San Sebastian welcomes the boom of police series in Spain and discusses its causes

SAN SEBASTIAN — Since it began including Spanish TV series in its official selection — think “The Plague” in 2017 or the double success of “Patria” and “Riot Police” in 2020 — San Sebastian has used its first Saturday to debate television issues.

This time, a panel highlighted detective series, featuring Susana Herreras of Movistar Plus+, Laura Sarmiento, showrunner of the Netflix hit “Intimacy” and lead writer of “Burning Body”, and Elías León Siminiani, co- creator of the 2017 documentary series “El caso”. Asunta (Operación Nenúfar),” which inspired the 2024 Netflix fiction series, “El Caso Asunta.”

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Six points of view on the round table:

Spanish police series boom

The panel was titled in Spanish “The boom of Spanish police series.” That seems like an understatement. According to Variety According to a study by Netflix, up until September 13 of this year, seven Spanish titles reached the number one spot in Netflix’s global ranking of non-English-language TV series, holding the top spot in the ranking for a total of 15 of the 35 weeks of the period. This is a much better performance than that of any other non-English-speaking country in the world: Korea (8 weeks), Japan (3) and France (2) are lagging behind. Six of the seven series that reached the number one spot worldwide, a total of 13 weeks at the top, were police or part-police series, ranging from the heist comedy-drama “Berlin” to the drug cartel drama “Gangs of Galicia” or the sexual abuse thriller “Raising Voices”. The boom in police series is not limited to Spain. Fictional crime series increased by 39% between September 2022 and August 2023, compared to the previous year, observed Virginie Mouseler during the Fresh TV Fiction 2023 presentation of The Wit’s Mipcom. That said, the case of Spain remains remarkable.

Streamer Drivers

“The arrival of platforms has changed everything,” Siminiani explains. This has consequences on several levels. “Platforms have made it possible to obtain budgets that did not exist before, which has made it possible to produce longer series and much more in-depth investigations,” he explains. In addition, series creators have begun to include their investigative process in the content of the titles themselves, and these have begun to be produced by investigator-creators without formal legal training. This has opened up access to the true crime genre, in particular, Siminiani explains. For about two years, platforms have also been asking for sister titles, a fiction and a docu-series. “The possibility of inventing in a fiction series is now much broader than it was ten years ago. It is a tectonic shift,” he says. One of the results is the Netflix fiction series “El Caso Asunta” from 2024, one of the biggest Spanish global successes of this year.

True crime fuels detective fiction

If today’s series dramatize the criminal procedure, the possibility of investigating stimulates others, for the better. Fran Araujo and Pepe Coira, the main writers of the successful police series “Hierro” and “Rapa” on Movistar Plus+, “researched, read, created documents before and during writing. They let reality upset what they thought, changing entire scenes, plots and characters,” said Herreras. “It’s very Movistar Plus+. We don’t want our characters to be clones of foreign police series, American, French or English lawyers. They have to be lawyers who work here and from here. This is only possible if we create voluntary links with reality.”

Character, character

Beyond research, the key to a crime series, Sarmiento says, is character. “Burning Body,” for example, is based on a true crime. But the burning question for Sarmiento is “why?” “There were things about the characters, their lust for life, their dissatisfaction, that seemed very human and recognizable to me,” she said during the panel. “So why would people who are so recognizable, even if they were a little crazy, go so far as to kill? That’s what I wanted to explore.”

The Benefits of Detective Fiction

“Querer,” Movistar Plus+’s biggest series at this year’s San Sebastián Festival, directed by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, focuses on a woman who, after 30 years of a seemingly stable marriage, sues her husband, accusing him of three decades of sexual abuse. The series is fiction but inspired by “an amalgam of real cases,” Herreras said. “Fiction allows us to talk about very controversial topics but to shape and nuance them so that they are understandable,” she added. Depending on the case, fiction can give you more tools than nonfiction, Herreras argued, citing the case of “Samber,” a hit film shown during television screenings at Federation Studios in London, in which women from northern France in the late 1980s are sexually assaulted along the same road near the Samber River. It takes more than 30 years to catch a man. “Samber” depicts a society. It seems like a lot of time has passed, but it echoes the current cases in France and of course “Querer”.

A partial crime and a real crime?

France prides itself on its light-hearted crime series—think HPI or Tandem, with Tom & Lola another contender, which mix female detective work with domestic life and are perhaps set in a bright South. Spain, on the other hand, has been mixing crime with other genres for years, as a way to fill the 70 minutes of traditional prime-time television episodes. These are now 45 minutes long, but the tradition of mixing crime genres lives on. “Elite,” for example, mixes one death per season, sensitive topics and, especially in its early versions, lots of sex. Crime series are indeed divided into several subgenres, the panelists observed. One of them is in evidence in San Sebastián this year: true crime? In “Je suis Nevenka” and Iciar Bollain’s “Querer,” women must prove that sexual harassment or abuse took place in court. It’s not a certainty.

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