“I’m looking forward to the long weekend and finishing the season. The Serranos“A 15-year-old student I recently taught recognized me. Yes, 15 years. Possibly the combination of that phrase and that idea gives us a short circuit: we are talking about a series that ended in 2008; when she hadn’t even started kindergarten. I couldn’t contain myself and as someone who did grow up with Diego Serrano, the brush and the boom for Fran Perea, I had to ask him where that passion had come from.
It came through clips on TikTok.
That content of a few minutes and loose decontextualized fragments were not enough, and they turned something that began as a simple curiosity into a true marathon to know in detail what happened to Eva and Marcos, the most famous stepbrothers on TV in the 2000s. A fiction as iconic as that, but for generation millennialhad found its new primary audience in Generation Z.
I was surprised, of course, but the idea stayed in the back of my head, like a specific issue to which I should not give more importance. Like when your friend tells you that she is pregnant and suddenly you start noticing people on the street and you discover something that we could almost classify as a baby epidemic; Shortly after, another teenage student, whom we will call Victoria, shows me her pending homework on her tablet. Between irregular verbs and vocabulary to learn, I look at the wallpaper: nothing less than ‘Santa Justa Klan‘, the fictional (and not so fictional) group that was formed in ‘Los Serrano’.
At this point, I was already ‘mode’Queen’s Gambit‘, projecting theories on the ceiling about something so strange to understand and that he was also seeing everywhere.
Just a few weeks ago, at the next table in a restaurant, a group of university girls revealed in their talk that this is not just about ‘The Serranos‘. To a certain extent, declaring yourself a fan of ‘There is no one who lives here‘It is understandable with the common thread that it has with an already veteran series, but still in broadcast, like ‘The one that is coming‘. The thing is that they start quoting ‘The boarding school’, ‘Physics or Chemistry‘, ‘The ship’ or ‘Paco’s men‘, debating passionately about how the revival Prime Video of the first one does not have one bit of the quality of the original.
Once again, I could not contain myself, and I assailed them with my doubts about how they had arrived at these fictions so typical of my generation and not so much of theirs. The same pattern: discovery on social networks, the possibility of watching all seasons on platforms or even through those fragments, and the echo chamber that is created in classes and groups of friends. That week-by-week phenomenon effect that we’ve barely seen since ‘Game of Thrones‘, is being achieved organically in the middle classes of Spain.
Some actors are still relevant today, and although it is difficult to think that all the youth have come to ‘El Barco’ by looking at the IMDb of Mario Casas or ‘El Internado’ doing the same with Ana de Armascould make sense in certain cases. None of that: it is the series itself is what hooks you so many years later. This is how Catalina, one of these girls, recognizes it: “I’m finishing The Boarding School; When I do it I plan to tell my little sister to start it.”
The generational contrast is more than evident, and the lapidary phrase that unsettles an entire generation millennial who, like me, has grown up with ‘Three meters above the sky‘ and ‘SMS without fear of dreaming‘ is pronounced by Sara, to whom her friends were highly recommending ‘El Barco’: “Ah, but Mario Casas went out there? I had no idea.”
From meme to marathon
The furor over the story of Lucas and Sara from ‘Paco’s Men’ or the crazy theories that ‘El Internado’ sparked now do not begin on television, waiting week after week for a new chapter. Rather the opposite occurs; Like almost everything in recent years, it all starts with the mobile.
If before you watched a series and then it was when the meme festival began on the networks, now the journey is the other way around, from the meme it goes to television. And whoever says meme says fancams or fragments of interviews that awaken interest in those fictions dosmileras. “I started watching the story of Teté and Guille in parts on TikTok and I couldn’t stop,” one of my students reminded me. So, the clip opens the door and the series does the rest, becoming almost an involuntary trailer.
And, really, this fragmented and instant format is very much in line with the current consumption model. Everything has to be quick, that captures your attention in the first seconds and encourages you to consume something, of whatever nature. So it is no coincidence that the algorithm works as a perfect cultural programmer for generation Z, a tool that prioritizes the high emotional or humorous charge it has in the love drama of Lucas and Sara or in the phrases from Bethlehem to his greatest ally.
This resurgence poses a very curious paradox: in the era of rapid consumption, these young people return to long, choral series designed to be watched without any rush. We are also talking about fictions that achieved audience figures that were unthinkable on current television (‘There is no one who lives here‘ either’ The Serranos‘ reached 7,000,000 spectators), so all the merit of their revival It cannot fall on social networks or on the virality of certain clips. In a sea of platforms and on-demand content, available at any time, something unique and special must have that 2000s television imagery.
One of the keys is probably the ID with the characters. Even today, many university students from Generation Z find in Belén or Emilio from ‘No one lives here’ that reflection of work and life precariousness, a very tangible everyday life.
Yes for the millennialespecially for women, became in motto generational and meme meat that famous “I’m twenty-seven years old, I have no money or future prospects, I’m already a burden to my parents and I’m afraid” from the adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (2005), for them that emotional mirror can perfectly be the “I don’t have a job, I don’t have a home, I don’t have a boyfriend, I have nothing” from Belén.
Something similar happens with the personal relationships. The family conflicts, the impossible and tortuous love stories and the chaotic bonds that these series went through are still more than recognizable for any new generation. Of course, there are plots that in today’s series would be impossible to present in the same way, or, at least, they would not be romanticized in that way. See as an example the relationship between Lucas and Sara in ‘Los Hombres de Paco’, a love story with a large age difference, which in the 2000s functioned as an iconic romance and which we would now see with much more reluctance.
The certainty of the series
In a world of uncertainty, another comforting factor for Generation Z is that they are already complete; no surprise episodes or seasons to wait two years for and, most importantly, no fear of sudden cancellation. Having a top series waiting for you and knowing that it already has an end seems to alleviate some of that anxiety associated with current consumption.
Another element that works in favor is a form of nostalgia very particular: the one that is generated towards the unlived. The rise of vintage It not only extends into the world of clothing or technology, it also goes through the audiovisual world. And here something curious happens: nostalgia no longer functions solely as the desire to live one’s own experience. Most of Gen Z didn’t even live through the boom original of these series, but still feels fascinated by that aura dosmilera.
A classic.
So through their consumption on platforms or social networks, these series have become a kind of shared memory of a time that they have not lived but that they do perceive as close. Furthermore, this is directly related to a generation’s search for the collective, to move away from that individuality and flee from loneliness.
We have young people who have grown up with much more individualized consumption and infinite catalogs where few people agree on their watchlist. That feeling of community, of collective culture where everyone saw the same thing and the next day you commented on the weekly episode is something more unknown to them and that they want to conquer. These fictions are once again a generational meeting point.
Added to this, they are fictions comfortable to see. Relatively predictable plots, familiar characters and cliffhangers not at all comparable to those of ‘Game of Thrones’. Even within the narrative delirium that some episodes of ‘Los Hombres de Paco’ represented, the light and humorous tone always predominated, giving us that comforting feeling. And now, in addition, any tension has an immediate solution: “See next episode”
The most striking thing is that we completely break the narrative and generational logic. The millennials We grew up with the series of our time, but we certainly did not develop a massive fascination for the fictions that marked our parents. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of teenagers who in 2008 were doing a marathon of ‘Family Doctor’ or debating in their group of friends about characters or plots of ‘Pharmacy on call’.
They still had that spirit of “old television.” Quite the opposite happens with generation Z, since those series from the 2000s do not perceive them as old or foreign, but rather as a completely unexpected living cultural imaginary.
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