A Private Affair

It looks fantastic and I could follow the story. I love Jean Reno. Both the plot and the story are very interesting. I love mysteries and it seemed very promising. Stylistically it is shot very well and the classic women are not allowed on the Police force theme is nicely handled by a very modern women not holding to those ideals. Unfortunately, I cannot follow something dubbed. Its very dizzying and I started to get a headache. If it is available in Spanish, which is its original language. I will watch it again and just use English subtitles which does not bother me. But viewer beware of the dubbing.

The story takes place at the end of the 1940s in Galicia, where a sassy upper-class girl with a taste for mystery, Marina Quiroga, together with her butler Hector, sets out to hunt down the serial killer who has been stalking the city for months. I say it's "cute" because it doesn't seem too serious, even though it's about murder and a serial killer. In the first episode our heroine Marina complains the man her mother would have her marry has a "unibrow." Monobrow first appeared in a novel in the late 1960's and Unibrow in 1981. Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954 is arguably the most famous person with a unibrow on this side of the world, died in 1954. What did they call hers? Her self portraits left it clearly represented. Anyway, I digress. This was enough to make me pause the episode and get more history than I could ever want about the unibrow. So far, it's a great occupant of my downtime. Enjoy!

It's a great production, sets, costumes the props everything is in this department is well done. However, the plot and the story is not much to look for. Fairly decent who done it story line that drags on too long with drama. There are many plot holes and at one point I got tired of people running around to catch someone. It happens too often in this. Every episode they are running behind someone to catch someone who literally one feet away. Like I said at the beginning it's a great production and it could've been a lot better if the plot would've been better. Could've been better but this is not it. I finished the whole series to see the who done it.

PS: change the language to original (Spanish). If not it has the English dubbed. Which makes it even worse. I watched it with subtitles.

Like so many recent productions and books in which lazy writers set stories in the past, yet forget to do any kind of serious research about expressions that are used, concepts that are common and technology that existed at the time in which the story takes place, this series is rife with late 20th and early 21st century language and attitudes. It takes away from a fun and otherwise well-produced program.

It is very tiresome that too many people who write stories taking place in bygone eras cannot be bothered to do even a modicum of research to make sure they've stayed true to those times. It takes a few minutes to Google the origins of a word or phrase to make sure it was in use at the time. Ditto manners and mores, songs, films, clothing and technology. Are they stupid or just lazy?

The dubbing is as good as it could be, but after ten minutes I switched to the original Spanish with subtitles and, suddenly, what had been a bit tiresome became excellent. Also, it seems very likely that many of the language anachronisms were down to the poor translation demanded by the need for the lip-sync to be as smooth as possible. Before you give up on this, do what I did. You'll enjoy it a whole lot more. Though I don't disagree that it could have been tightened up considerably - it was a little slow in places. Now I'm wittering a bit to make up the character count. Never met that before!