ironic

When the series ‘Aída’ ended in June 2014 with four million viewers saying goodbye, no one seriously considered a sequel. A decade later, Paco León turns that reunion into metacinema with ‘There and back’which now premieres Prime Videoa film that functions as another chapter, but also as a question about what it means to revisit something that has not completely disappeared from collective memory. It is clear that the dizzying audience figures for ‘Aída’ belong to another era, when audience fragmentation was not as great as it is now. At one of its peaks, the series reached 33.2% share and 6,282,000 spectators. Throughout its nine years on screen, the series led the audience in its first two seasons; During the 2006-2007 season it was the most viewed Spanish fiction, and in the following season it not only maintained the leadership, but did so above foreign productions. ‘There and back’ arose as a commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the end of the series and twenty years of the original premiere. The filming featured almost the entire original cast (Carmen Machi, Mariano Peña, Miren Ibarguren, Eduardo Casanova, Pepe Viyuela, Melani Olivares, Canco Rodríguez and León himself), with the notable exception of Ana Polvorosa (Lore), who felt that she was not at her best to reprise her role. The twist that no one expected was the one that led the film to merge elements of fiction with metanarrative to show the recording process of an episode, mixing the original characters with the actors themselves giving life to themselves. The narrative axis is Carmen Machi’s resistance to returning to the character, and all this with abundant reflections on the nature and limits of humor, which the original series exceeded on numerous occasions. Can’t you make humor out of anything anymore? ‘Back and forth he does it… and he also wonders why. In Xataka | This Prime Video series ends after 7 years and 40 chapters, making history with an audience more divided than ever