Money Heist (La Casa De Papel)

“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”

These lyrics have been going around my head ever since I finished the latest available episode of Money Heist on Netflix last night (and immediately started the making of documentary).  Dear readers, abandon the sourdough yeast you’ve been nurturing and for god’s sake stop sharing your top 10 albums on Facebook, for I’m about to school you in the world of the planet’s most popular Netflix boxset.

It’s a damning yet fair indictment of English-speaking people’s intelligence (please see evidence: Trump and Johnson as leaders of nations) that the name of this programme in our mother tongue is the most basic example of labelling ever known to mankind.  Yes, this programme is about a heist, and yes, money is stolen in that heist.  It is a money heist.  For some reason, whoever translated the Spanish title only had thirty seconds spare to think of the new name.  It would be like taking a beloved comedy such as Friends and entitling it Relationship Sitcom or renaming Tiger King as Outrageous Large Cat Documentary.  As you would expect, the original Spanish moniker has more poetry and art to it: La Casa De Papel.  I spent most of the first series thinking this meant the house of the pope.  However, no crusty old white man telling millions how to live their lives appeared and I remembered that papel actually means paper, so we have the house of paper – a synonym for the Royal Mint where the first two seasons play out.

That’s the title covered, and a bit of its content, but what I’m sure you’re all dying to know is why did I start watching it?  I have a vague memory of, at some juncture before we got locked down, Netflix sharing data on their most watched programming.  Of course, as expected, Stranger Things and Sex Education appeared as worthy leaders of the pack.  But, top of the pops was Money Heist.  Something about Dalí masks and red boiler suits.  “Don’t worry,” everyone said, “that’s just a show that’s big in South America.”  For some reason, the accolade of being number one had to be dismissed.  But then I got far too into Elite and, on the advice of pals with more open-minded approaches to finding good TV, selected Money Heist as my next boxset.

As a touch of expectedly brutal honesty, I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t feel grabbed by the show straightaway.  Sure, the set up was sexy, the stylisation was classy and the Spanish language with subtitles a great way of keeping my focus (do not watch this with English-language dubbing – if eyesight problems preclude you from tolerating subtitles, we all know there’s a Durham castle you can drive to if you wish to assess your ophthalmological abilities), but for some reason I didn’t really care about the characters.  I felt another The Boys coming on.  But, by the seventh installment I had connected.  Since then, it has been a whirlwind of affection between me and the atracadores.

I’m struggling to put my finger on the exact reasons, but I’m not alone in my appreciation.  A modest feature in Spanish TV schedules, La Casa De Papel slipped into Netflix’s international back catalogue and nobody thought any more of it.  That is, until the actors’ social media accounts started to swell with thousands of new followers.  Word of mouth generated buzz that compounded itself over and over until Netflix greenlit further installments which themselves were hampered by huge numbers of fans crashing the shoots.

At its heart, we have la banda – the select group of diversely skilled ne’er-do-wells assembled by the enigmatic Profesor.  They do the dirty work that brings to life his masterminded plans, taking on a robbery of such far-fetched ambitions that your only option is to go with it: taking over the Spanish Royal Mint and printing their own stash of billions of euros.  The action plays out in multiple timebands, with scenes from the Profesor’s robbery boot camp foreshadowing events that transpire explosively in the mint itself.  You root for the robbers, but also for the hostages inside and the police outside trying to regain control of the situation.  Some things go to plan, while others require a fair bit of thinking on the spot.  But the tension almost never lets up.  Someone once asked if it’s like Prison Break, with a new hurdle to overcome in each episode, but it feels more sophisticated than that (and the subsequent series don’t get exponentially worse).

Let’s call it Stockholm Syndrome.  Suddenly, Denver’s staccato laugh goes from being annoying to something that fills you with joy each time you hear it.  Nairobi’s constant shouting stops irritating you and you come to love everything about her.  Even Helsinki goes from being a background bit of hired muscle to a key player.  Nevertheless, Arturito is a prick the whole time.  These beloved characters’ development is deftly woven through a plot that thinks of pretty much everything, resulting in a compelling piece of drama that, even with it’s gun gratuity, shootout porn and slap-you-in-the-face silliness, is everything people are looking for in a TV show.  The fact that this achievement is replicated across multiple heists is staggering.

And now it’s a social movement.  Like the Handmaid’s Tale outfit, Money Heist jumpsuits have characterised protests for equality and better prospects throughout the world.  The gang, even the morally dubious ones like Berlin and Palermo, are fighting the system, and the show plays on their exploitation of PR to bring the Spanish population on side.  Money Heist resonates, and without it, I am now bereft.  I’ll miss the soundtrack, I’ll miss the cast (even though a load of them are in Elite anyway), I’ll miss the sentiment.  I’ll gladly be held hostage by the wait for another series, but till then, those same lyrics (bizarrely in Italian, rather than Spanish) will be going around my head.

“O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”