The Spanish soap “Rotten Legacy,” on Netflix (in Spanish, with subtitles, or dubbed), follows an ailing media czar and his unhappy heirs as they take turns manipulating and sabotaging one another.
“Succession”? “Succession,” you say? Oh, not quite. “Legacy” is nowhere near as tense or textured, nor as funny, but it also isn’t trying to be. It’s bright and pulpy, juicy and impatient. Plenty of fraught and twisty board meetings, though.
Federico (Jose Coronado) has spent the last two years away from his home and work, receiving cancer treatment. Now that he’s back, he is dismayed by how his children have run the show in his absence, though of course he’s the kind of father who is always dismayed.
Andrés (Diego Martín) has been handling the newspaper and Yolanda (Belén Cuesta) a TV station. Guadalupe (Natalia Huarte) is trying to shed her rich-girl image with a career in progressive politics. They are each mixing business with pleasure — or if not pleasure, at least sex, self-loathing and double-crossing. But the family that frauds together stays together, bound by mutually assured destruction. “Your kids are like this because you’re like this,” an associate tells Federico. It’s not a compliment.
In addition to prodigal patriarch woes, Federico’s other big project is sitting for a tell-all interview that will be released upon his death. On one hand, it’s an important way to solidify his legacy and get the last word. On the other … now there’s a recording of all his dirty laundry and cruel opinions, and plenty of people would love to get their hands on it while he’s alive to face the fallout.
“In order to back-stab, you don’t really need talent,” Yolanda tells her father, knife in his back. Everybody has secrets here, and secret priorities, and boy are there a lot of surreptitious recordings. That’s life in the media biz, where knowledge, leverage and receipts make the world go ’round.
“Legacy” has some fun with its messy romance plots, though I could do without a sex scene set to the Sufjan Stevens song “John Wayne Gacy.” So many shows about executive strife look gray and cold, all silvery reflections and austere offices. “Legacy,” though, is bright and colorful, with secret meetings on lush, green soccer pitches and big, candied cherries on pertly iced cupcakes.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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