Now permanently resident in Spain, my wife and I will occasionally watch a Spanish television production and given that she in particular likes to watch true-crime programmes, we happened on this recent Netflix series. Told over three one-hour shows, it concerned the disappearance and murder of a pretty young teenage girl Marta Del Castillo in Andalusia in 2009, one of those crimes which ends up gaining national prominence with saturation TV and press coverage, to such an extent that it accidentally elevates the missing girl's parents to celebrity status with the father in particular seemingly unable to move without having a TV or newspaper company microphone shoved in his face seeking some instant reaction to events as they occur.
I've watched one or two similar programmes of this type in Spain and they've all struck me in the media-frenzied way that contemporary television in particular treated such matters. Compared to the BBC news-reporting style I've grown up with, in Spain occurrences like this seem instead to be much more emotionally, even sensationally treated. Besides the apparent requirement for a running commentary from the distraught parents, there appears to be no end of nightly TV programmes with highly-charged presenters contributing their opinion on each new twist in the tale. I don't know if it's the old cliché about the hot-blooded Spanish temperament or just a less detached and I'd say professional approach to news-coverage but I certainly felt that a calmer, more measured approach by the various news-hounds might have served this sad story better.
This Netflix production. I would charge, is similarly guilty of getting too close to the case. The director doesn't use a narrator but instead lets the events lead the story, with an advancing clock-calendar indicating the passage of time. So what we get is almost a rolling CNN-type breaking-news treatment of the story, going over and over the various versions of events from all the different protagonists without really leaving the viewer with a sense of what actually happened to Marta the fateful night she disappeared.
Of course I appreciate that given the girl's body has never been found, there will obviously be some confusion as to her real fate but I felt this frenetic, full-on retelling of this tragic story didn't serve her altogether well. As I said earlier, this may be a cultural thing and that Spanish viewers may be familiar and indeed comfortable with this
highly-charged production style but I personally think the telling of this story could have benefitted from a cooler, more grounded treatment, as indeed could the original investigation itself.
