020, Veneno, could not be more Spanish in content and form. HBO Spain's bets (Homeland, 50 coins, XHOXB) are also deeply rooted in local society. Is there, therefore, a "Netflix aesthetic"?
@fatbootybellaa I don't really perceive children's mistakes and bad choices as “crime” either and that's a huge par… https://t.co/ivBCzfMntc
— ✨✨✨ Wed Jul 14 18:51:54 +0000 2021
Urban consultant Stephen Rowley, author of the book Movie Towns & Sitcom Suburbs, calls these types of non-places “notional cities”: recognizable but generic urban spaces. The first Spanish bet on the platform was an exception (Las Chicas del Cable took place in Madrid at the beginning of the century); the second and more explosive, Elite, was shot in the outskirts of Madrid (El Escorial, Villaviciosa, Villalba) and when its own creators saw it they were surprised at how Swedish it had come out.
"The pijerío from Madrid, with his little Spanish flags and his Castilian shoes, never interested us," admits Montero. His references were Cruel Intentions and the institutes of Hollywood movies: Las Encinas, the fictitious center, does not have a prom but it does have very similar events. However, Montero assures that the "international aesthetic" of the series was not intentional. “It was almost more the result of chance. For me, luxury has to do with water, with a pond, and to have water you had to shoot in residential areas. And those are the same all over the world.” His art director, Antón Blanco, adds: “We tried to give it a more powerful, more international aesthetic; we had to invent a map, a geography that the viewer understands, and El Escorial was more like a suburb of England than Fuenlabrada”.
Also the cities of the real world are becoming more similar to each other, according to the architect Jorge Gorostiza (author of Cinema and architecture). Among other things because they all imitate the urbanism of the movies. “The Western cities of the 20th century are not the first equal to each other but it is true that for the first time in history, largely thanks to the cinema, a city model (the Western one) has been implanted in all the countries of the planet” , indicates.
This greatly benefits Netflix, which wants all its content to have a similar aesthetic so that the viewer can jump from one series to a movie and then to another series without sensory jolts. So that consumption flows for hours, rocked by visual harmony. In a colloquium on photography organized within the festival What Comes in 2019, the director of photography Raquel Fernández explained that Netflix gives its filmmakers a choice between several specific models of brands with which the platform has agreements.
Sylvia Steinbrecht confirms that “certain things are given a choice” and they prefer “some better than others”. “They ask directors of photography for guidelines and if they want to skip them, it has to be for a very justified proposal. Netflix will have done their studies on which aesthetic codes are more attractive, but they are open to creative discourse and have more waist than it seems. In Elisa and Marcela they accessed black and white when no other chain or distributor allowed it. On Galician television and on TV3 it was broadcast in color. Isabel Coixet was horrified."
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