We try not to review shows by referring to other shows. But in the case of the new Spanish drama Rotten Legacy, there are way too many similarities between this show and a certain HBO hit about a succession battle at a media conglomerate to not make those comparisons. What’s surprising to us is that this new show is almost as enjoyable as the one we’re comparing it to.
Opening Shot: Two men sit in a room with lights and cameras. One man is interviewing the other, asking questions about why he’s exposing the misdeeds of his adult children in this interview, which will only be shown after he dies. “Ultimately, it’s something I’m being forced into,” he says.
The Gist: The man being interviewed is Federico Seligman (Jose Coronado), who has owned the progressive newspaper El Baltico for over 40 years. But in the past 2 years, he’s been in the United States getting treatment for pancreatic cancer. In the meantime, his son Andrés (Diego Martín) has been running the paper and the media company in general. Two weeks before that interview, Andrés gets a call telling him that there’s going to be a tax audit of the company’s charitable conservatory; a government minister was tipped off that funds were being embezzled from the conservatory.
Andrés and his sister Yolanda (Belén Cuesta), who runs a women’s magazine in the media company, are in a panic about the audit, and go to their sister Guadalupe (Natalia Huarte), a newly elected legislator who is trying to distance herself from her wealthy roots, to see if she can find out more from the people she knows in government. That’s when they get the call that Federico is in remission and on his way back to Madrid with his current wife Isabel (Mireia Portas) and college-age daughter Lara (Maria Morera).
He promises Isabel that he won’t dive back into running the paper when he returns, but when his adult children give him a restored car he had been eyeing for years as a welcome home gift, his suspicions are aroused. Knowing that he can’t trust his kids, he gets info from someone who works at the house and finds out about the investigation. When he asks his three oldest about it, Yolanda tries to distract by talking about her and her husband being in an open marriage.
Part of Federico’s retirement was to do an interview about his legacy that would be released posthumously. But when the interviewer — Enrique (José Luis Martínez), an author and old friend — brings up an El Baltico reporter who died some years back, Federico shuts things down. But after he finds out exactly why Andrés is stealing this money, he decides to open up about everything to Enrique, even if it ruins his and the paper’s legacy.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s not a huge stretch to say that Rotten Legacy is very Succession-like, even down to a similar sense of humor.
Our Take: Pablo Alén, Breixo Corral and Carlos Montero, the creators of Rotten Legacy, may or may not admit this, but they certainly took a lot of inspiration and cues from Succession when creating their show. Federico was a distant and demanding father to his kids, and he his distrust of them is confirmed when he finds out how they’ve been running his media company in his absence. The two shows don’t exactly have the same plots, but they’re similar enough to make us think that the HBO hit was certainly a big influence.
In this case, that’s fine with us. We miss the combination of drama, sometimes-sophomoric humor and intensely unethical characters that made Succession such a compelling watch, and Rotten Legacy executes all of it well.
Coronado, who most people in the US likely know from the series Wrong Side Of The Tracks, is appropriately intense as Federico, who is intent on trashing the company he spent four decades building rather than have his kids run it into the ground. The way he figures, he’d rather go down in flames with some honesty and dignity than have his company exposed for questionable ethics — which includes Yolanda and Andrés blackmailing the minister who called for the audit.
The three oldest kids are different degrees of venal, and we bet that even the seemingly honest Guadalupe (the Shiv of this series) has her own ulterior motives; after all, the leak about the embezzlement came from someone close to the family. Yolanda is certainly the comic relief of the group, who overtalks and overshares.
There are some side stories, like one involving Lara and Luis (Lucas Nabor), who she met on the plane back to Madrid who somehow is connected with the Seligmans in more than one way, and Leon (Ivan Pellicer), who goes to the same college as Lara and seems to be very interested in her and her family. There’s also the story about the reporter who died, which Federico has tried to keep under wraps for many years. So there’s lots of potential for the story to go in lots of different directions, and if the despicable people who populate it can maintain their funny dispicableness, we’ll be here for it.
Sex and Skin: Except for Yolanda talking about her open marriage, there’s nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: On a balcony outside his apartment, Federico calls Enrique, wanting to tell all, “even if heads have to roll. Even if it’s my own children’s. Especially my children’s.”
Sleeper Star: Belén Cuesta’s Yolanda is definitely going to have the funniest lines in each episodes. It’s hard not to compare her to Kieran Culkin’s Succession character Roman.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Federico finds out what the embezzled money was used for, he drives the gifted car to a group of teens hanging out on the street and throws them the keys. Why not just sell it?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Rotten Legacy is a sometimes-funny, mostly dramatic story about a mogul who acknowledges he might have been a rotten dad, but that his kids are a whole lot more rotten than he is, and he’s going to extremes to let them know about that.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.