The Prestige HBO Series Is Going South
A PSYCHOTIC serial killer is on the loose in a harsh, soulless city, and the police are stumped. It's a familiar plot from a familiar genre, but among the things that make 'Epitafios' different from the average television thriller is this: it is the first dramatic mini-series that HBO has ever commissioned in Spanish, and it was written and filmed in Latin America by Latin Americans with Latin American viewers in mind.
On the air in the prime-time slot of Sunday night at 10 since mid-August, 'Epitafios' ('Epitaphs' in English) admittedly does feature a world-weary former cop as its main character, along with a few other conventions of the genre. But the 13-episode series has also emphasized some distinctly Latin American plot elements and production strategies with an eye to helping HBO raise its profile in a market that at times has proved difficult to penetrate.
'After years of being HBO's little brother, operating in a much smaller territory in terms of subscribers and economic strength than our domestic side, we needed to initiate a process parallel to what HBO did in the U.S. and generate our own programming,' said Luis Peraza, a vice president of HBO Latin America who also is executive producer of the series.
Latin Americans, though, are raised on soapy telenovelas, which draw huge ratings everywhere they are broadcast, and have little exposure to thrillers other than what comes from the United States. Thus the choice of 'Epitafios' as HBO Latin America's first effort was risky, as the directors and writers responsible for the show knew from the start.
'The Americans do the thriller a lot, and they do it well, whether in films, on television or in cable, and with more resources than we will ever have,' said Alberto Lecchi, a veteran of film and television who is one of two directors of the mini-series, filmed in Argentina with an Argentine cast. 'So the first challenge we had to face was how to tell a story that has been told many times before and still, on the budget we had, glue the viewer to the screen.'
One solution was to give the main characters traits that would be recognizable to viewers in the 20-plus countries where 'Epitafios' is broadcast. Renzo Márquez, the former police detective turned cabdriver who is the protagonist, may be disillusioned, but he and the ex-colleagues he rejoins after his name appears on the killer's hit list are anything but hard-boiled.
'We can't forget that we're in Latin America, with all the self-destructive processes and impulses that go with that fact,' said Jorge Nisco, the other director of the series. 'These are not American or European characters. They are more passionate, with more exacerbated sensibilities, given to emotional explosions and not hiding their sentiments, whether love or fear or euphoria.'
To make 'Epitafios' even more realistic to HBO Latin America's two million or so subscribers, the series takes place in a world where the police 'lack the means to investigate, which forces them to improvise,' said Walter Slavich, one of the scriptwriters. 'This isn't 'C.S.I.,'' he added, meaning that patrol cars run out of gas and forensic experts do not have the money to run tests that could help them crack the case.
Mr. Slavich and his twin brother, Marcelo, the other scriptwriter, also devised some unusual plot twists they hope will hook viewers. 'Epitafios' not only features 'a killer chasing a police detective and not vice versa,' as Mr. Lecchi noted, but also allows the identity of the killer, who has been knocking off teachers, students and administrators at an elite private school, to be revealed at the end of the third episode.
'We wanted to be provocative,' Marcelo Slavich said. 'We know the spectator is going to say, 'How can that be?' It's a different way of doing things, and I think it works. The audience knows the identity of the killer, but not why he kills or how the story turns out. And because the spectator knows who the killer is and the characters don't, we make the spectator an accomplice.'
Once those issues were resolved, the producers then had to grapple with the problem of whether the actors should speak with Argentine accents, which are heavily Italianate in intonation and use some words and grammatical structures that are not common elsewhere. In the end, they decided to have the cast try to speak in what Mr. Peraza called 'neutral Spanish' and to minimize Argentine inflections.
'It was very strange in the beginning, very odd,' said Julio Chávez, who plays Renzo Márquez. 'I didn't think it was really necessary, but then I'm not the producer, so it's not my area. But what I could and did do was to grab the script and try to eliminate as many as possible of the usages that felt peculiar to me.'
Similarly, though the setting of 'Epitafios' is clearly Buenos Aires, with scenes set in identifiable local landmarks like Recoleta Cemetery, where Evita Perón is buried, the city's name is never once mentioned. 'We don't refer to the place because we want to tell a story that could take place in any Latin American metropolis,' Mr. Nisco explained.
As the series progresses, a brassy, burned-out detective named Marina Segal, played by Cecilia Roth, emerges as Renzo Márquez's bête noire turned ally. Ms. Roth, probably best-known outside Argentina as one of the muses of the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, hasn't worked much in television in recent years, but said she was attracted by the novelty of the 'Epitafios' project and the challenges it presented.
'We felt a little bit like lab rats in an experiment, in that we were aware that we were doing something new and very different,' she said.
HBO Latin America is not seen in Spain, but there is already interest there and in other European countries in showing 'Epitafios' on cable or broadcast channels. The show's producers recognize that in the United States the English-language audience that watches 'The Sopranos' and 'Six Feet Under' is a very hard sell. But they hope to reach the booming Hispanic market directly through the network's Spanish-language channel, HBO Latino.
'We don't have a deal yet, but we are in discussions with HBO Latino,' Mr. Peraza said. 'HBO domestic is more difficult for anything not spoken in English, but HBO Latino is very interested and we are very optimistic. Whether sooner or later, we are expecting some remuneration from our investment.'
So far critics and audiences have embraced the series. There may even be an 'Epitafios II.' But even if there is not a second season, Mr. Chávez already sees a spillover effect, both into network television here and across borders.
And regardless of the fate of 'Epitafios,' HBO plans to plunge ahead with more original programming from other countries in Latin America. The network has already commissioned a pair of mini-series to be made in Brazil. The first, based on a character created by the Brazilian novelist Rubem Fonseca, is tentatively scheduled to go on the air a year from now and will give Spanish-speakers a glimpse of their giant Portuguese-speaking neighbor.
'This is the good side of globalization, one that offers us the possibility for growth,' Ms. Roth said. 'It is a good way for us to come together but at the same time see how we are different. The English-speaking world has been doing this sort of thing for a long time, but in Latin America, we have been distanced from each other. So this is an important step forward.'
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